Yorgos Lanthimos’s Kinds of Kindness has generally been viewed along two largely similar lines: as a rebuke of the quasi-mainstream success of his two Tony McNamara-scripted period farces The Favourite (2018) and Poor Things (2023), and as a return to some kind of form, a reunion with his co-writer Efthimis Filippou that plunges once more into tales of control and humiliation. But the operative word here is “tales” in its plural form. The film follows a tripartite anthology structure, utilizing the same repertory of seven main actors—Jesse Plemons, Emma Stone, Willem Dafoe, Hong Chau, Margaret Qualley, Mamoudou Athie, and Joe Alwyn—to tell the successive stories of a man (Plemons) whose way of life crumbles after he ceases following the commands of his boss/lover (Dafoe); a cop (Plemons) who suspects his wife, who returned after being presumed lost at sea (Stone), has been replaced by a doppelgänger; and a woman (Stone) navigating her position in a cult obsessed with purity of bodily fluids led by a polyamorous couple (Dafoe and Chau), searching for a woman who can resurrect the dead (Qualley).

Each of these three parts is titled after an action on the part of a man named R.M.F., a bearded, mostly silent presence who potentially serves as a linking device. It may be significant that his name is one rotated letter away from the initials of Rainer Werner Fassbinder, another director obsessed with precise camera movements—here discarding the past two films’ fish-eye lenses in favor of inexorable forward and lateral tracking shots—narratives of degradation and domination/submission, and casting familiar actors in divergent roles; it is probably even more notable that R.M.F. is played by Yorgos Stefanakos, who has only appeared in Lanthimos’s films to date.

Whether this man who shares his director’s name is meant to serve as a stand-in is uncertain, but the anthology form, in contrast to the detestable The Killing of a Sacred Deer or even the brazenly static Dogtooth, allows Lanthimos to inject just a little bit more mystery into the proceedings than usual. For these are, at their core, fables about the limits of belief, observing how far each character is willing to go in order to maintain their status quo while testing the extent to which they truly believe that an external force can make it all disappear.

Perhaps Kinds of Kindness finds its fullest expression of that principle in its canny approach to recasting across each of the three parts. The clearest dynamic is the inverse relationship between Plemons and Stone’s prominence, especially in the way in which the former’s paring down of his facial hair and haircut represent a sinister hollowing out of his characters’ capacities for change. Other choices are very amusing on a metafictional level: Alwyn’s unnamed, one-scene roles during the first two parts; rising star Hunter Schafer appearing for only a few minutes in the third part. Each part ends with an credits screen showing these seven cast members (and only them, regardless of their or other actors’ prominence) and their roles, a seemingly final punctuation mark even as the inscrutable game Lanthimos plays continues to build in both potential meaning and, yes, exhaustion. The final moment, arguably the film’s most misguided, perhaps reveals this as just another case of the old Lanthimos rearing his head, but the journey to that point, at least to these eyes, can’t be discounted.