Poor Things director’s dark, absurdist triptych; singalongs and sentiment in a chicken factory; a trip of discovery to Istanbul…

Peopleare strange:Emma Stone and Joe Alwyn in Kinds OfKindness

ATSUSHINISHIJIMA

KINDS OF KINDNESS Emma Stone and Yorgos Lanthimos are the most sensational actor-director partnership since Luis Buñuel met Catherine Deneuve. She has brought warmth, screwball humour and mainstream appeal to his often-chilly arthouse absurdism. Meanwhile, he has encouraged her into erotic and philosophical realms unusual for an all-singing, all-dancing, all-American actor who chose to name herself after Baby Spice.

On the face of it, Kinds Of Kindness looks like a backwards step in their creative pas de deux. It reunites Lanthimos with Efthimis Filippou, the writer responsible for the savage surrealism of his early, funny-peculiar stuff: Dogtooth (isolation and parental abuse), Alps (acting and death), The Lobster (love and animals) and Killing Of A Sacred Deer (surgery and sacrifice). Across three distinct stories, it enacts a kind of greatest hits thematic remix of their earlier films and is likely to bemuse and appal many of those who fell for Poor Things’ pastel steampunk picaresque. The sickos among us, who have delighted in Lanthimos’ spectacular ascent, will find much to relish, however.

The thread between the chapters might be the lengths we go to win back lost love. In the first part, Jesse Plemons is an apparently successful businessman who wakes every morning to find a neatly written indexed card from his funder and ex-lover Willem Defoe, detailing precisely what he is to eat, wear and read and when he is to make love to his wife. One day the instruction arrives that he is to plough his car as fast as possible into a blue BMW, killing the driver if necessary. Plemons struggles to follow instructions but can’t face disappointing his mentor.