Renodus

Yorgos Lanthimos

9 min read

Yorgos Lanthimos (b. 1973)

Lanthimos is the central figure of what critics call the Greek Weird Wave — the cluster of Greek filmmakers who emerged during the 2008–2015 financial crisis with movies about small closed systems running ruthless internal logic. His method is a specific one, and once you see it you can’t unsee it: take one social rule — the family, the couple, medical ethics, monarchy, obedience — and absolutize it. Follow the rule past its normal limits. Build a world in which the rule is enforced without exception. Film it deadpan, in wide-angle symmetry, with actors who deliver their lines as if they’re reading from a poorly translated manual. The result is a sensation of systematic horror delivered with comic timing, and it’s unlike anyone else working.

The Biography

Lanthimos was born in Athens in 1973, trained at the Stavrakos Hellenic Cinema and Television School, and started his career directing commercials and music videos. He co-directed the opening and closing ceremonies of the 2004 Athens Olympics. His breakthrough as a feature director came during the Greek financial crisis, when austerity-era budgets pushed him and a small group of collaborators — Efthymis Filippou on scripts, Thimios Bakatakis on cinematography — toward a style of pure formal constraint. Kinetta (2005), Dogtooth / Κυνόδοντας (2009), and Alps (2011) are the Greek-language trilogy that established his language.

Since 2015 he has worked primarily in English-language cinema, but the method hasn’t changed. The Lobster (2015), The Killing of a Sacred Deer (2017), The Favourite (2018, ten Oscar nominations), Poor Things (2023, eleven nominations, four wins), and Kinds of Kindness (2024) are Lanthimos in international-cast scale doing exactly what he was doing with Greek unknowns a decade earlier.

The Method — Absurdism as System Design

Lanthimos’s core move is to treat social reality as a programming problem. Every film picks one rule and runs it to completion. In Dogtooth, parents keep their adult children confined to a walled estate and teach them a corrupted vocabulary — sea means chair, motorway means wind. In The Lobster, single adults get forty-five days to find a partner or are surgically converted into an animal of their choosing. In The Killing of a Sacred Deer, a surgeon whose patient died on the table must choose which member of his own family to sacrifice. In The Favourite, Queen Anne’s court is a closed ecosystem in which two women compete for proximity to the throne and a sick rabbit is the weather vane. In Poor Things, Bella Baxter’s moral education is run by a mad scientist who transplanted her infant’s brain into her adult body. In Kinds of Kindness, a boss (played by Willem Dafoe) demands total obedience from an employee (played by Jesse Plemons) in a workplace ritual extended past its bureaucratic limits.

This is Kafka’s territory, not Dalí’s. Lanthimos’s worlds are not surrealist in the dream sense; they are hyper-rationalist in the bureaucratic sense. Every rule is stated. Every consequence follows from the rule. The horror is in the consistency. When Colin Farrell’s David chooses “lobster” for his animal, the hotel manager treats his reasoning — lobsters live 100 years, remain sexually active throughout, have blue blood — as if it were a legitimate form submission. Which it is, inside the rule.

The comparison that matters is to Swift’s A Modest Proposal (1729). Swift’s trick is to adopt the tone of the reasonable policy paper and use it to advocate eating the children of the Irish poor. The reader laughs because the logic is impeccable; the horror lands because the logic is impeccable. Lanthimos is Swiftian in exactly this way. The difference is that Swift wrote a pamphlet; Lanthimos builds fully functioning societies.

The Themes

Institutions as constructed realities. Family (Dogtooth), coupledom (The Lobster), medical ethics (Sacred Deer), the court (The Favourite), employment (Kinds of Kindness) — all are shown as arbitrary rule-sets that pretend to be natural. The characters’ tragedy is that they’ve forgotten the rules are arbitrary.

Language as power. Lanthimos’s dialogue is famously flat. Characters speak as if they’re reading a phrasebook. The affect is not “poor acting” — it’s a deliberate gesture, inherited from Brecht and Robert Bresson, that refuses the naturalistic contract between audience and screen. If you watch The Favourite with the sound off, the performances look conventional; turn the sound on and the cadence shifts everything. Language in Lanthimos is Foucault’s discourse — a grid that positions speakers before they speak.

The female body as contested terrain. Poor Things, The Favourite, Sacred Deer, The Lobster, and Kinds of Kindness all pivot on scenes of control and escape centered on women’s bodies. Lanthimos isn’t feminist in a programmatic sense; he’s showing the operating system, not writing a critique of it. The operating system happens to place women’s bodies at the center of most of its disputes.

Cruelty as procedure, not affect. Lanthimos’s characters are almost never actively sadistic. They are carrying out what the rules say. The hotel manager in The Lobster doesn’t enjoy running the conversion lab; she’s doing her job. This is exactly Hannah Arendt’s account of administrative evil — banality is not lack of imagination, it’s the refusal to think beyond the rule.

The Look

Lanthimos’s images are recognizable within five seconds. Symmetrical frames, often with the subject centered as in a Wes Anderson composition, but without the warmth. Wide-angle and fisheye lenses (used heavily in The Favourite and Poor Things), which distort the world at the optical level — the room is too wide, the face is too close, the corners curve. Natural light or harsh practicals. Long lenses for tension, wide for absurdity. Static compositions with long takes that refuse to cut on reaction shots the way conventional scene grammar demands.

Sound design is a second layer of the joke: dissonant orchestral motifs (Schnittke, Shostakovich fragments, Jerskin Fendrix for Poor Things) at moments when the action is banal, creating the feeling that the ordinary itself is a source of dread. It’s the reverse of Spielberg — where Spielberg builds emotion through rising strings, Lanthimos builds unease by deploying Romantic-era emotion at scenes where no emotion is structurally appropriate.

The Major Films

Dogtooth (2009)

Parents raise adult children on a walled estate and teach them a distorted version of Greek, a distorted version of sex, and a distorted version of what exists outside. The allegory is patriarchal authoritarianism in its family-sized container. Winner of Un Certain Regard at Cannes 2009; Oscar-nominated for Foreign Language Film 2011. The film that announced Lanthimos.

The Lobster (2015)

A near-future dystopia in which single adults have forty-five days to partner up or be surgically converted into an animal. Rebels (“Loners”) live in the forest and punish romance. Colin Farrell’s David navigates both systems and finds that both are carceral. Cannes Jury Prize 2015. Lanthimos’s first English-language feature and still one of the most original dystopias of the century.

The Killing of a Sacred Deer (2017)

A cardiac surgeon whose patient died on the table is pursued by the dead man’s son, who demands a symmetrical sacrifice from the surgeon’s own family. The film borrows the structure of Euripides’s Iphigenia in Aulis and delivers it in a medical-horror register. The soundtrack — Schnittke, Bach, Ligeti — sits on top of the action like a stone.

The Favourite (2018)

A period film about the court of Queen Anne in which Emma Stone and Rachel Weisz compete for the Queen’s favor while Olivia Colman’s Anne declines physically and psychologically. Ten Oscar nominations. Colman won Best Actress. The film’s political vision is straight Foucault: power is not sovereign, it’s relational, and the throne is the least important place in the room.

Poor Things (2023)

Bella Baxter, a woman who has had the brain of her unborn child transplanted into her adult body, grows up in fast-forward in a world of Victorian steampunk absurdism. The film is Frankenstein and Pygmalion re-read through feminist philosophy. Eleven Oscar nominations, four wins. Emma Stone’s second Oscar.

Kinds of Kindness (2024)

Three loosely linked stories about obedience and self-erasure, with the same cast (Emma Stone, Jesse Plemons, Willem Dafoe) playing different characters in each. A return to the Filippou-scripted Greek-weird register of Dogtooth and The Lobster, now with international stars and an A24 budget.

Philosophical Connections

  • Camus — the absurd as the dilemma between a mind that demands meaning and a world that refuses to provide it. Lanthimos converts the absurd from a metaphysical situation to a social one: the absurd is now between the mind and the rule-set.
  • Kafka — bureaucratic absurdity, the deadpan tone, the procedural machinery. The Trial is the spiritual parent of every Lanthimos scene.
  • Foucault — the anatomy of power, institutional discipline, the body trained by discourse. The Favourite is essentially Discipline and Punish with a rabbit.
  • Luis Buñuel — surrealism as bourgeois critique, The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972) as the twentieth-century precedent for what Lanthimos is doing in the twenty-first.
  • Swift — satiric absurdism, A Modest Proposal, logically extrapolated social horror.
  • Ancient Greek tragedy — particularly Euripides; The Killing of a Sacred Deer is Iphigenia in Aulis with a cardiac surgeon.

Lineage

Predecessors:

  • Ancient Greek tragedy, especially Euripides
  • Jonathan Swift, A Modest Proposal (1729)
  • Franz Kafka, The Trial, The Penal Colony (1914)
  • Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot, Molloy
  • Luis Buñuel, The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972)
  • Michael Haneke, Funny Games (1997), The White Ribbon (2009)

Successors / Contemporaries:

  • Ari Aster — Hereditary (2018), Midsommar (2019): the Lanthimos method applied to horror
  • Julia Ducournau — Titane (2021), Raw (2016): bodily transformation as philosophical gesture
  • Jonathan Glazer — Under the Skin (2013), The Zone of Interest (2023): deadpan horror of administrative evil
  • Greek Weird Wave contemporaries: Athina Rachel Tsangari, Alexandros Avranas

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