I finally saw Kinds of Kindness, the Yorgos Lanthimos film that showed up in theaters surprisingly soon after the writer-director’s triumphal award-winner Poor Things (2023). It reunites Lanthimos with his Poor Things actors Emma Stone, Willem Dafoe, and Margaret Qualley, and adds Jesse Plemons for a quartet playing the leads in this anthology film. And it reunites Lanthimos with Efthimis Filippou (The Lobster, Killing of a Sacred Deer), his old screenwriting collaborator before his mainstream hits The Favourite and Poor Things.

In Kinds of Kindness, over the course of nearly three hours, Lanthimos presents us with three narratives connected by themes of dominance and submission in human relationships. It’s boring in the extreme. I fell asleep three times, once for each of the stories. I didn’t miss anything, though — this kind of filmmaking involves a lot of weighty pauses between startling effects such as abrupt acts of cruelty or harshly dramatic plonks on the piano that wake you up again just as soon as you drop off.

There are such hot come-ons in ads and reviews plugging Kinds of Kindness that tout its audacity, its shock value, its mind-blowing bursts of violence and degradation, its black comic hilarity for those erudite types who are in on the big absurdist joke that is human suffering. But the blandishments of marketers and my fellow critics, always too impressed with fancy films, can’t fool me. I’m the scarred veteran of hundreds of art film screenings. A friend of mine once called this kind of material “black-tie nihilism,” and no more contemptible form exists.