Emma Stone and Yorgos Lanthimos' trippy third collaboration Kindness of Kindness is not our favourite

Over the course of two films, Emma Stone and writer-director Yorgos Lanthimos have established a thrilling creative partnership that has produced some of their best work on both sides. But their third effort, Kinds of Kindness, tarnishes their sterling record together, steering away (in a purple Dodge Challenger) from the luscious narrative glee of The Favourite and Poor Things to a more meandering, avant-garde approach.

The film is a trilogy of short stories, each using a different lens to meditate on themes of love, control, power, and sex. The first, “The Death of R.M.F.,” follows worker bee Robert (Jesse Plemons) as he attempts to break free from the twisted dynamic he shares with his boss, Raymond (Willem Dafoe). Next is “R.M.F. is Flying,” in which a missing woman, Liz (Emma Stone), returns to her husband, Daniel (Plemons), who suspects she is not the same person. Lanthimos wraps things up with “R.M.F. Eats a Sandwich,” in which Stone and Plemons portray cult members hunting for a woman who can resurrect the dead.Many will regard this as a return to form for Lanthimos. It's his first time writing with Efthimis Filippou since 2017’s The Killing of the Sacred Deer and his first script for Stone, as Tony McNamara (The Great) wrote both previous collaborations. But without the alchemy of a McNamara script, the chemistry is off.With their abrupt violence, grotesque body horror, and mordant sense of humor, all three of the stories feel more aligned with Lanthimos’ earlier style, The audacity that has so defined Lanthimos and Stone’s work together remains, but here, it takes on a nastiness that becomes tedious the longer the film stretches on (and on and on to a nearly three-hour running time).

There’s plenty to dissect. Lanthimos takes a disturbing approach to three tales of dominance and submission, interrogating the language of control within the context of corporate culture, marriage, and religion. But he takes an exceedingly nihilistic view of it all, sometimes with an impulse toward humor, other times toward sex or romance. Ultimately, though, its provocations feel mean-spirited rather than ever truly outrageous or revelatory.