One of the simple, but great, joys of the Cannes Film Festival is throwing off your formalwear and changing back into your regular clothes. Relaxation is instant; everything feels suddenly easier. Perhaps that is how the director Yorgos Lanthimos felt after wrapping his ornate, Oscar-winning bildungsroman epic Poor Things and then tucking into his new film Kinds of Kindness, which premiered at Cannes on May 17.

The film is a return to Lanthimos’s smaller-scale style, the blunt chilliness that first made him famous. Kinds of Kindness shares the same DNA as Dogtooth or Killing of a Sacred Deer, morbid little tales that verge on outright nihilism. In Kinds of Kindness, Lanthimos and co-screenwriter Efthimis Filippou stage three short stories about people desperately trying to regain control of their lives—dark and strange as those lives may have been before twists of fate came calling.

Live Updates From the 2024 Cannes Film Festival

As was also true of Lanthimos’s earlier work, Kinds of Kindness risks alienation. Each story ends on a note of puckish discordancy that could be read as a middle finger to the audience, or empty provocation. Those hoping for some sense of grand meaning—or, really, any kind of explanation of what’s going on—are denied. Kinds of Kindness is clever and a bit snide, a curio cabinet not designed for beauty.

The first section, called “The Death of R.M.F.,” features Jesse Plemons—whose dry deadpan is a natural fit for Lanthimos and Filippou’s writing—as Robert, a corporate drone of some variety who has an unnerving devotion to his boss, Raymond (Willem Dafoe, having a good time). Robert has regimented his life to the letter of Raymond’s instruction—he gains weight to please Raymond; he has sex with his wife (Hong Chau) when he’s told to; he’s even willing to crash his car, risking his life and that of the stranger who’s been paid to be T-boned in his BMW. Why Raymond wants any of this done is never illuminated. All we really understand is that there’s something psychosexual happening between Robert, Raymond, and Raymond’s wife, played by Margaret Qualley.

Maybe this is a metaphor for those who forsake their autonomy (and morality) to please the gods of capitalism, who secure for themselves a comfortable and upwardly mobile life at the cost of their own pleasure and the well-being of others. Or maybe there’s no commentary here and Lanthimos just wanted to noodle around with Plemons and Dafoe, a perfectly reasonable justification for doing anything.

The second story, “R.M.F. Is Flying,” is the most elusive, concerning a man (Plemons) longing for his missing wife (Emma Stone) but not liking who eventually returns. There are clever moments throughout “Flying”— most notably a very funny, if slightly obvious, sex joke—but Lanthimos tries patience as he meanders into ever more inscrutable territory. Opacity is all well and good; weirdness for weirdness’s sake has been the intention behind many great works of art. Too often in “Flying,” though, one feels that Lanthimos is simply poking at us just to get an annoyed reaction. The bit gets dull pretty quickly.

Things turn around in the third panel of the triptych, “R.M.F. Eats a Sandwich,” the most engaging of the set. Stone and Plemons play two cult members (or something like cult members), Andrew and Emily, who are in search of a young woman—identified by some kind of prophecy, we are to assume—who has healing powers. Their leaders, played by Dafoe and Chau, have—like Dafoe’s character in the first chapter—placed strict demands on Andrew and Emily. Perhaps particularly on Emily, who has abandoned her husband (Joe Alwyn) and young daughter for him.

“Sandwich” is probably the cruelest of the three pieces, but it has weight and dimension lacking in the others. Stone is, as ever, a commanding presence, even when tasked with speaking in the blank tone that Lanthimos favors when he isn’t working with Tony McNamara (who wrote The Favourite and Poor Things). A bleak sendup of wellness culture (I think?), “Sandwich” has a nasty kiss-off ending that is actually earned. Lanthimos may still be toying with us in a pesky way, but at least he rounds out this last story; it’s a fable with a fitting payoff.

The quiet groans in my audience when each story ended would seem to indicate that not everyone is happy to see Lanthimos back to his macabre teasing. I certainly can’t say that I prefer this mode over his statelier, more upstanding work. But there is nonetheless some charge to watching a talented director play around in the sandbox, taking it easy after six years of period-piece elaborateness. Maybe he can find a middle ground someday, one that pleases both sides of his artistic interest—and more broadly appeals to audiences. Or he’ll just do a “one for me” like Kinds of Kindness every now and then, once again pushing his audience away to get a little breathing room.