< Yorgos Lanthimos exhausts his ideas, and his audience, in 'Kinds of Kindness'

TONYA MOSLEY, HOST:

This is FRESH AIR. The new movie "Kinds Of Kindness" is a three-part dark comedy that reunites several players of the Oscar-winning "Poor Things," including actors Emma Stone, Willem Dafoe and the director Yorgos Lanthimos. The movie, which opens in theaters this week, also stars Jesse Plemons, who won the Best Actor Award last month at the Cannes Film Festival. Our film critic Justin Chang has this review.

JUSTIN CHANG, BYLINE: With his grimly funny movies about people doing cruel things to each other under surreally absurd circumstances, the Greek-born filmmaker Yorgos Lanthimos has long been what you might call an acquired taste. I acquired it pretty early on myself when I first saw and loved his viciously warped satire "Dogtooth" back in 2009. In more recent years, it's been gratifying to see so many others acquire it, too, embracing the director's brilliant period comedies "The Favourite" and "Poor Things" - both commercial hits that won Oscars. Lanthimos' success is not to be taken lightly. He's one of a few European filmmakers I can think of who's managed to go Hollywood without diluting what makes him distinctive.

So I wish I had kinder things to say about his new film, which is called "Kinds Of Kindness." But for the first time in a while, probably since his 2017 misfire "The Killing Of A Sacred Deer," Lanthimos seems to be spinning his wheels. "Kinds Of kindness," which runs a very deliberate two hours and 45 minutes, spins three dark fables set in the present day, all of which feature the same actors playing different characters.

In the first story, Jesse Plemons plays Robert, who lives under the thumb of his boss Raymond, played by Willem Dafoe. It's unclear what kind of business they're in. Each morning, Raymond gives Robert detailed instructions on what to eat, what to wear and even whether to have sex with his wife, who's played by Hong Chau. Everything Robert owns, including his house and his car, was given to him by Raymond. In this scene, Robert visits Raymond in his office.

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WILLEM DAFOE: (As Raymond) Good afternoon, Robert. Don't just stand there. Sit down. Were you waiting long?

JESSE PLEMONS: (As Robert) No, 15 minutes or so.

DAFOE: (As Raymond) Your hair is nice like that. Don't get it cut. Let it grow a little longer. And you've lost more weight, I think. Skinny men are the most ridiculous thing there is. We've gone over this before. You must put on a few pounds. I told you that last time.

PLEMONS: (As Robert) But I have.

DAFOE: (As Raymond) You most certainly have not. You're even skinnier now. We'll have to take another look at your eating plan for the week.

CHANG: When Robert finally refuses to follow one of Raymond's orders - let's just say it involves killing somebody - he is promptly fired for his disloyalty. The rest of the story follows Robert as he struggles to get back into Raymond's good graces. Plemons won the Best Actor Award for his performance at the recent Cannes Film Festival, and deservedly so. He finds genuine notes of pathos. And of all the actors in the film, his three characters show the most range.

In the second story, Plemons plays a gruff cop named Daniel who's mourning the presumed death of his marine biologist wife Liz, who went missing during a research expedition. But then, miraculously, Liz, played by Emma Stone, is found alive and returns home, though Daniel almost immediately suspects she's an imposter. The ways in which he tries to trap and expose her are decidedly not for the faint of heart. By this point, it's clear that Lanthimos is saying something about the human drive to dominate others and the absence of free will. It's not an original thesis for him.

Again and again in his movies, he's reminded us that we're all controlled by something, whether it's our jobs, our significant others, our routines, our diets or our religions. The latter is made explicit in the third and most tediously drawn-out story, which revolves around a bizarre cult led by a couple played by Dafoe and Chau. Stone plays Emily, a high-ranking member of the cult who is excommunicated for violating its strict rules of bodily purity. Her efforts to get back in lead her into ever weirder and nastier situations involving drugging, kidnapping and animal cruelty.

If the theme of "Kinds Of Kindness" is control, the strategy is repetition. Lanthimos doesn't just recycle the same ideas and the same actors, he also repeats some of the same story beats, whether it's people plunging into strange sexual situations, people getting in grisly car crashes - you get the idea. Lanthimos is very clever in the way he sets up his patterns and motifs, but I was disappointed by the lack of rigor in his approach. His ideas feel exhausted here, and the exhaustion is contagious.

It's especially disappointing coming so soon after "Poor Things," which, for all its transgressive sex and Frankensteinian weirdness, felt like a unified vision, a work of genuine purpose that got more interesting, not less, as it went on. "Kinds Of Kindness," by contrast, feels like a lazy and self-admiring riff punctuated by the occasional crude shock, like when one character asks another to chop off their finger and serve it for dinner. Talk about an acquired taste.

MOSLEY: Justin Chang is a film critic at The New Yorker magazine. He reviewed "Kinds Of Kindness."

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MOSLEY: On Monday's show, New York Times correspondent Peter Goodman illuminates the breakdown of the global supply chain during the pandemic. He says it was rooted in risky management practices, government deregulation and corporate greed. His new book is "How The World Ran Out Of Everything." I hope you can join us.

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MOSLEY: To keep up with what's on the show and get highlights of our interviews, follow us on Instagram at @nprfreshair. FRESH AIR's executive producer is Danny Miller. Our senior producer today is Roberta Shorrock. Our technical director and engineer is Audrey Bentham, with additional engineering support from Joyce Lieberman and Julian Herzfeld. Our interviews and reviews are produced and edited by Amy Salit, Phyllis Myers, Ann Marie Baldonado, Sam Briger, Lauren Krenzel, Therese Madden, Thea Chaloner, Susan Nyakundi, Heidi Saman, Kayla Lattimore and Joel Wolfram. Our digital media producer is Molly Seavy-Nesper. With Terry Gross, I'm Tonya Mosley.

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