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.

The first segment, titled “The Death of R.M.F.,” is about an affluent man named Robert Fletcher (Plemons) whose corporate boss Raymond (Dafoe) dictates his entire life, including with detailed instructions about every move he makes, like what he eats for breakfast and when he has sex with his wife, Sarah (Hong Chau).

But Robert attempts his first tentative refusal after he’s followed the instruction to crash his car into the car of a man known as R.M.F. (Yorgos Stefanakos), who’s agreed to be killed on Raymond’s order. Robert refuses to do the crash again. Raymond then cuts off all contact with him, and Robert quickly loses his wife, his prospective new job, and his whole extremely tenuous sense of himself. Soon he’s ready to crawl back to Raymond on any terms.

If it’s news to you that under capitalism the vast majority of people’s lives are cruelly dictated by the work they have to do in order to live, and that this system is so warping some wind up embracing their own subjugation, then this is the movie for you.

Of course, Plemons, Stone, Dafoe, and Qualley are all excellent actors and do as much with their roles as can be done within the stiltedness of Lanthimos’s preferred acting style. And the film itself looks very handsome, with Edward Hopper–like scenes of human estrangement in alienating spaces shot very nicely by cinematographer Robbie Ryan, a frequent Lanthimos collaborator.

But at every turn you’re up against the wit and wisdom of Filippou and Lanthimos, which is limited in the extreme but dressed up in fantastical conceits and lingered over at enervating length. Which brings us to the dull second segment, “R.M.F. is Flying,” in which a cop (Plemons) who’s increasingly disturbed by the loss of his long-missing wife (Stone) is only deranged further by her miraculous rescue and return. He becomes convinced she’s a sinister doppelganger.

And she’s come back haunted by a dream that she was living on an island ruled by dogs, “who treated us pretty well, actually,” though she’s now addicted to chocolate because that’s all the humans could find in plentiful supply. Dogs can’t eat chocolate, see, which has toxic effects on them.

But her doglike devotion to her increasingly malevolent husband will soon be costing her literal pounds of flesh that she willingly sacrifices. The credit crawl on this segment features dogs driving cars and acting out various human roles.

Lanthimos doesn’t seem to have much understanding of dogs, though he drags one into the third segment too. It’s called “R.M.F. Eats a Sandwich,” and it’s about a New Age cult led by Omi (Dafoe) and Aki (Hong Chau) who are seeking a woman who can raise the dead. They’ve sent out agents Emily and Andrew (Stone and Plemons) to find the person foretold in Omi’s prophecy.

Emily gets excluded from the cult after she’s raped by her ex-husband and tested for “contamination” in a cult ceremony. Cult members are only allowed sexual relationships among themselves. In order to regain her membership, she desperately runs down a hot prospect as far as dead-raising abilities go, a veterinarian named Ruth (Qualley). To test out her talent first, Emily finds a stray dog, coldly cuts its foreleg with a knife, and takes it to Ruth for treatment.

Why not kill the dog to see if Ruth can reanimate it? I don’t know. I’m just a humble reviewer trying to make sense of what’s presented to me. Lanthimos, a proudly sadistic director, clearly knows we’ll be expecting the dog to be killed, however.

Emily’s cover story when talking to Ruth about the dog claims that “Linda” is a treasured family pet that was injured by other dogs. It’s very distracting that Ruth the vet wouldn’t notice immediately that a homeless dog couldn’t possibly be a treasured family pet — there’s generally dirt, matted fur, and other clear signs. She also doesn’t notice that a clean slit from a knife blade — which is shown in close-up — couldn’t be an injury inflicted by other dogs.

But that’s the lofty way the film approaches verisimilitude.

There’s a good example of the film’s dark humor when Emily takes the stray dog — healed instantly after Ruth treated her — back to the exact spot where she was found and tells her formally, “Go,” and the dog trots off obediently. At least Emma Stone puts a droll spin on her line delivery that indicates it’s supposed to be amusing. That’s the kind of humor this film offers — the kind that’s not actually funny. You have to guess if an act of comedy was committed anywhere in the making of this film.

Though to be fair, comedy, especially the darker kind, is in the eye and ear of the beholder. In the New York Times review of this film, the claim is that Kinds of Kindness features a “vibrantly, defiantly off-putting stance and sidesplittingly sick sense of humor.”

Though in the Variety review, you’re advised that Kinds of Kindness is “funnier on subsequent viewings, once we’ve gotten over the initial shock.” The problem there, of course, is that you’d have to sit through the film again, the whole 164 minutes, in order to get the sidesplitting effect.

If you can see this thing twice, you have remarkable fortitude that’s far beyond me.