Resurrection: ALIEN: ROMULUS

As a frightened character inserts a crackling electric prod into a dripping alien egg sac, I found myself thinking that Alien: Romulus will please those who love to read Freudian symbolism into these pictures. But then again, there’s something to please all sorts of Alien fans in this movie—a gripping little exercise in style and craftsmanship while playing the series’ greatest hits. It’s set between Ridley Scott’s original sci-fi horror Alien, in which long-haul space-trucker Sigourney Weaver barely escapes a close call with a nasty extraterrestrial infestation, and James Cameron’s slam-bang sequel of action escalation, Aliens. And so it naturally borrows from each of those in appearance and mood, while layering on nods and winks and tracing along motifs and plot threads from other prequels, sequels, and spin-offs. The leads are a group of young miners (capably led by Cailee Spaeny and Isabela Merced, and David Jonsson with a tricky robotic role-and-a-half). They’re stuck on a far-flung planet under an onerous corporate contract when they decide to heist a derelict company space craft drifting by. Once there they discover, oops, it was a secret research station abandoned upon getting overrun by the face-hugging, acid-bleeding, ruthlessly predatory Xenomorph Aliens we’d expect from this series. The following is mostly predictable, but done up with enough fine shorthand performances and cool effects and ominous sounds and a big score that it rattles and shakes with patient entertainments until it hits a surprising new gear in its finale.

The director is Fede Alvarez, who brings a knack for doing right by a franchise—his Evil Dead remake is one of the better, gnarlier, horror remakes of the last decade—as well as his ability to spin a claustrophobic vice-grip of tension—like his trapped-in-a-house-with-a-mad-blind-man Don’t Breathe. He’s a fine maker of images and can layer visual and sonic effects with a degree of teeth-rattling force, churning out resourceful pulp awe. Romulus looks and sounds sensational with endless dark corridors and shafts of light and creepy crawlies scuttling and scurrying. It’s freshly familiar, so its biggest success is always what keeps it from greatness: it simply can’t stop reminding us of all the other Alien movies. But maybe that’s fitting for a series that features, across its many iterations, evolutionary explorations, genetic manipulation, gene splicing, cloning, and mutations. What it lacks in originality—and I definitely would’ve trimmed its most thuddingly obvious homages—it makes up for in fun throwback appeal. Here’s a movie that’s built out of bits and pieces of the others in its tradition—a big eerie location elegantly framed, a desperate blue-collar ensemble, a ragtag colonial machine-gun set-piece, gooey body-horror eruptions, elaborate gore effects and expertly manipulated CG enhanced puppetry of the new protuberances and pustules on the attack. The whole thing moves with a fine sense of tension and release, slamming down with grave, bleak world-building in each new implication and crisp, legible action as piles on the complications. It’s a minor-key entry, but one built up out of enjoyable resonances. And I certainly found myself in the suspense of hoping the appealing characters could find their way out; it’s new to them, after all.

Irish to Speak: KNEECAP

Kneecap is one of those movies that teaches you something, although you certainly won’t be seeing this in schools. It introduces the audience to people and a subculture you might not’ve known about, but could be glad to discover. It’s based on a true story from around a decade ago in Northern Ireland about two teenage drug dealers who end up forming a rap group with a high school music teacher. Improbable, perhaps, but not impossible. More unusual is the language in which they rap: authentic indigenous Irish, at a time when the government refuses to acknowledge it as a legitimate language and, indeed, British elements in their country view it with a deep suspicion. These hoodlums run amuck snorting powders and snogging young ladies, but they have a love of their language that expresses itself in swaggering poetry of the sort imported from American hip-hop. The teacher, for his part, loves making beats, and is engaged in the political agitation for making Irish an official language of Northern Ireland. He sees in these boys a chance to bring his two passions together. Besides, he likes getting youthful stupidity back in his life, throwing himself into some of their more juvenile habits as they become intergenerational pals. (There’s a bit of a fun generation gap at play, too, like when he drops references to Dr. Dre or Abbey Road and they sail over the lads’ heads.) Calling themselves Kneecap, they start the underdog road to niche success, drawing the expected controversies any rappers exalting drugs and revolution alike attract. The movie, which stars the band as themselves in surprisingly charismatic and believable performances, ends up following a lot of the usual musical biopic beats. But its style and tone are enlivened by a cultural specificity and a raucous energy. Writer-director Rich Peppiatt takes his cues from their vulgar lyrics and rough-around-the-edges personalities—as well as a rooting in The Troubles that still linger in sociopolitical tensions in their town, from an estranged revolutionary dad (Michael Fassbender) to a girl (Jessica Reynolds) whose British roots give her fling with one of the fellas a naughty charge she loves to cultivate. The movie hops and bounces with a pattering narration, visual jumpiness like Danny Boyle-lite, and little animated filigrees or super-imposed handwritten embellishments, keeping things light and joyful even as the darkness of addiction and sectarian violence bubbles up. It’s basically as if Trainspotting was also A Hard Day’s Night. If it’s not quite as good as that sounds, it’s not for lack of trying. It’s a vibrant, vulgar ode to free speech that ends with a lovely syllogism: language makes stories, and stories make nations. I got a little misty eyed right there, even before the narration even draws its final conclusion.

Concerted Effort: TRAP

M. Night Shyamalan’s Trap is probably his slightest and most straightforward movie to date. It’s pretty much always exactly what it appears to be, all right on the surface with no surprises. And yet his pacing, rhythm and plot progression is always so idiosyncratically his own that it’s still unexpected in its every development and every preposterous turn of events. More than any Shyamalan before, this one has little logic on a scene to scene basis, with plausibility, or even basic sense, almost completely subsumed by his workings of style, character, and theme. It makes for a minor work, but a vivid and telling one. He’s too good a filmmaker to let something like coherence or context throw him off his game. Forget having a plot hole or two; this movie’s Swiss cheese. But, hey, cheese can be a good treat, too, and my fellow Shyamalan auteurists will still find plenty to appreciate in the movie’s total refusal to be anything but itself. That is to say, it is, like his other recent efforts like Old and Knock at the Cabin, another outlandish premise in which a family is put to an ultimate test of togetherness.

Here we find Josh Hartnett as a doting dad taking his daughter to a pop concert, an event we quickly realize has been infiltrated by an FBI team on the hunt for a serial killer they have good reason to believe is in attendance. The twist lands quickly: Hartnett is that killer. Now he’s stuck surrounded by cops and crowds—and proceeds to plow unstoppably forward, like a shark on the move. He’s cornered, and needs to find his way out by working all the angles. That’s clever enough—and a more conventionally satisfying thriller might’ve milked its central concept more fully. Instead it’s played loosely for a few macabre moments and a lot of cringing comic stings. It never quite makes a full convincing space. The concert itself is a pretty flat affair—Shyamalan’s daughter Saleka plays a pop star simulacrum with songs that are bland and a performance a bit under-characterized and sketchily choreographed. And the variables at play in such a location are utilized rather sparingly as Hartnett eyes every potential escape route without rousing too much suspicion. Holding nearly every scene, he does a fine job of tight, restrained flailing, desperate to keep the ruse of normality from slipping. Then, without building to pop music crescendoes of payoffs, Shyamalan wriggles out of the expected and denies us the simple pleasures with a more eccentrically unexpected series of developments. We might think we’re watching a movie about a killer caught in a trap, but it’s soon clear it’s a movie about the traps we set for ourselves.

Here’s a man whose evil hobby has taken over his life. The unrealistic expectations he’s set for his nice suburban fatherhood persona colliding with his ugly urges threaten to ruin the good family man he could’ve been. He seems like a good dad—smiling, generous, bantering—and yet there’s a victim tied up in his basement. The friction between these halves of his identity is now grinding quickly toward imminent conflagration. The setup as rolled out was pretty far-fetched anyway. As Shyamalan lets it simmer as a twisted character piece instead, and gives a slow-rolling, high-pressure picture of a family life falling apart as it collides with the disjunctions and unexpected connections of stardom and screens and teens and the ways in which people can hide from each other in plain sight. The movie takes on a typically Shyamalanian frisson of pinned-back melodrama and ominous, geometrically composed implications that heighten the unreality of its murmured line readings and precise shell-game theatrics. It may have still left me wishing for the more conventional setups and payoffs the concert setting seemed to promise—but the more bitter interpersonal stakes of its increasingly small turns and odd shifts might end up lingering all the more.

What Fresh Misery Is This? LATE NIGHT WITH THE DEVIL, IN A VIOLENT NATURE, MAXXXINE, and LONGLEGS

In a recent Facebook post, writer-director Paul Schrader asserted that horror movies resist seriousness and are difficult to use for serious ideas, writing that “for the most part their raison d’être is horror itself.” This he says despite, or maybe because, of his own interesting flawed Cat People remake and Exorcist prequel. Regardless. It’s certainly true that the horror genre is one that easily tips over into empty gestures and routine imagery. Even some of the best somehow milk suspense afresh from the same small bag of tricks. Lights flicker. Frames swell with negative space. The score stings with a tremor of strings or a bleat of brass. Figures suddenly appear. Fog lingers. Grass cracks. Leather gloves stretch and crinkle. Blades shine and snicker-slice through air and flesh alike. Hey, I can like these tools of suspense as much as the next incorrigible horror frequenter. The masters of the form make these same basic moves manipulate responses for something pavlovian, if not pathological, in their ruthless effects. The masterpieces might lean on these, too, but on their way to burrow beneath the skin by turning the unease into an all-consuming nightmare of discomfort and lingering psychological doubt and distress. All that potential to find so many of the buzziest horror films lately are all empty gestures? Or at least they have wide gulfs between good ideas and unsatisfying execution.

Take the surprise sleeper hit of the spring: Late Night with the Devil. It sets itself up as found footage: a doomed episode of a 1970’s talk show wherein a possessed guest wreaked demonic havoc on live television. That’s an incredible premise, and with character actor David Dastmalchian in the lead role playing a kind of flop sweat Dick Cavett, has some unctuous charms. The way the intimations of real horror build along with the chummy surreality of a bleary-eyed half-imagined midnight talk show, segment by segment, has a nice sick logic to it as well. Where the movie loses me, and keeps it from fully activating its potential, is its craftsmanship. Writer-directors Cameron and Colin Cairnes fumble all the little details—from the too-digital faux-video look, to the vaguely modern phoniness of some performances, to the too-smooth gore effects—and break their own conceit with implausible and unnecessary behind-the-scenes photography and some nightmare-perspective shots in the back stretch cut into what could’ve stayed trapped in the diegetic. The longer it went on like that, the more frustrated I was that such a promising idea was whittled away one distracting choice after the next. It’s like they didn’t have the confidence to fully commit to their own idea.

If you want to give some credit for commitment to the bit, though, look no further than In a Violent Nature. It isn’t much of a movie, but as an excuse to sit in the dark and think about slasher movies, it’s not so bad. It’s basically a knockoff Friday the 13th from Jason’s perspective, or more accurately from a third-person camera following closely behind him. The trance-like pacing includes a lot of tromping around in the woods, the distant sounds of shallow young adults carousing and camping drawing nearer as a hulking brute slowly, steady stomps toward them. The eventual kills are so grotesquely over-the-top, even by the genre’s standards, that one watches them with a sick fascination. It’s not so much about the death on display as clocking where, exactly, the wound makeup and eviscerated dummies are digitally stitched into the shots of real actors, and trying not to vomit through one’s appreciation for all that macabre hard work making it look excessive and real when someone is literally pretzeled inside out and pushed down a ravine. Writer-director Chris Nash makes a patiently punishing movie that makes the audience wait and wait, listening to nothing but the crunch of leaves and twigs underfoot as the killer’s back ambles onward to excessive violence. The plot, such as it is, is bone-deep derivative, and any glimmers of genre critique are quickly squelched out by the flat-faced slasher logic taken too seriously. For however much it had me contemplating why people, myself included, even enjoy this hack-and-stab form, it had my mind wandering to all manner of other films of its kind—both better and worse—rather than focus on the increasingly dull one in front of me.

I had a similar sense of diminishing returns with the summer’s bigger art house horror efforts: Ti West’s MaXXXine and Oz Perkins’ Longlegs. Both from reliable modern auteurs of the genre, they nonetheless fall flat in the way strong starts peter out into predictability. They’re not without their surface charms of style, but they never truly satisfy like their inspirations. West’s film is the third in a trilogy he began with his fun 70s throwback X, in which an indie porn crew is killed off on a remote Texas farm, and then continued with Pearl, a flashback to the beginning of the century where a desperate farm girl hoped for stardom and decided to murder instead. MaXXXine is in a neon-and-synths 80s L.A. and finds the imaginary actress of the title role (Mia Goth) trying to transition from porn to horror. Too bad people she knows are being killed off by a giallo-styled leather-gloved perv. It makes for a rather simplistic movie with a mystery that’s limply deployed and violence sparingly splattered. It also introduces nothing new or nuanced about its character or the doomed death-drive to stardom we haven’t already picked up. By the time we get to the weirdly routine conclusion—in which a detective played by Michelle Monaghan gets one of the funniest exits in recent memory—I was wondering what all the empty pastiche was even supposed to be saying at this point. 

At least Longlegs has some truly terrifying moments punctuating a thick layer of dread. It’s a dimly-lit, coolly framed serial killer procedural that slowly sinks into a satanic spell. Maika Monroe does a good Jodie Foster, and Nicolas Cage brings a typically talented and engaging push-pull between outlandishness and underplayed creepiness. His grotesquely made-up face, shrill vocalizing and halting rhythms puncture the chilly restraint of the filmmaking, warping the texture of the tone and bending the whole movie toward his evil gesticulations. That makes for a great uneasiness at play in every scene, especially when photographed in precision anamorphic tracking shots tied to a figure in the frame. But it’s all so cramped and small, and ultimately way more pedestrian, even in its nightmarish magical realism, that I spent the last third in a shrug. But compared to some of these other horror movies this year, no wonder this one hit the box office with a bit of a jolt.

Dead End: DEADPOOL & WOLVERINE

“Welcome to the MCU,” Deadpool (Ryan Reynolds), the irreverent regenerative mutant with a fourth-wall-breaking power, tells a Wolverine (Hugh Jackman). To this he adds: you’re joining it at a low point. You can say that again. Meant to be a joke about the lower box office and more mixed reception of recent Marvel Cinematic Universe pictures, this movie, the thuddingly obvious Deadpool & Wolverine, is the actual nadir for the whole hydra-headed franchise. Even by Deadpool standards, it is astonishingly witless and empty. It’s a movie with nothing at stake, in which nothing much of consequence happens, and in which every act of violence or feint toward character development is ultimately meaningless. (It doesn’t even, in the end, despite its promises, bring Deadpool or Wolverine into the MCU!) Its tone is typical of its meta-antihero’s: cynical, sarcastic, insincere. But it feels even worse, somehow, shorn from the comparatively more authentic edge of the initial two entries produced under 20th Century Fox. Since that studio was absorbed by Disney, that edge is now queasily subsumed within the sturdy sentimentality and baseline simplicity of the MCU, which continues its project of painting the earlier efforts of Fox (and others) as unsanctioned variants of the Sacred Timeline. That whole concept comes from the largely satisfying TV series Loki, which has some fun with the idea of hopping through time and multiverses. The problem, though, is that one must care about the characters to track motivations across a conceit in which anything is possible and nothing is permanent. And Deadpool is awfully hard to care about as a real character; he’s more of a stunt and a goof at best. It might make sense to pair him as a mismatched partner to Jackman’s Wolverine, whose many film appearances have been tense and tortured; instead it’s a one-note irritation with a wild card bouncing off a stone wall.

Any chance of taking the stakes or characterizations as anything but obnoxious and tedious vanish quickly. The movie opens with a phony sequence in which Deadpool slaughters innocent agents of the Time Variance Authority in gory cartoonish shots of CG gore splattering. He does this while dancing to NSYNC and miming sex acts, stroking a phallic femur he uses to stab an anonymous extra in the gut. Later, he’ll tearfully ask an alternate universe Wolverine to help him save his universe from destruction, since the villains plan to rip it apart after sending him to The Void, where other misfit Marvel castoffs sit around waiting for their cameos. Hard to reconcile those two modes—high-stakes exposition and flat displays of vulgarity and violence—especially when the finale also includes a bloody massacre of alternate Deadpools who are constantly torn apart and regenerated to get up and get dismembered again. Sounds a little clever in concept, but why they’re fighting, and who they’re fighting, never makes sense. They can live forever and exist in every universe. Why do we care about any of them? And the sequence is shot so dispassionately—in a steady, calm, monotonously paced tracking shot—with stunts digitally smoothed that it’s creepy in its total alienation from reality and consequence. Death doesn’t matter here, so what are we rooting for? That action beat starts when a character’s head explodes in a spray of bullets because Deadpool is holding him as a human shield, making jokes the whole time. Why should we care if his universe of supporting characters will survive when none of the other characters, or the movie itself, cares about life itself? It’s numbing in its senselessness.

To whipsaw between total adolescent depravity and painfully vacant sentiment almost sounds energetic. But I cannot overstate how deadly dull the movie is from scene to scene. It sparks to life in sputtering spurts, drifting off affection for other, better Marvel properties—from the retro-future TVA offices to previous X-Men finale Logan to appearances from surprise castmates. (One shot of an ersatz Avengers had me dreaming of such a misfit matchup in a better movie.) Director Shawn Levy can be a reliably anonymous technician. He previously pulled off a robot boxing movie with Jackson—2011’s Real Steel—to diverting results, and a video-game meta action comedy with Reynolds—2021’s Free Guy—to some crowd-pleasing effects. And he can traffic cop comic personas well enough in Night at the Museum. But here some combination of the dictates of Deadpool’s juvenile ugliness and the MCU’s polished anonymity, along with his typically flavorless direction, combines to make a broadly repellent mush. The screenplay flops along doing nothing, Jackson's innate Wolverine charisma tries to imbue literally anything of note in the downtime, and the bland images constantly undercut any sense of creativity or cleverness. 

The whole movie is oddly cheap and small, taking place almost entirely in an empty wasteland and on one city street. It says a lot about the movie’s mismanaged sense of its own expectations that it prefaces one particular action sequence with Deadpool asking the nerds to get ready for something awesome and then follows that promise with janky effects awkwardly filmed. The characters may be stranded in a Void, but to sit watching one limp scene after the next flail self-satisfied feels like its own particular purgatorial punishment. It makes constant reference to other perceived Marvel failures—X-Men Origins, a couple Fantastic Fours, Affleck’s Daredevil—and each time the smug superiority of this movie’s tone had me thinking we were too hard on those earlier efforts. At least they were trying to be real movies. Even flashbacks to the first Deadpool, a movie I hated at the time, and probably still would if I rewatched it, look like great cinema compared to this rot.

Home on the Range: HORIZON: AN AMERICAN SAGA - CHAPTER 1

It begins with a massacre and ends with a massacre. Kevin Costner’s return to the director’s chair, Horizon: An American Saga — Chapter 1, may be merely the opening of a much longer project—and feels it, baggy with detail and spacious with introductions and set-ups, withholding all payoff for much, much later. But its intentions are already becoming clear. Here’s a movie about American Manifest Destiny: settlers moving west and the indigenous pushed out or pushing back. It’s about the violence it takes to recreate a country in your image; it’s about the hope to uproot one’s life only to replant it elsewhere; it’s about the perseverance to maintain your culture and traditions in the face of those who wish to take it from you. As such, the movie is a sturdy and sentimental work, overflowing with character melodramas played out against the backdrop of the American West. But it’s also a tough and fair story, thus far, and prismatic in the way it turns over the scenarios and sees from multiple perspectives. It opens with a small tent city struggling to become something more—a would-be town called Horizon advertised to settlers back east as a place of potential. The townsfolk are slaughtered by nearby natives, leaving dazed survivors to confront a military man who glumly tells them it’ll happen again. The people on whose land they’re attempting to build will not give it up without a fight. Some settlers want to stay. Some flee to the safety of the nearby army outpost. Soon enough, we meet the natives, and see they too are of split loyalties. A chief chastises a warrior who led the attack. Violence makes them all unsafe, he says. Eventually, this long chapter ends with retribution—a pack of miserable mercenaries slaughter an innocent tribe. And the cycle continues.

Between these two bloody action sequences shot through with the excitement of grief and agitation of injustice, we meet many characters in a huge ensemble, and find a great deal of conflict and rooting interest taking place. There’s the strong widow (Sienna Miller) and her angelic young teen daughter (Georgia MacPhail who, in one scene with all-white wardrobe, underlines her role as a literal manifestation of innocence) taken under the wing of a tender-hearted cavalry officer (Sam Worthington). There are the squabbling tensions of a wagon train under the watch of a tired leader (Luke Wilson) leading them inexorably toward Horizon. There’s a taciturn cowboy (Costner, saving his introduction for over an hour) who becomes suddenly, and somewhat reluctantly, invested in the survival of a prostitute (Abbey Lee). She’s stalked by gunmen (with a glowering, pouting Jamie Campbell Bower the most sinister among them) hunting down her friend (Jena Malone), a fugitive who killed their brother—the father of the friend’s child. It’s at once complicated and clear. We start to get a sense of where these stories might go through the conventions of such tales, and the easy rapport the actors build in these characters whose circumstances are historical and dramatic, but shot with a dependable gloss of some more mythic aims. Costner allows for plenty of heroic shots and sweeping landscapes that heighten that larger-than-life feeling as he keeps up a generous pace that’s all rising action. Each sequence is patiently developed in square and sturdy images, sunny and dusty and cut with the grace of a classical engraving. (One character even has a hobby of making sketches for just that purpose.) The film’s playing in the iconographic expected tableau of such an old-fashioned tale, while the complications pile up with the sense that we’re getting somewhere vast and engaging—eventually.

The movie is an expansive, wandering one, content to roll out every kind of Western—historical, pulpy, epic, romantic, bloody, wry—and pile up the tropes of each until they sing anew in a dynamic chorus. Costner is clearly a filmmaker in love with the genre; he’s starred in a few and his entire directorial output is some form of Western—his Dances with Wolves a revisionist take partially from a native perspective, and Open Range a classical rancher shootout showdown. (His The Postman may be post-apocalyptic, but it, too, is all about horses trotting between outposts nonetheless.) With Horizon’s first chapter, he stretches across the plains and the canyons, echoing Ford’s She Wore a Yellow Ribbon and Wagon Master, Eastwood’s Unforgiven and his own Wolves and Ranges, letting each storyline start brewing with comfortably gripping potential and familiar images. He draws his narratives in languorous shorthand, letting the cliche gather the force of emotional expression from a sincere storyteller. The film’s three hours are engaging and expansive, while feeling lengthy yet somehow quick. I found myself leaving satisfied without any resolution, craving Chapter 2.

Triple Threat: KINDS OF KINDNESS

“Some of them want to use you / Some of them want to get used by you / Some of them want to abuse you / Some of them want to be abused”
— Eurythmics, “Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)”

“This were kindness?”
— The Merchant of Venice (1.3.154)

For anyone worried that Greek writer-director Yorgos Lanthimos was drifting to the mainstream with his awards feted, and surprise box office hits, The Favourite and Poor Things, here’s Kinds of Kindness to most fully expose that bleeding heart of darkness within his works. Not that those other films aren’t wild with vulgarity and explicitness, too, but they were packaged in aesthetically pleasing historical intrigue or flights of fancy, respectively. Kindness is colder, slower, less immediately narratively legible, and without even the slightest hint of appealing character motives. That’s what makes it so compelling, too. One watches it trying to figure it out, and it's structured to keep slipping away. It’s fitting that it begins by blasting the iconic driving synths of Eurythmics’ “Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This),” as the movie is about people used and abused, in darkly comedic and deadpan absurd stories in which everyone is looking for something, and in which reality seems to take on the logic of an inscrutable dream. Lanthimos pins down his characters in clinically precise widescreen frames, and then spins out the surreal plot turns, scripted with his Killing of a Sacred Deer co-writer Efthimis Filippou. He does so with an unblinking, mannered realism, dialing back the style and coaxing underplayed reactions just when the stories are aching for excess.

As the characters wriggle their ways through the emotional and physical pain of their plots, the movie becomes a caustic acid bath of cynicism, watching toxic people give into base impulses, and work their wicked ways. The film is made up of three short films, each nearly an hour long and starring the same ensemble. Each tale would undoubtedly test the patience at feature length, each take a sick joke inside a sick joke that starts strange, grows even stranger, and then ends on its bleakest, gnarliest punchline. The first finds a businessman (Jesse Plemons) totally controlled by his boss (Willem Dafoe) and the old man’s mistresses (Emma Stone and Margaret Qualley), down to the food he eats and whether or not his wife (Hong Chau) will get pregnant. When he finds himself doubting his commitment to his latest grotesque task, his life instantly changes for the worse. The second story finds Plemons as a police officer whose wife (Stone) has been missing at sea. It’s odd enough that in his grief he invites their friends (Qualley and Mamoudou Athie) over to watch their sex tape; odder still is how he reacts when his wife is eventually discovered. Lastly, we find Stone and Plemons looking for a Chosen One at the behest of a cult leader (Dafoe) and his wife (Chau). It becomes a sort of desperate ritual as it goes on.

In each story, the cast is so good at inhabiting these extreme situations of sex and violence with shrugging acceptance that the bubbling surreality is played out quite naturally—subtext and text dancing with extreme literalness, down to the black-and-white flashes of dreams and visions that mingle with their mindsets. These characters are constantly doing acts of a selfish sort of kindness, casually blowing up lives, behaving as dangers to themselves and others. If this were kindness, who needs cruelty? Here’s a movie with a pretty low opinion of human behavior that’s as darkly upsetting as it is grimly funny, in a preposterous string of circumstances held in the grip of skilled filmmakers making each moment count. Lanthimos using the same faces in new roles uses each switch of the narrative to recombine them into dynamics of freedom and control, power and submission, responsibility and individualism. These characters keeps slamming into illusions they’ve created to make sense of lives spiraling out of control—often of their own doing. The bruising absurdism of each accumulates into the sickest joke of all: sometimes the only kindness is to give into the absurdity of your circumstances and hope for the best.

As an aside—how wild is it to think back to 2010, when Stone’s Easy A was a satisfying comedy that confirmed her a star and Lanthimos’ nasty, explicit Dogtooth got a surprise Academy Award nomination for foreign-language film. Imagine telling us moviegoers back then that those two would bring out the best in each other.