I saw this on the 3rd of July, 2024, in the Everyman cinema.
Overall, I liked it! It’s a triptych of three stories with the same cast, rotated among them. The first is an odd one (they’re all odd) about a man who has signed up to have his entire life controlled by his boss (Dafoe), but when he asks him to ram into a car, he refuses and is set adrift. He meets someone else, Rita (Stone), but it turns out that she’s also being controlled, so in desperation he kills the guy who was meant to be driving the car and is received back with open arms.
In the second, a police officer is waiting for his wife (Stone), a marine scientist, to be found after she’s gone missing. She returns, but he is slowly convinced she is not who she seems. He is increasingly irrational, cold, and cannibalistic; he asks her to cook her finger for him, and then her liver. She does so; she dies; she appears at the door, hale and hearty, while her body slowly drips in a chair in the living room. It’s played intentionally ambiguously, so we don’t know whether he was right, or simply psychotic and hallucinating. Deeply disturbing but very well done.
The final one was my favourite, about a woman (Stone) in a cult, run by Willem and Hong Chau (of Downsizing) who are searching for a woman who can raise the dead. Over the course of the story, Stone’s character slowly returns to her husband and child, only for her husband to drug and rape her one night, after which the cult declares her unclean and expels her. In desperation, she contacts a woman from earlier in the story who claims to know the one they’re looking for; after she heals a dog, Stone kidnaps her and races to drive her to the cult. She crashes into a car, and the chosen one is thrown out of the windscreen and killed.
This one was actually darkly comedic, with a really funny bit near the end where Stone realises she’s found her and just dances in an odd, angular style (from the trailer) for a couple of minutes, before an abrupt cut to them driving.
Overall, interesting, and I’ll remember it for a long time. My friend absolutely hated it, she found it scary and harrowing.