The films of Yorgos Lanthimos are a big, fascinating, and unique vehicle into a surreal world, one with a heightened artificiality that twists and subverts reality into something truthful. Lanthimos told Issue Magazine, “I’m not interested in just trying to represent reality as it is. I can see that right in front of me.”
The filmmaker was born in Greece, while studying at a film school he started making films with his friends, they had no funds, but had a lot of desire to tell stories. Despite co-direction with Lakis Lazopoulos’ 2001 mainstream comedy My Best Friend, Lanthimos doesn’t list this film on his official website and said that 2005 experimental Kinetta is his first feature film. Well, it makes sense, because Yorgos Lanthimos discovered his voice in Kinetta. This film and few others of Lanthimos become a part of the Greek Weird Wave, a movement with brilliantly strange films by young Greece directors, who provoked discussions about taboo, loneliness, and authoritarian power.
After two more great films in Greek language, Dogtooth and Alps, Yorgos Lanthimos presented his first English language feature film The Lobster. The Lobster was a critical hit and got an Academy Award nomination for Best Original Screenplay. His next two films, The Killing of a Sacred Deer and The Favourite, were received by both critics and audiences in an even more glowing way; for The Favourite Lanthimos received the Academy Award nominations for Best Director and Best Picture. Now, Yorgos Lanthimos is working on Poor Things with Mark Ruffalo and Emma Stone, a re-imagining of the classic Victorian-era England story.
Let’s take a look at every Yorgos Lanthimos film, ranked.
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6 Kinetta
Haos Film
This 2005 psychological drama film is set at the Greek seaside resort of Kinetta, with three strangers (a hotel cleaner, a police officer, and a photographer) who decide to recreate crime scenes together. Their bizarre amateur film and reality become blurred. Yorgos Lanthimos leads us to thinking about filmmaking, isolation, and violence. Kinetta is an imperfect solo debut with a bit rough camera work and sparse dialogues, but this film introduces ideas that would come to define Lanthimos movies.
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5 Alps
Alps is a provocative and surreal story about a group of therapists who impersonate deceased individuals for the questionable benefit of the people who lost their loved ones. In the hands of a Hollywood filmmaker, perhaps, this plot could be sad and touching, but Yorgos Lanthimos made a film which is more of a social experiment, absurd and odd. Alps won the 2011 Venice Film Festival award for Best Script, so someof its emotionlessness became an advantage of the film, inspiring Lanthimos’ style further (along with the careers of other directors, like Riley Stearns and his films The Art of Self-Defence and Dual).
4 Dogtooth
Feelgood Entertainment
The 2009 nightmarish drama Dogtooth centers on controlling and manipulative parents, who keep their children in isolation from the outside world, create a lot of bizarre rules, invented a new vocabulary (in which, for example, “sea” means an “armchair”), and promise that isolation will end with losing a dogtooth. We don’t know why parents create such strange reality for their children, but at lst we know who is creating this isolated surreal world in Dogtooth (unlike other Lanthimos films, where very little is known).
Dogtooth deals with the subject of power and abuse, how influential a child’s environment is, and perfectly shows the drawbacks of extreme protectiveness. Dogtooth went on to receive Academy Award nomination for Best Foreign Language Film, and Yorgos Lanthimos became known worldwide after this movie.
3 The Killing of a Sacred Deer
Film4
Lanthimos’ 2017 psychological horror The Killing of a Sacred Deer is a chilling modern adaptation of the ancient Greek tragedy Iphigenia at Aulis. The film follows the surgeon Steven (one of the best Colin Farrell indie performances) and his perfect family (with Nicole Kidman as a wife), but their life becomes a nightmare after Steven introduces them to a sinister boy who’s connected to the surgeon’s past.
The Killing of a Sacred Deer is set in the real world, arguably a first for Lanthimos, though the emotionless register of the actors is totally bhis style. “Within this world that we’re familiar with, something odd and otherworldly happens. So it was important that it felt like the real world, so that the situation did seem extreme and strange and impossible to deal with”, Yorgos Lanthimos told The Atlantic. The contrast between the usual reality and the events in the film make The Killing of a Sacred Deer one of the most terrifying and brutal movies about revenge and justice. It is visually stunning and thought-provoking, as well as other Yorgos Lanthimos movies.
2 The Favourite
Element Pictures
In 2018, Lanthimos chose an unusual project for himself: a dark comedy film about 18th century Great Britain. The Favourite follows two young women (played by Emma Stone and Rachel Weisz) who want to be court favourite of Queen Anne (for this role, Olivia Colman won the Academy Award for Best Actress). The Favourite is not a period film like other period films. It is weird, entertaining, awe-inspiring, and perfectly performed, subverting traditional historical movies while also queering them with a unique LGBTQ+ narrative. This movie became the biggest commercial success for Yorgos Lanthimos and received 10 Oscar nominations.
1 The Lobster
The Lobster is one of the best English-language debuts from an international director, this film is about dystopian society where being single is illegal. People in the world of The Lobster have 45 days to find love. If they fail, they become animals. Colin Farrell and Rachel Weisz lead the cast. “The Lobster tries to look at how we are as people,” Yorgos Lanthimos said, “what it means to be single, alone, or involved with someone and all of the constraints that society puts on that. We tried to reflect upon these aspects of the human condition while portraying a very original love story.” The Lobster is the type of film that brings joy not only while watching, but while thinking about it afterward as well. It’s truly unique and special.
