Kinds of Kindness review: 'Almost unbearable cruelty' in Emma Stone's wacky black comedy

Emma Stone, Jesse Plemons, Margaret Qualley and Willem Dafoe star in Kinds of Kindness, Yorgos Lanthimos's latest, which premiered at the Cannes Film Festival. Its blackly comic sketches are dark – and disturbing. Having made two back-to-back award-winning extravaganzas, The Favourite and Poor Things, Yorgos Lanthimos can be forgiven for taking things a little easier on his new film. It isn't an ambitious epic. There are no period trappings or fantastical designs. Instead, Kinds of Kindness comprises three short films, all set in the present-day US, and all featuring the same few actors: Emma Stone, Jesse Plemons, Willem Dafoe, Hong Chau, Joe Alwyn, Margaret Qualley and Mamoudou Athie. They all sparkle with Lanthimos's deadpan genius: in his world, everything is just off-kilter enough to be funny, but just real enough to be horrifying Co-written by Efthymis Filippou, Lanthimos's collaborator on his earlier work, Kinds of Kindness sees the director cleansing his palate and getting back to his roots with three trips to the macabre, absurdist parallel universes of The Lobster, The Killing of a Sacred Deer and the Greek films that preceded them. His fans will be intoxicated by this triple shot of pure, unfiltered Lanthimos. And they can rest assured that, at the very end, he puts in one of his trademark wacky dance routines.