Kinds of Kindness review: A pounding headache might be the only reward for your patience

If we were to liken the career of Yorgos Lanthimos to that of David Bowie – and why not? – then a highly qualified case could be made for classing this odd triptych with the musician’s notorious 1988 folly, Tin Machine. The qualifications? Lanthimos, unlike slump-era Bowie, is negotiating from a position of strength. Poor Things and The Favourite, his two most recent triumphs, scored with critics, cinemagoers and Oscar voters. Also, you couldn’t exactly say Bowie was returning to his early sound (maybe Iggy Pop’s?). But, in both cases, there is a sense of a major artist getting back to basics with decidedly iffy results.

There is certainly something of the director’s early Greek work here. Reuniting with his cowriter Efthimis Filippou for the first time since The Killing of a Sacred Deer, seven years ago, he delivers a film as stark and unyielding as their 2009 hit Dogtooth. There is also something here of British horror anthologies from the 1960s such as Asylum and The House that Dripped Blood. An impeccable cast, some familiar from Poor Things, returns for a triptych shot in a New Orleans that – this feels like a joke in itself – could be any anonymous American city in any one of the hotter states. Emma Stone, Jesse Plemons and Willem Dafoe form the core team. Margaret Qualley, Hong Chau and Joe Alwyn offer strong support. Each appears in each section. Tendrils connect those performances, but we are essentially dealing with three discrete episodes in similar shades of weird.

The titles relate to supporting roles played by Yorgos Stefanakos. In the Death of RMF, Plemons is at the mercy of Dafoe’s controlling boss. In RMF Is Flying (an out-there variation on the 1963 Doris Day vehicle Move Over Darling), Plemons worries that his wife, an inevitable Stone, has been mysteriously altered when she miraculously reappears after a period missing at sea. In RMF Eats a Sandwich – the weakest and most overextended of the three – Stone and Plemons, again a couple, seek to locate a necromancer while part of a cult led by ... well, it could hardly be anyone other than Dafoe.

The tech work holds firm to core principles. Robbie Ryan, the Irish cinematographer nominated for Oscars for both The Favourite and Poor Things, shoots with a clean eccentricity that enjoys severing bits of actors normally kept well within frame. You couldn’t reasonably argue there is a bad performance here. Dafoe, working the tyrannical beat, has something of a child given demonic powers in a Twilight Zone episode. Plemons, who won best actor at Cannes, proves to be an ideal fit for the harder Lanthimos aesthetic: confused by, but still accepting of, the bad dream around him.

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For much of the first episode, the package does what you want it to do. Familiar Lanthimosian themes of control and submission are played out in an environment at home to endless forms of surreal cruelty. Digits are severed. An apparent rape takes place in the wings. Jerskin Fendrix’s angular score immerses us further in escalating depravity.

The longer it goes on, however (and, boy, does it go on), the harder it becomes to keep a handle on the narrative sprawl. One of the strengths of Filippou and Lanthimos’s Greek films was their ruthless discipline. There was an unsettling variation on reality in Dogtooth, but it played to firm and unshakeable rules. Kinds of Kindness ultimately dissolves into a sparking, clanking mess of half-decent ideas, any three of which might, with careful working, form the basis for one economic feature. It is plainly the work of talented individuals, but it ultimately leaves you with little to show for your patience other than a pounding headache. Much like Tin Machine.

Kinds of Kindness is in cinemas from Friday, June 28th