Stone, Jesse Plemons and Willem Dafoe head the cast in the Poor Things director’s odd three-part study of control whose central idea proves elusive

Cannibalism. Auto-amputation. Obsession. Delusion. A glum, bearded, entirely silent man whose initials are RMF. Numerous themes and plot points are nipping away at the bones of Yorgos Lanthimos’s follow-up to Poor Things. An unwieldy triptych of not quite connected stories, starring the same repertory group of actors – Emma Stone, Jesse Plemons, Margaret Qualley, Willem Dafoe, Hong Chau, Mamoudou Athie and Joe Alwyn – in different roles in each of the three chapters, Kinds of Kindness leans back into the surreal cruelty and bizarro-banal logic of the director’s earlier films. Dogtooth is an obvious reference, but there’s also an element of The Lobster’s twisted relationship politics here.

But despite the recurring themes in the three stories, a unifying idea or central thesis that ties them together proves to be frustratingly elusive. Two things are undeniable, however. The first is that kindness of any kind is conspicuously absent in the film. The second is that Lanthimos is evidently fascinated (to a degree that may not be entirely healthy) with the idea of total control and subjugation of free will.