The working title of Yorgos Lanthimos’ Kinds of Kindnesses was And. In some ways, that was a more apposite title, since this anthology comedy is obsessed with one of the uncanniest spectacles in a hyper-connected world: the physical spaces and silences between things. The structure of the film itself reflects that interest in connective tissue – or rather, in the old forms of physical connective tissue that have been displaced by digital proximity. It unfolds as three discrete stories, each of which are clearly linked in their focus on extreme acts, their morbid sense of humour, and their casts, all featuring Willem Dafoe, Emma Stone, Jesse Plemons, Hong Chau and Margaret Qualley in some combination. Beyond that, though, the spaces between the films is left to resonate, and often makes its way into the film themselves. The second working title was R.M.F. and we see this in the title of each of the instalments, which all reference that eponoymous, extremely marginal character – “The Death of R.M.F.,” “R.M.F. is Flying” and “R.M.F. Eats a Sandwich.” Yet these titles displace the connection between the stories further, relegating it to their peripheries, and so once again positioning us at the nexus between them, rather than providing any kind of definitive narrative thread.

This aesthetic approach easily works best in the first film, “The Death of R.M.F.” which ranks amongst Lanthimos’ best visions. In this film, Lanthimos pairs the looming silences and cavernous spaces of the film with the professional relationship between a worker and a manager who combines the perverse demands of a director and a father-figure. The entire aesthetic of the film is set in play here – an immaculate and yet curiously voided sense of mise-en-scene, an emergent sense of hostile intentions that remain opaque at first glance, and dialogue that is constrained by a stilted declarative formality. You sense a monstrous enterprise taking place just beneath the surface of the image, even as every encounter feels risk-managed to appease a continuous corporate surveillance. There’s very little soundtrack and, when it does occur, it only serves to contour these enormous absences, as when Eurythmics’ “Sweet Dreams (Are Made Of This)” pummel out over the opening credits only to abruptly give way to an almost impossibly quiet first scene, the audience’s ears still ringing.

As mentioned, the brilliance of the first film, “The Death of R.M.F.,” lies in the way it presents this aesthetic as the inevitable consequence of a certain kind of corporate sphere. The workplace in question is a construction company, with Raymond (Dafoe) as its CEO and Robert (Plemons) as its most loyal foot soldier. Drawing upon the inventor-auteur role that he played in Poor Things, Raymond’s professional relationship with Robert has clearly exceeded the workplace (or perhaps the workplace has just expanded its coordinates), since he has taken it upon himself to scrupulously and meticulously manage every single facet of his subordinate’s life. He tells him what to eat, what to wear, who to sleep with, and perhaps most significantly, where to position himself in space, prefacing their first meeting with instructions about how he should have walked into the room, and directions to do it again. Here, as in the other stories, Plemons is perfect for the role, as his face exudes a certain superficial blankness and malleability that allows him to play the connective tissue between other actors in a peculiarly powerful way. At the end of “The Death of R.M.F.” we will learn that Raymond’s instructions to Robert are ultimately about mediating his own eerie marriage.

Part of the genius of this first film is that the more perverse Robert’s demands become, the more that the film leans into the corporate reception interface as the norm for human communication. Insane acts are paired with polite, proper and above all “professional” communication, until it feels like the whole film has been run through a PR filter to make sure that its tone is appropriate even as its content devolves into ever more depraved acts. For it turns out that Raymond’s ultimate demand is that Robert have a severe car crash to prove that he loves him. No reason, explanation or context is given for this – it just coalesces out of the corporate connective tissue between them, and the pall of white noise it casts on the film.

“The Death of R.M.F.” thus provides a dystopian vision of corporate America in which there is nothing left to build or maintain, forcing managers to resort to creative destruction to retain their aura and autocracy. Between the botched crash that starts this first film, and the successful crash that ends it (killing R.M.F. in the process), Raymond delights in organising, mapping and reflecting on risk matrices. Creative destruction, the mystification of risk, and the PR-smoothing of perverse imperatives quickly becomes an aesthetic (or anti-aesthetic) principle in itself, the horizon for a new era of human artistry and endeavour. Hence the excerpts from Strauss’ “Thus Spoke Zarathustra,” with their inevitable echoes of Kubrick’s 2001, which build throughout the film and then culminate as Robert drives his SUV around and around a hospital roundabout, crushing the body of R.M.F. more with every revolution.

The difference from 2001 is that the monolith has become a figment of a certain kind of American corporate sphere – brutal in its outlines and yet suffused with the studied blankness of risk management. That monolithic aesthetic carries over into the next two stories, both of which focus on voids of their own. In the second film, “R.M.F. is Flying,” Plemons plays a man whose wife, played by Stone, has gone missing at sea. When she returns he is no longer sure that she is his wife. Meanwhile, all the looming silences of this film are contoured by the couple’s ongoing group sex sessions with another couple. We only experience these vicariously, through the videotapes they make – every other references to their escapades are couched in the same reception interface, with its streamlined and functional cordiality. Likewise, the third film, “R.M.F. Eats a Sandwich,” revolves around a water-worshipping cult who use prolonged sauna treatments to sweat out mineral and moral impurities, even as they force their members to engage in ever more bizarre and dehumanising rituals. There’s a clear analogy with the way that Lanthimos “sweats out” the grit of his own mise-en-scenes but only to make for a more streamlined sense of perversion, but here, as in the second film, I wasn’t as engaged as in “The Death of R.M.F.” Having established the aesthetic of Kinds of Kindness as such an immoveable monolithic force, it doesn’t quite land when Lanthimos tries to “develop” it, just because the whole point of this aesthetic is foreclosure of all possibilities. Nevertheless, that opening film stands for me as one of the finest things he has accomplished.