Kinds of Kindness review: 'Almost unbearable cruelty' in Emma Stone's wacky black comedy

Having made two back-to-back award-winning extravaganzas, The Favourite and Poor Things, Yorgos Lanthimos can be forgiven for taking things a little easier on his new film. It isn't an ambitious epic. There are no period trappings or fantastical designs. Instead, Kinds of Kindness comprises three short films, all set in the present-day US, and all featuring the same few actors: Emma Stone, Jesse Plemons, Willem Dafoe, Hong Chau, Joe Alwyn, Margaret Qualley and Mamoudou Athie.

They all sparkle with Lanthimos's deadpan genius: in his world, everything is just off-kilter enough to be funny, but just real enough to be horrifying

Co-written by Efthymis Filippou, Lanthimos's collaborator on his earlier work, Kinds of Kindness sees the director cleansing his palate and getting back to his roots with three trips to the macabre, absurdist parallel universes of The Lobster, The Killing of a Sacred Deer and the Greek films that preceded them. His fans will be intoxicated by this triple shot of pure, unfiltered Lanthimos. And they can rest assured that, at the very end, he puts in one of his trademark wacky dance routines.

In the first of the three blackly comic sketches, Plemons stars as Robert, a middle manager who reports to a reptilian boss played by Dafoe. Every day, Robert is given a sheet of handwritten instructions which he obeys to the letter, instructions that detail what he should wear, what he should eat, when he is allowed to have sex with his wife (Chau), and plenty more besides. In return, he is rewarded with rare sports memorabilia – the source of several laugh-out-loud gags. But when he is instructed to hospitalise himself by crashing his car into someone else's at high speed, he wonders whether he should demur at last, or whether he is no longer capable of functioning without someone guiding his every decision.

In the second segment, Plemons is a policeman whose wife (Stone) has disappeared on a diving expedition. She is eventually rescued from a desert island, but he isn't sure that she is the same woman. And in the third story, Plemons and Stone play two members of a seaside cult led, inevitably, by Dafoe and Chau. They have the job of locating a woman with the power to bring people back from the dead, a quest that sees them careering around at dangerous speeds in a purple sports car. The theme in each case is one of Lanthimos's stand-bys: the grisly extremes that people will go to in co-dependent relationships.

The first section is the best. A devilish corporate satire that recalls the work of Armando Iannucci, Christopher Morris and Charlie Brooker, it may be fabulously uncanny, but when Dafoe's preening boss demands "love" from his underling, and the underling does awful things to demonstrate that love, there's a lot of truth to it, too. The other two sections are less focused and vaguer in their plotting, but they're all beautifully performed, and they all sparkle with Lanthimos's deadpan genius: in his world, everything is just off-kilter enough to be funny, but just real enough to be horrifying.

Still, at the best part of an hour each, all three parts could have done with some trimming: the makers of TV series Inside No 9 could have got through them in half the time. Bear in mind, too, that the title of Kinds of Kindness could hardly be more ironic. As dark as Lanthimos's comedy has always been, there are times when the cruelty becomes almost unbearable. Car crashes are one thing, but the recurring motif of women being debased by their husbands isn't a laughing matter.

There's certainly nothing too humorous about all the shots of semi-naked young women, particularly semi-naked young women being humiliated and hurt. Certainly, those of us who argued that the sex and nudity in Poor Things were important to Bella's story of liberation and self-confidence may find it harder to defend Kinds of Kindness.

-bbc