Once again, I've been suckered into watching one of Lanthimos's deranged concoctions because of the strong cast (Emma Stone, Jesses Plemons and Willem Dafoe, all in multiple roles) and the hope that the director's idiosyncracies might finally produce something meaningful to the world outside his head. No such luck. After 2 hours and 45 minutes of a loosely connected triptych of stories, all that is learnt once again is that Lanthimos is so autistic as to border on being a sociopath. David Lynch and Alejandro Jodorowsky, Michael Haneke and Lars Von Trier are notable directors of highly leftfield, visionary films which have more than their fair share of wilfully jarring moments, but ones with a sense of empathy and purpose. Lanthimos, on the other hand, is to be placed in the same category of emotionally-stunted misanthropes as Ulrich Seidl and Tom Six. That category may well also be a competition between them.
Each part of the triptych presents an enslaved main character: first one whose every timiest life choice is completely dictated by his boss, then a man who falls prey to the delusion that the woman who has returned from a disastrous expedition isn't really his wife, and finally a woman who is completely in thrall to to a cult of resurrectionists. The ideas are all interesting enough, which will keep you watching, but there's simply no pay-off at the end of any of them.
5/10
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