Sex, rape, cannibals: what Yorgos Lanthimos did after Poor Things

Joe Alwyn, the British star of one of the most disturbing films to compete at the Cannes festival this year, has given his verdict on making the “bonkers” Kinds of Kindness, which features scenes of group sex, cannibalism and violence and in which Alwyn has to perform a drug rape on the character played by Oscar-winner Emma Stone. “You have to try not to unpack it all too much, or you get it stuck in your head,” he said on Saturday.

The 33-year-old, until now best known as a former partner of Taylor Swift, has been thrust into the glaring lights of Cannes this weekend, but has also had to survive entering the odd imagination of Poor Things director Yorgos Lanthimos. Alwyn said the best way to prepare himself for Lanthimos’s unsettling and explicit screen world had been to “trust him, trust him, trust him”. “It is bizarre and strange and bonkers and special,” Alwyn added, “but one of the reasons I love his films is because you feel it first, before you try to understand it all.”

Speaking after the premiere of Kinds of Kindness on Friday, the Greek director, also known for The Favourite and The Lobster, revealed that the tyranny of the depraved Roman emperor Caligula had sparked the idea for his film. “My inspiration was reading about Caligula and thinking how a man can have such power over other people,” he said. “So I started to imagine how, in our modern world, it would be if someone had such complete control over others, deciding when they eat and who they marry.”

Willem Dafoe, who stars alongside Stone and Alwyn in the gory shocker, agreed that it is “not always clear” what Lanthimos wants, but that a clarity develops on set through “call and response”, allowing the actors to “find the beauty in the strength of those things” they are asked to do.

Dafoe, 68, plays three characters in the film’s anthology format, including a sociopathic businessman and a sex cult leader, and said he was glad to have been accepted into Lanthimos’s repertory company of regular actors after his performance last year alongside Stone in Poor Things.

Stone, 35, said that she now had “extreme comfort” when acting for Lanthimos’s camera. “I trust him beyond the trust I have had with any director – and I have worked with some great directors,” she said. “I feel I can do anything with him. We just have something.”

The American actor won many honours last year for her role as Bella Baxter, a woman with the mind of a baby, in Poor Things, a film which also portrayed controversial sex scenes. Stone reaffirmed her personal feminist stance on Saturday; she explained, however, that it did not always dictate her choice of films: “These are stories that feel interesting to me. I just find the characters and the world interesting,” she said.

If a director aims to surprise or shock the Cannes crowd, they really have to flex to find new ways, and the maverick Lanthimos has pulled out all the stops with Kinds of Kindness. It may not rank at the top of the list of the festival’s most unpalatable fare – say, up with Lars von Trier’s Antichrist of 2009, which also starred Dafoe, or with Gaspar Noé’s notorious Irréversible (2002), but for determined strangeness and extreme content it vies with 2021’s Benedetta, co-written and directed by Paul Verhoeven, or with Michael Winterbottom’s Nine Songs (2004), which was criticised for using real sex scenes.

Related: Kinds of Kindness review – sex, death and Emma Stone in Lanthimos’s disturbing triptych

Kinds of Kindness contains very little kindness and lots of cruelty and delusion, as it tells three bleak stories featuring the same actors and loosely linked with nihilistic motifs. Among the more alarming sequences is a four-way couples sex scene featuring Stone and Margaret Qualley as consenting wives, and a scene in which Jesse Plemons encourages Stone to cut out her liver.

Lanthimos defended his vision by saying that the real world around him was “crazy and sad a lot of times”.

“Don’t you think that something is off with the world?” he asked the Cannes media. “Probably more so than with the films that I make … It is also ridiculous and funny and so that needs to be part of what we make.” The director wrote the script with Efthymis Filippou, his previous collaborator on 2009’s Dogtooth.

Qualley, the 29-year-old daughter of Four Weddings and A Funeral star Andie MacDowell, agreed with Alwyn that trust was crucial to acting for Lanthimos, as well as allowing “some kind of freefalling feeling”. Plemons said that the rehearsal period had helped him to “bypass intellectualising” the script. “The story sort of seeps in without you even asking it to. It is a very unsettling place to be, to have it in your head, with nowhere to put it at first,” he said.