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Yorgos Lanthimos, the Greek director of Poor Things, The Lobster, and this week’s new supersize anthology Kinds of Kindness, has to be one of the most unlikely success stories of 21st-century cinema: an oddball visionary whose cracked comedies and antagonistic allegories of power and madness have been widely embraced by American moviegoers and awards voters alike. Seriously, what magic spell did this man cast to become one of the world’s most popular filmmakers? You can love his work and still be perplexed by the way that mainstream tastes seem to have bent in the direction of his singularly strange, brutal, and unsparing studies of the human condition.
A veteran of experimental theater who rode to prominence on the so-called Greek Weird Wave, Lanthimos made a splash in global cinephile circles with his unnerving and darkly funny third feature, Dogtooth. In its violence, transgressive sex, and general portrait of abominable parental cruelty, the film seemed like the very definition of an acquired taste. And yet it was promptly nominated for an Oscar. More awards attention followed as Lanthimos began making movies in English, on bigger budgets and with international stars like Colin Farrell and Emma Stone. While some of these films are more accessible than his earlier homegrown curiosities, none of them feel like sellout moves. Quite to the contrary, they seem to have created an appetite for the peculiar particulars of his style: lobotomy-patient dialogue, coldly removed camerawork, mysterious or inscrutable behavior.
Maybe Lanthimos is just in step with his moment — a madman provocateur for an increasingly mad world. Or maybe it’s not so mysterious that a filmmaker so in control of the look, performances, and atmosphere of his films would quickly amass a following and rack up accolades. Either way, he’s built one of the most thematically consistent bodies of work in modern cinema: a canon of magnetic meditations on manipulation and control. There’s an element of that in all nine of the ranked features below, even if a few of them are more poor thing than personal favo(u)rite.
My Best Friend (2001)
Only in its opening shot, which gives new meaning to the term “fish-eye lens,” does the first Yorgos Lanthimos movie remotely resemble any other Yorgos Lanthimos movie. His inauspicious debut belongs more obviously to its co-director, Greek TV star Lakis Lazopoulos, who wrote the screenplay and cast himself as a married zhlub who spirals into a midlife crisis after he catches his buddy in bed with his wife. The sitcomish sex comedy that follows — an unfunny, vaguely misogynistic farce that keeps splintering into flashbacks and fantasy sequences — contains few hints of the crazed deadpan sensibility or supreme formal control for which Lanthimos would become known. Though a hit back home, My Best Friend didn’t travel much beyond Greece and rarely shows up in retrospectives of the director’s work, like the one Lincoln Center put together back in 2019. Frankly, you’d never guess he made this film, which is probably how he prefers it.
Kinetta (2005)
Now this is the Lanthimos we know, if not yet the Lanthimos we love. Unlike the filmmaker’s co-directed first feature, his solo-directed second is recognizably, even undeniably him: an enigmatic drama about three unnamed strangers — a plainclothes cop (Costas Xikominos), a photographer (Aris Servetalis), and a maid (Evangelia Randou) — who meet to perform mysterious reenactments of violent crimes in a small Greek vacation town, until the line between imitation and reality starts to blur. Cryptic to a fault, the film takes a small eternity to clarify the nature of its relationships, entrusting the audience to parse the truth from poker-faced ciphers who barely speak. Curiosity calcifies fast into boredom, while the shaky handheld camerawork proves that while the writer-director was quickly finding his voice, he was still honing his craft. In retrospect, Kinetta feels like a dry run for Lanthimos, with all the droll affectation of his later provocations but little of the allegorical power or lunatic comedy that would distinguish them.
Kinds of Kindness (2024)
Less than a year after Poor Things — and a mere three months since that movie won multiple Oscars — Lanthimos reunited with Emma Stone, Willem Dafoe, and Margaret Qualley for a demented triptych organized around dominant-submissive relationships. If nothing else, this two-hour, 40-minute anthology proves that the filmmaker still has some hostile anti-crowd-pleasers left in him after the slightly kinder and gentler awards darlings he made for Searchlight. Working from his own script for the first time in years, Lanthimos giddily gins up fresh grotesqueries (like a severed and cooked thumb) and absurdist plot points (including one that demonstrates that the man behind Dogtooth is still a dog guy). But the three tales are arguably too tonally and structurally similar, hitting a familiar note of nausea ad nauseam, and the whole doesn’t really exceed the sum of its parts. Despite the epic length, Kinds of Kindness ultimately comes across as a lark, riffing on pet motifs with the help of a game ensemble on triple duty. Best in show is Jesse Plemons, who won Best Actor at Cannes last month; a newcomer to Lanthimos Land, he discovers a relatively wide range of personality types in the deliberately stilted performance style the filmmaker prefers.
Alps (2011)
Dogtooth was a tough act to follow. After that international breakthrough, Lanthimos retreated to the more somnambulistic, less grimly comic mode of his earlier Kinetta for this like-minded story of a troupe of unconventional grief counselors hired to imitate deceased loved ones. Disappointed critics poked holes in the premise (how would someone doing a robotic impersonation of your nearest and dearest help you cope with their death?) without considering that the film is more interested in the practitioners of this imaginary service than the bereaved clientele. Alps is really about the absurdity of acting in general, and perhaps the specific psychological burden of the Method in particular. What the film lacks in shock value and wicked humor — both crucial to the director’s more acclaimed work — it makes up for via its oddly affecting portrait of a nurse (Lanthimos regular Angeliki Papoulia) losing herself to the role-play. Years later, it remains the director’s most misunderstood movie and his most underrated.
The Killing of a Sacred Deer (2017)
Sophie’s Choice meets Cape Fear meets Greek mythology in this disturbing yuppies-in-peril thriller about a wealthy, respected doctor (Colin Farrell, reuniting with Lanthimos immediately after The Lobster) whose mistakes in the operating theater come back to haunt him. To say much more would be to spoil the twisted twists of the plot, in which the director finally applies his affinity for mounting dread to a bona fide horror movie — albeit one characterized by the off-kilter black humor that had become his speciality by that point. One could argue that The Killing of a Sacred Deer might be even more effective if the characters didn’t speak in that classic Lanthimos monotone, if he created a more “normal” domestic life he could nightmarishly shatter. But there’s no denying the spooky, Kubrickian unease of the imagery, nor the all-time creepiness of Barry Keoghan’s performance as a teenage instrument of karmic retribution, wreaking supernatural comeuppance with a glazed stare. As for Farrell, rarely has a pathological abdication of responsibility been so uncannily conveyed; he’s well matched by his The Beguiled co-star, Nicole Kidman, who cuts through the body-snatcher torpor of the material with her growing rage and panic.
The Lobster (2015)
Speaking of Farrell, he’s brilliantly cast against type as a frumpy, rizzless divorcé desperate to find a new life partner in the director’s first English-language film. Set in a world where romantic companionship is compulsory (under threat of being surgically transformed into an animal of your own choosing!), The Lobster surreally exaggerates the indignities and stakes of our actual, unforgiving dating culture. The first hour, set at a resort that’s like a singles cruise through the Twilight Zone (or Bachelor in Paradise beamed in from a brutal alternate universe), contains some of the most pitilessly funny scenes of the filmmaker’s career. The movie loses a little comic steam once the action shifts to the woodland hideout of pancho-wearing, renegade singles with their own strict code of conduct, but even these scenes sharpen the satirical point: Whether romantically attached or not, we’re all prisoners to society’s expectations. As for Lanthimos, he proved here that his particular strain of savage allegory could easily cross language barriers, speaking a universal tongue of sadistic cringe comedy.
The Favourite (2018)
Dialogue is the biggest clue that Lanthimos didn’t write this uproarious, withering dark comedy about a power struggle within the court of Queen Anne. Rather than the stiff alien chitchat that dots his own screenplays, the characters in The Favourite trade the witty, venomous bon mots of The Great creator Tony McNamara. All the same, it’s not difficult to see what drew the director to the true story of two 18th-century cousins, Lady Sarah Churchill (Rachel Weisz, never better) and Abigail Hill (Emma Stone, never better until her next film with Lanthimos), competing for the sapphic affections of a mentally and physically unwell monarch (Olivia Colman, who won the Oscar for Best Actress in a major and well-deserved upset). No amount of refined wordplay or frilly couture can disguise how neatly the women’s war of wills fits into a larger filmography obsessed with the ways everyone madly scrambles for influence and control. Certainly, he didn’t need ostentatious flourishes to make the material his own; The Favourite would look perfectly Lanthimosian without those distorting, distracting wide-angle shots.
Poor Things (2023)
The most accessible movie Lanthimos has ever made, but why hold that against it? His deranged imagination is all over this vibrantly stylized journey of awakening, in which horny experiment Bella Baxter — a woman with the literal brain of a child — follows her libido to liberation, finding herself sexually and ideologically in the Victorian steampunk world beyond the gates of her gothic home/prison. The performances are deliriously inspired, from Mark Ruffalo’s hilarious caricature of insecure manhood to Willem Dafoe’s oddly paternal mad scientist to Stone’s astonishing mental maturation through every developmental stage on the way to adulthood. Meanwhile, Lanthimos matches the blossoming social and sexual consciousness of his heroine with a triumphant expansion of the film’s palette, trading the boxy black-and-white of his James Whale homage for a colorful reverie. Dyed-in-the-wool fans of this oddball filmmaker may lament his flirtation with a wider audience, but there’s real continuity of theme between the Frankensteinian sex comedy of Poor Things and the real high-water mark of his oeuvre, a like-minded story of sheltered lab rats clawing at the cage built around them …
Dogtooth (2009)
Somewhere in the suburbs, in a house walled off from the world, three adult children are raised in captivity and perpetuity. They’re the subjects, nay victims, of a rather extreme homeschooling experiment — a social-deprivation tank built by their mad parents, who use lies, an alternate vocabulary, and violent punishment to keep them inside a controlled domestic environment. Dogtooth is the movie that put Yorgos Lanthimos on the world-cinema map, and though the writer-director has widened his scope since, he’s never found a more perfect marriage of clinically precise form and bleakly gripping content. Nor has he quite matched the sick, strange genre alchemy he achieved with his Cannes winner; in the games and rituals of these stunted grown-babies, Lanthimos locates an audacious comedy, the kind that spills from disbelief. Beyond the shocks and shocked laughter, you could say this is a movie about the way all parents inevitably fuck up their kids and shape their reality. Or you could see a deeper metaphor for all manner of social conditioning in its bloody, crooked grin. We’re nothing more than products of our environment, Lanthimos keeps saying. He just said it best with Dogtooth.
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A.A. Dowd , 2024-06-21 22:00:22
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