Lanthimos’ first feature film came out in 2001: My Best Friend was co-directed with Lakis Lazopoulos and is a story of betrayal between longtime friends. His later Kinetta (2005) is a morbid, voyeuristic reconstruction of a crime scene. These two, plus Dogtooth of 2009, make it clear the Greek filmmaker’s intention to place his audience before a challenge against vision and verisimilitude.
The settings and situations are over the top to the point of absurd but work well as a metaphor of the modern world. A cold, realist vision that shows us something anomalous and out of bounds. The Lobster (2015) is Lanthimos’ first Hollywood film, a film of exquisite style. The premise of the film is a futuristic society of senseless, paradoxical rules. The same for The Killing of a Sacred Deer (2017), albeit with more virtuosity and some mannerism. In 2018, his period comedy The Favourite abandons the fantastic, surreal style to talk about female emancipation with elaborate, masterful visual touch.
The fundamentals of his production are personal relationships taken to extreme consequences, morbid voyeurism, pain, and grieving as a way to change one’s identity. There’s no one like him in modern cinema.
Based on the 1992 novel of the same name by Alasdair Gray, the irreverent new work by Yorgos Lanthimos revisits the typical canons of Gothic cinema with surprising creativity, using a cast of the highest calibre. When his daughter Bella kills herself to escape her husband̵...
A depiction of death in a perverted virtual simulation that has gotten out of hand.
The horror of family life in a foolish, extreme experiment that flirts with incest.
The process of grieving is helped by different people playing the dear departed’s role in his family’s life, to ease the pain.
In a futuristic society of senseless, paradoxical rules, people must choose whether to find a partner or be turned into animals.
Another step forward, stylistically, and a murky story of vengeance where dark forces cause the dissolution of a family.
An amazing, award-winning Olivia Colman starring in a period drama. A hymn to female emancipation.
