After his feminist Frankenstein remake, director Yorgos Lanthimos was back Friday with a trippy triptych featuring dogs as humans, a finger served with a vegetable and a cocktail called “Emily’s forehead”.
“I always think that we’re pushing things to the extreme,” the 50-year-old Greek filmmaker told AFP before its premiere in the Cannes Film Festival competition. “But sometimes reality is even crazier than what you’re trying to create.”
The wacky feature, one of 22 competing for the Palme d’Or, is his latest team-up with actor Emma Stone after she won an Oscar for returning from the dead in his steampunk “Poor Things”.
Lanthimos said that, as trust grows between them, the duo has become “more bold and more brave”.
Also returning from “Poor Things” are Willem Dafoe and up-and-coming star Margaret Qualley for an experimental ride in which the same actors morph from one character to the next in three separate stories.
The settings vary from a high-rise office to a pool of sacred tears by the sea, but all focus on a main character — Jesse Plemons (“Breaking Bad”) and then Stone — increasingly losing the plot and driven to murderous distraction.