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Yorgos Lanthimos and Jesse Plemmons Love Their Filmmaking Cult

And their new movie Kinds of Kindness, an anthology of abject debasement starring fellow cult members Margaret Qualley and Willem Dafoe.

This film feels definitively closer to the director’s pitch-black, degradation-filled Dogtooth and The Killing of a Sacred Deer than it does to his more recent Poor Things and The Favourite, both of which offer up a semblance of hopefulness about the state of humanity. Plemons is the only actor who plays a lead role in all three sections, each of which explores themes of control, obedience, free will, cult-like idolatry, and the strange societal mores that most of us follow without questioning in a desperate attempt to belong to something, to be loved. His characters here are tormented and lost, one compelled by a godlike father figure to run over an innocent stranger, another convinced their wives are imposters, and, in two of the three segments, sexually and emotionally obsessed with Dafoe.

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