Yorgos Lanthimos — a part of the “weird wave” of Greek cinema.
Yorgos Lanthimos is a Greek director and screenwriter. He first turned the heads of art-film fans with 2009’s Dogtooth and has received increasing mainstream attention as his career has progressed. He began to build a critical and fan following with follow-ups The Lobster and The Killing of a Sacred Deer, culminating with his 2018 film The Favourite which reached a wide audience and garnered positive reviews as well as two Oscars nominations, for Best Picture and Best Director. He has worked with a wide range of high-profile actors such as Colin Farrell, Emma Stone, Olivia Colman, Nicole Kidman, Rachel Weisz, Leá Seydoux and John C. Reilly.
Thematically Lanthimos is concerned with the dark undercurrents of everyday life. His films are usually centred around families and romantic partnerships, but ones that act as dark mirrors to what we understand as normal. His movies have featured parents who keep their adult children cut off from the outside world, actors who pretend to be your deceased relatives, a future where being single is outlawed and punishable by being transformed into an animal, and a family who must choose to kill one of their own to survive. The tone of his work is often dour, but darkly humorous, and shows a keen interest in physicality, from the potentially awkward and strange nature of sex to the odd ways in which our bodies grow, break down, and react to the world around us.
The director is cagey about the meaning behind his films, but it’s clear that he intends to provoke visceral reactions and inspire self-examination, saying of Dogtooth: “It didn’t […] start as a story about family dysfunction […] I was wondering about family life and parenting in general and if the way we think about it would ever really change. […] I had a conversation with some friends one day, and I was making fun about the fact that two of them were getting married and having children, because today many people get divorced and kids are being raised by single parents, so I said there was no point in getting married. […] I was obviously just joking, [but] all of a sudden they got extremely defensive about what I had said. This made me realise how someone I knew and who I would never have expected to react that way freaks out when you mess about with his family.” And saying of the uncomfortable and jarring situations he conjures: “Provocative… I used to be defensive about it, but in the end I realised it’s exactly right. It’s what we’re trying to do, to provoke thought and discussion […] I’m interested in messing with what they think is the norm.” and “I […] enjoy awkwardness. I think it’s an important feeling for people that maybe generates some kind of thirst to wonder about things. As an audience member myself, I love to be in a position where I’m trying to figure out what I am supposed to feel, or if what I’m feeling is appropriate or not.”
Lanthimos often engenders this feeling in his audience, of wondering at appropriateness and norms, through his offbeat style. His films feature stilted and often laboured dialogue. Characters blurt out inappropriate things in a deadpan manner, casually ask each other uncomfortable questions, and talk about the macabre and the distasteful with cold detachment, in a consistently anti-naturalistic acting style. His visual style furthers this sense of coldness, of wrongness, communicating and constructing this atmosphere via the cool, dark tones of the images; the drab interiors, and open empty spaces that radiate loneliness; and close-ups of blank, resigned faces. These cold spaces and dialogues are given life and contrast by his peppering in of humour and violence. A character in The Lobster inflicts violent nosebleeds on himself; The Killing of a Sacred Deer opens on a long shot of an exposed, beating, human heart. The humour in his films is derived from their absurdism, which itself stems from the contrasts mentioned above, between the deadpan reactions of the characters and the shocking spectacle of their predicaments. The protagonist of The Lobster, after having been sent to a special facility to try and find a romantic partner, is told: “If you encounter any problems you cannot resolve yourselves, you will be assigned children, that usually helps.”
Lanthimos’s style is often contextualized as being part of the “weird wave” of Greek cinema, as a slew of auteurs has emerged from the country over the past decade in the wake of political unrest and financial instability in the region. Dogtooth and Lanthimos’s earlier features were in Greek, but starting with The Lobster he has directed solely in English to secure wider audiences and funding. While he doesn’t see himself and his Greek contemporaries as being necessarily related, or reacting to their country’s circumstances, he does give his background some credit for his style and his tendency to go beyond what others consider normal: “[contemporary Greek filmmakers] were able to access a lot of art cinema, more than previous generations. But obviously, there is a cultural thing: it’s maybe Mediterranean, but there is a culture that is more open to certain things, with fewer restrictions and taboos, which maybe Anglo-Saxons and other cultures aren’t.”
Lanthimos operates fluidly when it comes to genre and seems to absorb influences from all quarters. He has made chamber dramas, dystopian romances, stylized period pieces, and adapted Greek tragedy for the modern day. As far as direct film influences, Lanthimos has spoken before about filmmakers who have inspired him, including John Hughes, Andrei Tarkovsky and John Cassavetes. Their inspiration can be seen in his depictions of young people and their sexual politics, his dark, forbidding settings, and his focus on family life and commitment to stylized acting. Darkness and surrealism are also ever-present in his reading habits, his favourite authors including Kafka, Beckett, Camus and Dostoevsky.
His theatre background is also important for understanding his work. His adaptation of Iphigenia at Aulis by Euripides and the anachronistic dialogue and dance featured in The Favourite could be traced, influentially, to the late British playwright Sarah Kane and her play Phaedra’s Love which updates classical myth with modern language and forthrightness. His theatre background has also influenced his approach to rehearsal. He has spoken before about how films, as opposed to theatre, suffer for lack of rehearsal time. During the rehearsals for The Favourite Lanthimos gave his cast experimental commands in terms of delivery and physical acting. He would have actors deliver lines as if they were giving birth, or work through scenes while the cast stood with their arms tangled around each other. Lanthimos’s goal with this process was to break down the actor’s preconceptions of the meaning of the words in the dialogue, and the logic of the scenes. Emma Stone said of the process “By the end, we all knew the script by heart because we had said the words over and over without really any intention behind them.”
Family, romance, modern life, all are rife with absurdity, and darkness. Often concealed, pushed to the back of your mind, the corner of your eye. The films of Yorgos Lanthimos are a worthy interrogation of that darkness, of those absurdities. They put these elements front and centre, the subtext and subtlety of the everyday dragged to the forefront and delivered with a stunning bluntness. So, if you’re intrigued by any of these details, or even put off by them, I would encourage you to delve into Yorgos Lanthimos’s filmography. Sit through the skin-crawling awkwardness, the familial creepiness, the absurd situations, and hopefully you will come out the other side with a set of fresh perspectives on love, human connection, the body — or, at the very least, an appreciation for the fact that maybe your family and friends might be weird, but not that weird.
