Take David Lynch’s multithreaded and loose-ended The Lost Highway 1997 and Mullholland Drive (2001) and insert some Peter Greenaway type of structure and you get Yorgos Lanthimos’s Kinds of Kindness. Just like the two American movies, the Greek director’s latest creation boasts actors playing multiple characters (and vice-versa), and multiple stories only vaguely connected. The difference is that the plots here are neatly separated into three segments, and developments are more or less chronological. The movie is also relatable to Peter Greenaway’s Zoo a Zed and Two Noughts (1985): both flms start with a major car crash, feature human and animal amputees, twins, constant numeric descriptions (hours, height, weight, percentages, etc), and – first and foremost – an obsession with sex and death.

Featuring Lanthimos’s regulars Emma Stone and William Dafoe in the lead, alongside Jesse Plemons and Hong Chao. Kinds of Kindness is not a film about being friendly and generous. The characters indeed seek to please others, however their tactics are barely commendable. Their morbid display of altruism almost invariably ends in tears.

In the first segment, Raymond (Dafoe) orders his sycophantic employee Robert (Plemons) to kill someone, but the poor man refuses. The consequences for Robert and his wife Sarah (Chao) are very serious. In the second part, Daniel (Plemons) is a police officer happily married to Liz (Stone). They regularly have dinner with a friendly policeman and his wife. Their entertainment includes watching sex tapes of the very same foursome having sex. Then Liz begins to self-harm. In the final segment, Emily (Stone) uses a twin with supernatural powers in order to revive a man killed in the beginning of the film, adding some circularity to this extremely long film journey of nearly three hours.

Lanthimos’s subversive, quirky humour is everywhere, and he makes every effort to break cinematic conventions. The film opens with Eurythmics’ Sweet Dreams playing loud over the opening logos. It’s almost as if the editor accidentally dislodged one of the sound tracks. He then goes on to include credits at the end of each segment. The demeanour of the characters is highly contrived, incoherent, and barely conceivable. Their actions oscillate between robotic and knee-jerk. They are the strange human beings associated with the Greek Weird Wave (Lanthimos remains the most prominent artist of the fluid film movement). The music score is often dissonant: ominous choir voices are combined with a monotonous (often one-note) piano score to eerie-silly results. The abundant, graphic and at times gruesome violence (including the hyperrealistic severing of a finger, a man being repeatedly run over by a heavy vehicle, corpses being disturbed, etc) gives Kinds of Kindness a touch of comedy horror.

The repetitive geometry of twisted altruism engages audiences for some time. Kinds of Kindness is indeed funny and repulsively endearing – at times even entrancing – for roughly two thirds of its 165-minute duration. But repetition can only sustain a narrative for a certain amount of time. It then becomes a little overblown. Kinds of Kindness is a good film, however far from a masterpiece, or even Lanthimos’s best (2009’s Dogtooth still remains my favourite). Kinds of Kindness would have blown me away if I was 19 (my age when I first saw Zoo and Lost Highway). Instead it passed me a like a pleasant breeze. It will take some time before Lanthimos can claim the “Rightful Heir of Peter Greenaway and David Lynch” title – at least inside the film institute of my heart.

Kinds of Kindness premiered in the Official Competition of the 77th Cannes International Film Festival, when this piece was originally written. The director had premiered his widely acclaimed Poor Things just eight months ago in Venice, where it won the Golden Lion, the event’s top prize. Also showing in the Official Competition of the 2nd Mediterrane Film Festival (in Malta). In cinemas on Friday, June 28th. On VoD on August 27th.