I was slow to fall in love with the work of Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos. I can probably attribute that to the headspace I was in when I first encountered his movies (The Lobster was the first one I saw) and his decision to have so many characters speak in the same deadpan, staccato style. Revisiting his movies again and again over the last two years or so have revealed him to be not just someone whose work I enjoy and admire, but who has quite literally become one of my absolute favorite working filmmakers. Here are his essential works.
Dogtooth (2009)
Alps (2011)
The director's sophomore effort centers on a group of people who come together to act as grief proxies -- substitutes for individuals who have died in order to provide comfort for those in mourning. While death and loss are very much at the center of Yorgos's thematic obsessions, none of his films deal with them quite as directly as Alps, a hopelessly sad and sometimes strange film (though still absurd, because Yorgos) about broken individuals with what seems like no road to happiness. Despite the fact that it's working with such big emotions, this might be the Lanthimos movie told in the most minor key -- the visual style remains reminiscent of Dogtooth (long takes played out as master shots) and the material is so deadpan and underplayed by the ensemble that this can feel like inessential Yorgos even though it very much is essential. It's also noteworthy because Lanthimos collaborated with his future wife, French actress and filmmaker Ariane Labed, for the first time on this movie. She plays the gymnast; she would reunite with the director to play the maid in The Lobster.
The Lobster (2015)
Speaking of The Lobster! +Yoros' American debut helped put him on the map in Hollywood (winning the Jury Prize at Cannes doesn't hurt either) despite being one of the least commercial movies to feature movie stars and receive a wide release in the last decade. It's a bleak, pitch-black slice of absurdity -- in other words, a Yorgos Lanthimos movie -- about a group of people who visit a special hotel in the hopes of pairing up with a romantic partner or else risk being turned into an animal forever. I was mixed on this the first time I saw it; I liked the stuff at the hotel, but thought the movie lost focus once characters went out into the woods to form a resistance. I was wrong. The Lobster is basically a masterpiece from start to finish, a film that has so much to say about relationships and what we are willing to put in and/or get out of them. It may not come as a shock to learn that Lanthimos does not have a lot of hope for love.
The Killing of a Sacred Deer (2017)
This one is only for the advanced students and is, for me, the movie that unlocked Yorgo Lanthimos. Despite being positioned as a kind of psychological horror film in the marketing (and even some of the critical response), The Killing of a Sacred Deer might be the darkest comedy ever made. Colin Farrell plays a surgeon who is deeply tied to a teenage boy (a spaghetti-eating Barry Keoghan) for mysterious and unspecified reasons that begin to reveal themselves over the course of the film as the rest of his family (including his wife, played by Nicole Kidman, a true weirdo icon) falls prey to unexplained illness. While his movies have always been told from a far-off emotional distance, Lanthimos is perhaps most influenced by Kubrick this time around: it's present in the score, in the way the camera moves, and in the overall coldness. Sacred Deer is tense and nightmarish and brutally bleak but also very funny. In the words of Marc Maron, it has to be.
The Favourite (2018)
The 18th century tale of two women (Emma Stone and Rachel Weisz) competing to the be court favorite of Queen Anne (Oliva Colman) by any means necessary, The Favourite arguably could be called Lanthimos' most "important" film since the release of Dogtooth a decade prior. First, it earned him major awards consideration, tying for most Academy Award nominations of its year (including Best Picture and Best Director), winning the Golden Globe for Musical or Comedy, and earning star Olivia Colman an Oscar for Best Actress. It was the director's first huge box office hit, grossing $100 million worldwide on a budget of just $15 million. It marks his first time working with cinematographer Robbie Ryan, who would shoot the director's next four films and is in part responsible for the off-kilter, fisheye approach that would mark this period in Lanthimos's filmography. Most importantly, though, is that The Favourite was the first time Lanthimos teamed with star Emma Stone, who would go on to be his most frequent collaborator and reveal herself to be a true weirdo thanks to their work together.
Poor Things (2023)
An adaptation of the 1992 novel of the same name by Scottish author Alisdair Gray, Poor Things is the most commercial movie Yorgos has ever made, which is an insane thing to say about a movie in which Willem Dafoe plays a mad scientist who pulls a Frankenstein and brings a woman (Emma Stone in the second of her four collaborations with Lanthimos, the role that won her a second Best Actress Oscar) back to life only for her to develop an insatiable sexual appetite and desire for independence. Nothing about Poor Things reads on paper as commercial. As realized, however, the film makes Yorgos' eccentricities more easily digestible by virtue of the stylization: part science-fiction fantasy, part comedy of manners, all told in an outrageously heightened steampunk-meets-fairy tale approach that plays like a hornier Terry Gilliam film. While still satirical in tone and willing to look side-eyed at humankind, Poor Things is the most upbeat and hopeful of all the director's films, eschewing his usual oppressive bleakness because its central character will have none of that. This was Yorgos' Blank Check being cashed following the box office success of The Favourite; the film would win four Academy Awards (off a whopping 11 nominations), two Golden Globes, and would outperform its predecessor by $20 million.
Kinds of Kindness (2024)
It's understandable that audiences would reject this one, especially coming off of the mainstream success of Poor Things, but it feels like Lanthimos is trying to get back to his Dogtooth/Alps approach to filmmaking -- Kinds of Kindness is a direct reaction to the movie before it. The director's most challenging and obtuse movie since Dogtooth reteams him with Emma Stone for an anthology of sorts: three mostly unrelated short stories (held together by the ensemble, who appear as different characters in each of the three segments) about alienation and the power of suggestion -- that is, people's willingness to give themselves over to just about anything in search of an identity. Kinds of Kindness is another "advanced studies" effort, marking the fifth collaboration between Lanthimos and co-writer Efthimis Filippou. The middle story, "RMF is Flying," more or less predicts Yorgos' next feature Bugonia by casting Jesse Plemons as a paranoid man who is convinced that Emma Stone is not who she says she is.
Bugonia (2025)
The latest from Lanthimos (as of this writing), written by The Menu's Will Tracy, is his first remake (of South Korea's Save the Green Planet!) and tells the story of two loners (Plemons again and newcomer Aidan Delbis) who kidnap the powerful CEO of an enormous pharmaceutical company in order to prove that she is an alien sent to destroy humankind. The director's third film in three years is the movie of 2025: the intersection of terminally online conspiracy theorist nutjobs and politically correct corporate speak, paranoia and placation. Emma Stone, playing the CEO, gives yet another tour de force performance for Yorgos as a character that is difficult to pin down by virtue of the story being told. Though it features much of Lanthimos's trademark absurdity and can be funny at times, Bugonia is a bleak-ass howl of despair from a filmmaker who has been warning us about our worst instincts for years. We didn't listen. Now the bubble has popped.
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