There aren’t many kinds of kindness in the latest from Yorgos Lanthimos, an almost-three-hour trilogy of dark, sometimes funny stories featuring an ensemble cast playing different parts in each of the loosely linked tales. About the best you can say of these characters is that they sometimes do bad things for what they perceive as the right reasons. Whether you’re willing to forgive their transgressions probably says more about you than them.
But if it’s not a morally uplifting triptych it is at least a thespian showcase, as acting powerhouses Emma Stone, Jesse Plemons, Willem Dafoe and others play multiple, sometimes wildly different roles from one chapter to the next. Thanks to a minor theme of doppelgängers, Stone actually gets four roles over the three parts, as does Margaret Qualley, who shines as identical twins in the final (and strongest) of the stories. The show opens to the Eurythmics’ Sweet Dreams and a title card announcing “The Death of R.
M.F.” Plemons plays a man whose life is so strictly controlled by his employer Raymond (Dafoe) that his reading habits, diet and hours of sleep are dictated for him.
Even his wife (Hong Chau) — and their sex life, and their childless status — have been engineered by Raymond. But when the boss demands that Robert crash his car into another, possibly killing the man inside, the minion balks, with drastic consequences for all involved. It’s a fascinating parable about control of the have-nots by the haves, but p.
