★★★★✩ Yorgos Lanthimos’s new movie has something theatrical about it. Much like a trilogy of plays it is cast with the same ensemble, only with such Hollywood A-listers as Emma Stone and Willem Defoe who starred in Lanthimos’s previous film which paved the way to Stones’s second Oscar. This team also includes Jesse Plemons (terrifying in ), Margaret Qualley ( ) and Joe Alwyn, the English actor whose name will be saddled with Taylor Swift’s for a good while yet, the price of being one of the megastar’s most significant former others.
Emma Stone plays a policeman's wife in the film The theatre comparison is also tempting because rather like playwright Annie Baker, whose first movie is being released this month, Lanthimos is interested in subverting the conventions of his art. Here each short story, which combined amounts to a film of nearly three hours, begins with a title and culminates with acting credits. Throughout Lanthimos and his co-screenwriter Efthimis Filipou exercise a wise maxim, that a narrative should start as late as possible into the plot.
To that end we are parachuted into the disturbing circumstances of their characters at the most extreme moments of their lives. In (the initials of a mute character who appears in each story) Plemons’s Robert is an employee of Defoe’s tycoon Raymond, a controlling boss who decides every aspect of Robert’s wealthy life, from what he eats to when he has sex with his wife. We join this Faustian pact as R.
