Jesse Plemons had never heard of the Monty Python “Silly Walk” until a few years ago, when Yorgos Lanthimos made a strange request. The Oscar-nominated actor was getting acquainted with his Kinds of Kindness director’s unorthodox approach to rehearsals, where an ensemble works through elaborate trust exercises with the goal “to get you comfortable with making a fool of yourself,” as Plemons puts it. Lanthimos showed Plemons a clip of Python’s “Ministry of Silly Walks” before asking him and his costar Mamoudou Athie to play a conversational scene off-book while mimicking the sketch’s absurdist movements. They obliged. “You start his rehearsals and then you really feel like, ‘Oh wow, I have no clue what I’m doing,’” Plemons says, but “it’s a helpful way of getting outside of your head and throwing yourself into something ridiculous.”

Kinds of Kindness marks a return to the brazenly bizarre for Lanthimos. Though he’s coming off of two Oscar-winning commercial successes in The Favourite and Poor Things, the filmmaker first made his name with darkly disturbing, coolly nightmarish projects like this one. It’s hard to imagine this rather severe vision being widely embraced, though those involved with the film wouldn’t have it any other way. “I did not understand what I read—complete disclosure, I did not understand the script,” Hong Chau tells me. Athie admits, “I’d be lying if I said I understood it. I didn’t.” And Plemons’s initial reaction? “Oh my God. What?”

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Kinds of Kindness is structured as a triptych of stories that have loose but fascinating thematic links and an aesthetic consistency. Fresh off of her Poor Things Oscar win, Emma Stone is back as a star along with Poor Things costars including Willem Dafoe and Margaret Qualley. They all appear as different characters in each short, as do most of the cast. (Hunter Schafer makes a brief but memorable appearance in the final story.) “Casting the same few actors in different roles would provide a sense of continuity and unity between the three different stories,” Lanthimos says. “At the same time, I didn’t want the actors to change that much from one role to the next, as that felt like a show-off. We wanted to make slight alterations in the look, energy, and pace of each actor.”

Willem Dafoe, Jesse Plemons, and Hong Chau.

While everyone gets a chance to shine, Kinds of Kindness quickly announces itself as Plemons’s movie. He takes on the lead in Kindness’s first two tales before yielding the center of the trippy finale, “R.M.F. Eats a Sandwich,” to Stone. “I have wanted to work with Jesse for a long time,” Lanthimos tells me. “I think he’s one of the greats of our time.”

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Plemons’s performances are impressively distinctive: at times spectacularly dry, at others unsettlingly explosive. His sheer presence in this bizarro-auteur world recalls his enigmatic turn in Charlie Kaufman’s I’m Thinking of Ending Things. “Like that script, you definitely run through a wide range of emotions while you’re reading [this]—which is very important if you’re doing something so abstract and surreal,” he says. “I was blown away, and then felt like, Okay, I need to read this script 30 more times.”

The first chapter of the trio, “The Death of R.M.F.,” opens on Plemons’s Robert severing ties with his powerful boss (Dafoe) after being asked to complete an unforgivable task. Kindness jumps from that bleak character study to “R.M.F. Is Flying,” a portrait of a marriage in crisis that edges toward body horror: a cop (Plemons) is seemingly reunited with his long-missing spouse (Stone), but becomes convinced that though they look exactly the same, this woman is not actually his wife. Plemons and Stone again play opposite one another in “Eats a Sandwich,” with the latter’s Emily emerging as the focus as she embarks on a mysterious search.

“Some of the characters are trying desperately to figure out how to live and how to find comfort, and they also feel like they’re all on their own island,” Plemons says. “It’s about people looking for security and trying to feel safe in these societal constructs that we create, and slowly seeing the cracks in them.”

That’s one interpretation, of course. This thing has layers.

Mamoudou Athie.

Lanthimos wrote Kinds of Kindness with Efthimis Filippou, the scribe behind the director’s earlier breakout features Dogtooth and The Killing of a Sacred Deer. (He was Oscar-nominated for their first mainstream success, The Lobster.) Lanthimos says the main difference between his work with Filippou and his work with Tony McNamara, the writer of The Favourite (loosely based on actual history) and Poor Things (a novel adaptation), is source material: “The films written with Efthimis have been created from scratch.” They also tend to be more elliptical. Hong Chau, for one, noticed that rather quickly. “It was exciting to go into a project not knowing what I was going to do, because I have a pretty good idea most of the time,” the Oscar nominee says with a laugh. “I [usually] have very strong opinions during wardrobe fittings. For this one, it was just like, ‘I don’t know, I don’t know. You tell me!’”

Kindness’s stylish contemporary sets and lovely natural lighting give familiar dressings to scenarios that feel anything but. Nearly every piece of dialogue could be spun in a dozen different directions.

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Lanthimos’s reputation as a relatively hands-off director was already known as the cast came together. “I knew exactly what I was signing up for,” Athie says with a smile. Still, with such unusual characters and circumstances, the lack of guidance could feel both confounding and freeing. Plemons, Chau, and Athie are the Lanthimos newcomers with the most to work with in this project, and each approached the script uniquely. There was no right or wrong way to go.

Dafoe with Margaret Qualley.

ATSUSHI NISHIJIMA

“I did think about intention—that’s where real freedom is. Because if you commit, it can come out very similar to the last take. But it’s not premeditated,” says Athie. “I was transfixed [by the script’s] theme of control.” Plemons sought more fluidity: “It’s constant discovery and experimenting. The whole thing felt like a big experiment.” Chau, who most notably plays Plemons’s wife in the first short, concurs: “[Yorgos] doesn’t say very much in terms of what he’s thinking or how you should approach it. It’s just: ‘Do it and then we’ll see.’ That’s the approach I like to take as well.” (She also got a kick out of playing opposite Plemons: “I loved Friday Night Lights, and it’s been so cool to see him move on to other really interesting projects. In a weird way, I would think, ‘Gosh, I hope I get to have Jesse Plemons’s career one day.’”)

Plemons noticed himself going to places he’d never gone as an actor, a sensation that reached its peak near the end of the first story. “I was just flying by the end of that one, having the greatest, strangest time,” he says. “When we shot the crescendo of that first one toward the end, it felt really great and exciting and unlike anything I had ever done before.” He wasn’t alone in that experience. Athie, a graduate of the Yale School of Drama, has felt in the past that he tends to hyperfocus on craft. “I’ve had such a hard time settling down as an actor,” he says. But Kinds of Kindness forced him to. “I’m like, ‘You know what, Mamo? I think it’s time to bring some of your manic energy back and just be free.’”

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Then there was the matter of how to root oneself in the three separate Kinds shorts. The stories were filmed back-to-back, each taking around three weeks with tiny breaks in between. In the lead-up to shooting, Plemons completed dreamwork with his wife, Kirsten Dunst, to find his footing in this world. (“It becomes rooted in your own unconscious mind,” he says of the process.) And he leaned on Stone, Dafoe, and Qualley to get a handle on Lanthimos’s methods. “Even in the rehearsal process, it helped that it was so normal to them,” he says. “In any situation that is new and unknown, when you look around and you see other people fully throwing themselves into something, it’s a little easier for you to do yourself.”

Like, say, when you’re asked to recite some wild Lanthimos-Filippou dialogue while silly-walking, Monty Python style? Plemons laughs, then nods. “Yeah,” he says, smiling. “That really unlocked it all.”

ATSUSHI NISHIJIMA

Kinds of Kindness premieres this month at the Cannes Film Festival 2024, and Searchlight Pictures will release the movie in theaters on June 21. This feature is part of Awards Insider’s exclusive Cannes coverage, featuring first looks and in-depth features on some of the festival’s most exciting debuts.