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Calling Yorgos Lanthimos an acquired taste is like calling a plate of broccoli "dessert." The Greek auteur has made his name in cinema l'inconfort, s'il vous plaît, and in eight features has yet to care whether or not his film's audiences are pleased or left smiling by the time the credits roll. One might go so far as to say his films are pearl-clutchers, works that take common themes and kick them in the noggin rather than flipping them on their heads. He captures nudity, gore, and the simple sight of someone rudely chewing with their mouth open with the same intimacy that Terrence Malick might film a grassy plain. Lanthimos doesn't shit in your Wheaties so much as he willingly pours you a bowl of cereal with expired milk and begs you to try it, just once. Perhaps it's the sort of sour you might get used to after a while.

This sensibility is precisely what made his two most recent projects, 2018's "The Favourite" and 2023's "Poor Things," so fascinating. Not only were both films set in relatively similar time periods - 18th century Great Britain and Victorian London, respectively - but each was ostensibly about power and independence and the lengths to which a woman will go to obtain agency in a sexual minefield. Of course, Lanthimos is wholly disinterested in the linear approach to such matters, so both "The Favourite" and "Poor Things" were chock-full of filth in its many forms. But overall, and especially pertaining to the latter, Lanthimos seemed to be adhering to the interests and comforts of more mainstream audiences with his two most "accessible" offerings to that point. So it makes sense that his follow-up would be "Kinds of Kindness," an anthology that, per The Atlantic's David Sims on Letterboxd, sees Lanthimos "sticking a middle finger in our eye post-Poor Things to remind us we are all evil bags of meat & water."

Then again, calling "Kinds of Kindness" a "follow-up" to the likes of "The Favourite" and "Poor Things" is about as silly as it would be to market George Miller's "Furiosa" as a film from the mind that brought you "Babe: Pig in the City." Originally titled "And," this omnibus sees Lanthimos reuniting with his longtime writing partner Efthimis Filippou, with whom he co-wrote "Dogtooth" and "The Killing of a Sacred Deer." And it feels like a reunion for Lanthimos, not just with a slew of collaborators including and beyond Filippou, but with the trademarked peculiarity that made Lanthimos stand apart from his contemporaries. Wholly steeped in perversion and consternation, "Kinds of Kindness" really does feel like a middle finger in the eye - perhaps both eyes. It's a fitting appointment for a personalized straight jacket, during which the customer sales rep is courteous and helpful up until it's time to tighten the buckles. Strap in, they'd say, and enjoy a near-three hour trip down derangement lane.

Only on this triptych journey, our fellow passengers include a troupe of talents that would make any cinephile squeal. Jesse Plemons, Emma Stone, Willem Dafoe, Hong Chau, Margaret Qualley, Mamoudou Athie, and Joe Alwyn all appear in roles of varying size in each of the film's three stories - titled, in order, "The Death of R.M.F.", "R.M.F. is Flying," and "R.M.F. Eats a Sandwich" - inhabiting different, progressively quirkier vessels as the stories unfold. It's almost as though Lanthimos watched Wes Anderson's Netflix quadrilogy from last year, dreamt up his own batch of stories, and injected each with just a bit more acid than the last. The result is a zany whirlwind of performative commentary on choice, class, jealousy, and desire. Not all of it works, and it spends nearly its entire 164-minute runtime teetering dangerously close to tumbling off the rails before retaining control of its course at the last gasp. In other words, it's a film by Yorgos Lanthimos, and a jet-black return to form at that.

The first of the triumvirate follows Plemons as Robert, a man without choice due to an agreement with his boss, Raymond (Dafoe), that he will follow a series of instructions that will map out his days from the moment he wakes up to the moment he shuts off the light at night, down to the minute. He must read "Anna Karenina" when told to do so; if he requests vodka, he shouldn't be surprised when he receives whiskey; he and his wife, Sarah (Chau), cannot have children, but is that because she's incapable, or because it's an order? When Robert turns down Raymond's most unthinkable demand his life turns to disarray, as he loses everyone, if not everything, and subsequently attempts to kindle a relationship with Rita (Stone), Raymond's new submissive, in an effort to regain Raymond's trust. It all goes swimmingly! (No, no, don't look over there, I promise!)

In the second, Plemons takes the helm again, this time as Daniel, a cop whose wife (Stone) has gone missing at sea. When she finally turns up, Daniel is convinced that she is, in fact, not his wife, but an imposter that happens to look and talk exactly like Emma Stone. Is he overwhelmed by grief? Or is he losing his mind? Well, yes. Similar narrative threads are strung together in the final chapter, where Stone and Plemons play two research partners working for a sex cult run by Omi and Aka (Dafoe and Chau, respectively). They spend their days searching for a young woman (Qualley, most involved in this section) who they believe can resurrect the dead. All the while, Stone's Emily is being emotionally pulled in another direction, back to the husband (Alwyn) and daughter she left behind. (Again, everyone ends up happy, prosperous, and alive. I swear.)

Though R.M.F. (Yorgos Stefanakos) appears in each story, he's more of a red herring disguised as a chameleon, never inhabiting the same exact character despite having the same name in all three. The same can be said for the film's title, though I suspect that most who struggle with what it's after are either unfamiliar with Lanthimos' cerebral fascination or are too focused on that final word: "Kindness". Yet in doing so, they neglect the two most operative words in the film's name, "Kinds of". These aren't depictions of quotidian goodwill, but of the different forms that affection tends to take, and how those shapes can be disorienting and persuasive, often in the worst ways. The relationships in these tales - as in life - are almost all toxic in some way or another. There's a reason this film's tagline is "We might all be in danger" and not "We will all be there for each other should danger come along."

I'm thankful that Lanthimos has returned to a place of disinterest in delineating the typical characteristics of human decency, even if this portrait of it feels more akin to the most infuriating kind of museum art, a canvas displaying three differently-colored straight lines that naturally sold for a cool $14 million to your friendly neighborhood French oligarch. "Kinds of Kindness" is abstract, revolting, hilarious, and inhospitable, a comedy of errors that is sure to include a smattering of errors and riotous mishaps, but one might begin to wonder if there's a secondary point coming down the line. The first is evident: That we are evil bags of meat and water indeed, vessels that seek self-preservation in whatever form rather than treating one another with but an ounce of deserved consideration. But there certainly is a "when will the rug be pulled out from under me?" vibe to this trilogy's events, and it's admittedly disappointing when the rug is merely rearranged, not yanked.

This shortcoming, a minor one, is made up for by now-by-the-numbers brilliance from Plemons (who won Best Actor at last month's Cannes Film Festival for his work here), as well as some standout turns from Stone and Dafoe, in particular. All three deliver shapeshifting performances that are, at times, as haunting as they are batshit crazy; more than likely, you know someone like the characters they inhabit, or have at least heard of someone similar and have wisely remained 1,000 yards away at all times.

Cinematographer Robbie Ryan ("The Favourite," "Poor Things") and production designer Anthony Gasparro, a frequent collaborator of Kelly Reichardt's, bring a sterility to "Kinds of Kindness" that is only fitting of a Lanthimos-laden world. Ninety percent of the time, sequences are filmed at a safe distance, so as to fully acknowledge the world around the characters communicating at their centers. Clutter is atypical if not virtually nonexistent; it's a shock to see a lovely family photo on a child's dresser in the third act, given how otherwise vacant Lanthimos' realms tend to be. Jerskin Fendrix's score is about as close to cluttered as "Kinds of Kindness" aesthetically gets, and that's only because his accompaniment sounds like someone is repeatedly dropping a cat on a keyboard.

If you look closely, there are plenty of poor things in "Kinds of Kindness", most of them human, thank God. But thankfully, there is no "Poor Things" to be seen here, save for one moment of on-screen animal torture and a sexual gag that is too jump-scare-ish and glorious to spoil. It's an entirely new invention, although it does seem to be a sum of Lanthimos' parts, good, bad, and in between. A lesser anthology might suffer more severe damnation for saving the worst of its three tales for last, as this one does, but that could also simply have more to do with the fact that you've already sat through 120 minutes of a Yorgosian tirade fresh off the griddle than it has to do with its contents. Then again, perhaps that's what makes "Kinds of Kindness" one of Lanthimos' most clever works, albeit not his best: The idea that our parts are imperfect, even irredeemable - but that doesn't make them any less worth seeing.