164 min | R | June 21, 2024 | Searchlight Pictures
Yorgos Lanthimos makes a three-part anthology about control, devotion, and obedience. Jesse Plemons and Emma Stone play different roles in each segment. It is long and strange and not for everyone.
Three stories. Same actors in different roles. The first follows a man whose entire life is controlled by his boss down to what he eats and who he sleeps with. The second follows a police officer whose wife returns from being lost at sea but seems like a different person. The third follows a woman in a cult searching for a chosen one with the power to resurrect the dead. Lanthimos reunites with co-writer Efthimis Filippou for the first time since The Killing of a Sacred Deer. The result is a return to the deadpan cruelty and absurdist power dynamics that defined his earlier work.
Jesse Plemons plays three different men with three different relationships to authority and he is extraordinary in all of them. His performance in the first segment as a man who has surrendered all autonomy is both comic and heartbreaking. Emma Stone plays three women who are dangerous in different ways. Willem Dafoe plays three authority figures with different tools of manipulation. Margaret Qualley, Hong Chau, Joe Alwyn, and Mamoudou Athie round out the ensemble with commitment to the tonal strangeness Lanthimos demands.
Lanthimos directs with the flat, precise visual style of his Greek films rather than the lush opulence of Poor Things and The Favourite. The camera observes without comment. The violence is sudden. The humor is dry to the point of desiccation. Each segment runs approximately fifty minutes and the cumulative effect is deliberately exhausting. The film is about what people will endure to belong to something. The answer is everything.
The film is too long. The third segment is the weakest. The connections between the three stories are thematic rather than narrative, which will frustrate audiences expecting resolution. But Lanthimos is not interested in resolution. He is interested in submission. The film presents three variations on the same human need to be told what to do and punishes the audience for watching. That is either brilliant or insufferable depending on your tolerance for Lanthimos at his most uncompromising.