CANNES, France — Have Emma Stone and Yorgos Lanthimos morphed into the same person? It felt like it here at the Cannes Film Festival, where word of the symbiotic duo’s next film together broke during a Saturday news conference for their upcoming film, “Kinds of Kindness,” which had just premiered the night before.
“Is Emma your muse, Yorgos?” a reporter asked.
“He’s my muse,” Stone replied with a laugh.
And the projects keep getting stranger. The sex and dark humor that made “Poor Things” a hit are still on the menu in “Kinds of Kindness,” but so is body horror, cruel mind manipulation and cult worship — all set in an ever-so-slightly off-kilter version of modern America, without the high-art costumes, feminist empowerment storyline and 19th-century fantasy elements that defined that Oscar-winning other movie.
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Rather than a full-length feature, the Greek auteur has created an absurdist anthology film in three chapters, each with its own mystery and the same ensemble playing different characters. (“Poor Things” vets such as Stone, Willem Dafoe and Margaret Qualley are joined by newcomers Jesse Plemons, Hong Chau, Joe Alwyn and Mamoudou Athie.) The film also reunites Lanthimos with screenwriter Efthimis Filippou, his collaborator on earlier, darker films, such as “The Lobster” and “The Killing of a Sacred Deer.” For many longtime Lanthimos fans, “Kinds of Kindness” is a welcome return to the really, really Twisted Yorgos of yore. Something is off about every person in it, and every scenario. No one even talks normally. Dialogue rhythms are staccato, accompanied by doomful music and eerie camera zooms — and every line sounds like an alien wrote it using Google Translate.
And that happy dance of Stone’s that dominates the film’s trailer is a MacGuffin; it doesn’t come until the end of the third chapter. “It’s just so funny, she does that dance sequence, which is a moment of community and relief and cathartic release, and then it’s immediately followed by an excruciatingly horrible moment,” says John Switzer, a 67-year-old musician from Toronto who attended the Cannes screening with his wife, a film director.
Some in the audience wondered whether “Kinds of Kindness” (which opens in the United States next month) will make any money. “It’s a thorny, extreme movie for a commercial audience,” says Stephen Follows, a U.K.-based data scientist who recently published a report about a some 40 percent decline of sex scenes in films. “It’s going to be interesting to see how they traverse that [extremism] and how much they’re going to have to do a bit of a bait-and-switch to get people in, which in itself may or may not be a bad thing, unless people really don’t love it.”
None of the creatives involved seemed to care. In the news conference, Stone declared her love of working with Lanthimos and said she has no intention of stopping: “The biggest feeling I have with him is a feeling of extreme comfort. I feel like I can do anything with him, because we’ve worked together so many times, and I trust him beyond the trust I’ve ever had with any director. We just have something that I can’t explain, and I’m so grateful for it. … It just makes sense to me.”
Stone and Lanthimos’s next film, “Bugonia,” is based on a 2003 South Korean sci-fi comedy.
Lanthimos and Filippou had been working on the “Kinds of Kindness” screenplay for years. It was completed before the director shot “Poor Things”; he then shot it during the production of “Poor Things’s” special effects.
In the “Kindness” chapters, there’s a through line of manipulation and the kind of cruelty, or obedience, that can be mistaken for kindness. Lanthimos had been inspired by reading about Caligula, he said — which tracks — “and just thinking how a man can have such power over other people and other individuals that he came into contact with. And I started reimagining it in contemporary America where someone would have complete control over this other person, like from what he eats, to when he can get married, has sex, has an accident and dies.”
The first chapter involves a powerful rich man (Dafoe) who uses his kindness and his patronage to make people harm themselves and others. The second chapter is about a woman who survives a shipwreck but comes home changed. And the third follows a man and woman (Plemons and Stone) who are searching for a woman who can raise the dead, in service of a cult led by Dafoe’s and Chau’s characters.
“Kindness” audience members at the Cannes screenings who only know Lanthimos and Stone’s collaborations through Academy-approved fare such as “The Favourite” or “Poor Things” were in for a rough awakening — as were those who hadn’t read ahead of time that this was actually three short films in one.
“I liked the first [chapter] a lot, but going into the second one, I definitely thought it was tied to the first one, and it took me until maybe [it was] 50 percent through, where I was like, ‘Oh, wait, we’re not going back to the first one at all,’” said John Franklin, a 28-year-old Google hardware product manager.
It was such a jarring, unexpected format, Franklin said, that he felt uneasy and confused throughout: “I was prepared for it [to be weird]. I don’t think I was prepared for how gruesome it was or how sexual the takes were, even somehow more than ‘Poor Things.’ I felt like this [film] was just kind of throwing you into a situation, leaving at some weird time and then going on to the next.”
Plenty of people walked out of the premiere and other screenings, although it wasn’t clear whether that was because of the gruesomeness of the second act, or because credits roll at the end of each section and they didn’t know there was more to come.
Franklin’s friend Nicole Rasquinha, 27, who works on Pixar’s animation software, said the film felt like “this trend in Hollywood of being really provocative with very gory scenes or very sexual scenes.” One particular scene of horrific self-mutilation almost had her squirming out of her seat. “It was a lot.”
Other longtime Lanthimos fans, though, were largely delighted. “I was blown away,” said Lily Moschen, 41, a culture presenter for Austrian and German public television. “I thought he went back to one of his core themes that he explored in ‘The Lobster,’ too, of the cruelty that we are capable of when it comes to love or when we think that we protect the ones we love.”
