Yorgos Lanthimos gets Emma Stone and the whole band back together in Kinds Of Kindness trailer

Sweet dreams are made of this: Yorgos Lanthimos has brought his merry band of weirdos, including Best Actress winner Emma Stone, Willem Dafoe, Margaret Qualley, and Joe Alwyn, back together for a new picture. Kinds Of Kindness, which premieres in theaters June 21, also adds a perfect crew of newcomers to Lanthimos’ repertory: Jesse Plemons, Hong Chau, Mamoudou Athie, and Hunter Schafer. The new trailer for the film doesn’t give away much, but it does do a good job of drumming up excitement for this stellar cast.

Previously titled And, Kinds Of Kindness is an anthology film, meaning it tells not one but three stories. The synopsis describes it as a “triptych fable, following a man without choice who tries to take control of his own life; a policeman who is alarmed that his wife who was missing-at-sea has returned and seems a different person; and a woman determined to find a specific someone with a special ability, who is destined to become a prodigious spiritual leader.”

This is not the kind of trailer that gives away the whole plot of the movie. Instead it’s brief flashes of moments that will whet your appetite for Lanthimos’ signature strangeness: Stone getting groovy, Chau licking someone’s stomach, Qualley straight-faced and slapping Plemons across the face. (Not pictured: Stone slapping Dafoe across the face, which they did 20 takes of, despite Dafoe not even being on camera for it.) Aesthetically, it couldn’t be more different from Poor Things, which heightened its period setting with surreal, colorful set design. Here, the mise-en-scène is the gritty, unbeautiful contemporary reality (though like Poor Things, one portion of the film appears to be in black-and-white). “This is it, the moment of truth,” Stone narrates over these disparate clips. “Isn’t it wonderful?”

Kinds Of Kindness was written by Efthymis Filippou, with whom Lanthimos collaborated on Dogtooth, Alps, The Lobster, and Killing Of A Sacred Deer. This is also the fourth collaboration between Lanthimos and Stone (After Poor Things, The Favourite, and the silent short film Bleat). Speaking with The Guardian in December 2023, Lanthimos confirmed that Kinds Of Kindness is “a contemporary film, set in the US—three different stories, with four or five actors who play one part in each story, so they all play three different parts. It was almost like making three films, really.” He added, “It’s great to be working again with Emma. It makes it so much easier to have someone there who trusts you so much, and who you trust so much.”