Contrary to what the title suggests, compassion is hard to find in Kinds Of Kindness, but you’d expect no less from Yorgos Lanthimos, who is better known for the wicked and the weird. Following the fierce flamboyance and utter brilliance of Poor Things and The Favourite, this celebrated Greek director returns to the more cynical and unsettling timbre of his earlier work, with a blackly comic triptych fable reuniting a familiar cast of players for some very twisted tales.

Divided into three segments, it sees actors of the calibre of Emma Stone, Jesse Plemons, Willem Dafoe and Margaret Qualley inhabit multiple characters in stories linked by an enigmatic figure played by Yorgos Stefanakos, who goes only by the initials RMF. The first such story finds Plemons’ businessman agreeing to his boss’ every whim, before disastrously drawing a line. In the second, Stone’s research scientist returns home a changed woman after being lost at sea. And in the third, Stone and Plemons play members of a cult on the hunt for a messiah-like figure.

This is a cold, deliberately stiff, sometimes chilling film effectively leavened by its absurdism, with wacky additions including deranged sports memorabilia and characters breaking into song and dance. If the middle segment feels less well realised, the opening satire of employer overreach is nicely done, and the closing vignette creates a compelling cult, while the appearances of RMF himself are a lot of fun.

Many of the best anthology films (stone-cold classic Dead Of Night, 2014’s excellent Wild Tales) keep things tighter and punchier, whereas these stories move at a feature-like pace, making it a tad overlong as a whole. Kinds Of Kindness does feel more minor after the masterpieces that preceded it, but it’s fantastically performed, deliciously dark and very, very funny.

Kinds Of Kindness is in cinemas from Friday 28 June.