It’s easy for me to imagine Yorgos Lanthimos endlessly dispensing a steady supply of the grimly comic cinematic novellas that make up his new film, Kinds of Kindness. I picture them plopping off the end of conveyor belt like mildly poisoning hard candies. Returning to his longstanding collaboration with co-writer Efthimis Filippou, Lanthimos crafts a trio of stories that exist in some unsettled netherworld between morality fable and cautionary tale. Or maybe these twisty and twisted fictions are simply meant to be provocations, springing from a vague prompt about the tenuousness of free will to leaves viewers on edge without an evident exist from their own discomfort. With Lanthimos, it’s sometimes difficult to tell.

Using largely the same troupe of actors for all three segments — most notably, Jesse Plemons and Poor Things carryovers Emma Stone, Willem Dafoe, and Margaret Qualley — Lanthimos unfolds these tales with measured menace. The first story centers on an employee in a vaguely defined office environment who is giving highly regimented instructions from his boss, the second follows the troubles of a married couple after the wife returns after going missing on a scientific expedition, and the third involves a cult-like commune that sends emissaries out in search of a prophesied healer. All three generally succeed on the oblique, esoteric terms Lanthimos lays out, thought the middle offering gets a little lost in the windy particulars of its theme.

Because the stories are truncated, Lanthimos doesn’t have the time to go as deep into the character’s anxious contradictions as he usually does, putting more of the burden of making these people real enough to make the dark doings matter. Plemons is the strongest, most consistent performer of the cast, finding and showing extra layers in his various unnerving characters. (Plemons also benefits from the extra material that comes with being the clear protagonist in two of the three stories.) The more confined narratives also prompts Lanthimos to rely more on quick gags — a surprising video selection for nostalgic viewing, a speeding, swerving car — and the grandly garish visual flourishes of his more recent features are tamped down. Although the film runs to nearly three hours, Kinds of Kindness is Lanthimos in a leaner mode.

As with earlier Lanthimos features, Kinds of Kindness requires a commitment to his discordant wavelength. The film is ultimately more hit or miss than, say, The Lobster. When it works, it works, and when it doesn’t, it’s like pushing a fully flat tire. For me, it works more often than it doesn’t, but everyone needs to understand they’re riding this ride at their own risk.