A Different Yorgos Lanthimos Film Dominates Netflix While Poor Things Racks Up Awards
Yorgos Lanthimos is an acquired taste. A key figure in the "Greek Weird Wave," he shares Wes Anderson's fondness for deadpan acting, artificial dialogue, and general oddities. However, the worlds and people in Lanthimos' films aren't just quirky, they're often aggressively unpleasant. More than that, they tend to be governed by twisted and bizarre "rules" and social norms. For example, in "The Lobster," all adults are required to have a romantic partner or find one within a short amount of time. Those who fail to do so are turned into an animal of their choice. Likewise, in "The Killing of a Sacred Deer," a surgeon is tormented by a teenager with unnatural abilities (played, fittingly enough, by everyone's favorite horny chaos child, Barry Keoghan) in retaliation for failing to save the boy's father on the operating table.
It's easy to intellectually appreciate the point Lanthimos is making with his work — that the "rules" we follow in our own lives might seem equally strange and warped to someone from the outside who hasn't been raised to see them as normal. In that sense, his films have more in common with the surreal social satire of Gary Larson's "The Far Side" comic panels than the output of any well-known contemporary filmmaker. But unlike "The Far Side," it can take a while for Lanthimos' movies to really click with you, assuming they ever do.
Personally, it wasn't until "The Favourite" — the film Lanthimos made right before his current Oscar contender "Poor Things" — that I came to earnestly love his movies. Now, it seems Netflix subscribers are rediscovering Lanthimos' delightfully dark comedy for themselves. In fact, according to viewership aggregator FlixPatrol, the film has consistently cracked Netflix's top 10 around the world for the past week (save for in the U.S.).
Netflix has a new Favourite
Before she was stuffing herself sick with pastries and "furious jumping" with Mark Ruffalo as Bella Baxter in "Poor Things," Emma Stone teamed up with Lanthimos and "Poor Things" writer Tony McNamara for "The Favourite." The 2018 period piece centers on Abigail Masham (Stone), a financially destitute young woman who's determined to become Queen Anne's (Olivia Colman) court favorite, pitting her against her cousin Sarah Churchill, Duchess of Marlborough (Rachel Weisz), the ailing Anne's right-hand woman and private lover.
As with any other Lanthimos film, the setting of "The Favourite" abides by its own set of rules. There's no such thing as foul play in Queen Anne's court when it comes to those who outrank you, as we see when Robert Harley, 1st Earl of Oxford and Earl Mortimer (Nicholas Hoult, wonderfully nasty), casually pushes Abigail down a hill in the dead of night, or when Sarah off-the-cuff fires a pistol at Abigail in the middle of a "friendly" afternoon at a shooting range. Unfortunately for Sarah, Abigail proves to be a far more cunning and ruthless opponent than she anticipated. By the same token, "The Favourite" allowed Stone to subvert her adorkable gal-next-door image and kicked off her current trend of playing complicated and frequently off-putting weirdos (something we're all the better off for).
As much as I adore "Poor Things" and its off-kilter Frankensteinian tale of liberation (an idea in keeping with the rest of Lanthimos' oeuvre), I think "The Favourite" might still be my, uh, favorite of his films. It's just three people — including Colman in a well-earned Oscar-winning turn — getting down in the dirt (and, when the occasion merits, getting down and dirty) as they vie to subjugate one another. With its razor-sharp wit and observations about relationships and power dynamics, it's as purely Lanthimos as his movies get.