UNHOLY TRINITY

“Kinds of Kindness.”

- JUSTIN CHANG

Jesse Plemons, Emma Stone, and Willem Dafoe star in Yorgos Lanthimos’s film.

Should you arrive late for Yorgos Lanthimos’s “Kinds of Kindness,” you will miss its single most rousing moment: an opening blast of that delectably sour 1983 earworm “Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This).” The song needs no justification; it could kick off every movie from now until kingdom come. Even so, you may wonder what put Lanthimos, the Greek-born director of such acrid downers as “The Lobster” (2015) and “The Killing of a Sacred Deer” (2017), in a specifically Eurythmics mood. Perhaps, after concocting the mad Victorian brew of “Poor Things” (2023), he wanted to signal a shift back to a more contemporary style of weird. Or perhaps he recognized, in the song’s coolly cynical lyrics, a corrosion of spirit to match his own. “Some of them want to abuse you/Some of them want to be abused”: there are worse ways to sum up the cruel spectacles of subjugation that Lanthimos has made such a perverse specialty of.