Yes I could have seen this one on streaming on my TV screen but I chose to treat myself to a cinema viewing. I’m a very big Yorgos Lanthimos fan, particularly his early Greek-based works and a little less so of his more recent Hollywood outings. Kinds of Kindness is a mostly successful amalgamation of them both.

There are three stories, with each character played by the same group of actors, including Jesse Plemons, recent Lanthimos favourite Emma Stone, Willem Dafoe, Margaret Qualley and Hong Chau. They have the benign weirdness of Lanthimos films like The Lobster (2015) and Dogtooth where we watch a story play out with great seriousness but something is distinctly askew.

In the first story, Plemons’s character Robert is an unexceptional man who has lived for 10 years with every moment of everyday being controlled by Dafoe’s Raymond. In the second story, Plemons is a policeman whose wife Liz, Emma Stone, has gone missing on a remote island. When she returns, he is sure that she is not actually his wife.

The third story is more substantial and could have been a film of its own. Stone is at the centre as a woman, Emily, who has left her husband and daughter to join a cult. The cult leaders are Chau and Dafoe and Emily and fellow acolyte Plemons are trying to find a prophetised spiritual being who can raise the dead.

There are some scenes that are incredibly hard to watch in each of the three stories and they all end with Lanthimos’s signature and uneasy charm. It felt like we were watching Greek tragedy set in modern times, slavery shown as a middle class reality, demon possession, and the love of pets shown as perhaps real or not real. There are some great little touches, like Emily driving a souped up purple car like a rally driver and a delightful dance that is an occasional signature in Lanthimos’s films.

I thoroughly enjoyed it, but not sure I engaged deeply with the characters or the stories.