Awkwardness and Absurdity in Yorgos Lanthimos Movies

From movies in his mother tongue like Dogtooth and Alps to his more recent work like Poor Things, Yorgos Lanthimos has had an enormous impact on modern cinema. The Greek filmmaker is bringing about a visual and emotional language in his films that uses human awkwardness and situational absurdity to talk about things that are right in front of our noses. His cinematic style is often comically detached or clinically eerie, and his storytelling includes tongue-in-cheek decisions or onscreen surprises that he continues to bring to the table even today. Let’s explore the following Yorgos Lanthimos movies to uncover his cinematic idiosyncrasies.

Scripts from this Article

Moonlight

Lady Bird

Hereditary

Minari

Ex Machina

Green Room

The Farewell

Room

The Witch

Eighth Grade

The Lobster

This bleak futurescape showcases humans in a strange dilemma: They must find love or lose their humanity. By law, the people in the world of The Lobster — Colin Farrell’s character included — must visit a large matchmaking effort in The Hotel and try their luck for less than two months before the ultimatum is fully upon them.

Lanthimos masterfully characterizes the inhuman nature of this arrangement in a number of ways, such as with bizarre behaviors from some of the so-called guests. Even stranger might be the humdrum acceptance of the arrangement by other characters who fall in lockstep with it, lest they risk life as an animal in The Woods.

‘The Lobster’

Yorgos Lanthimos uses this odd predicament to showcase the feeling of loneliness in a story set in a world complex and riddled with tension. It’s only through that tension that the audience can begin to see what kind of meaning loneliness might have beyond its general feeling. The awkward onset of interactions between characters within The Lobster mirrors earlier pursuits in Lanthimos films, wherein expressionless ritual and put-upon boundaries create awkward human moments that elevate the messages he conveys.

The filmic language Lanthimos uses provides, at times, a cold and sterile look and a sense of alienation. This visual style complements the stilted dialogue and abnormal emotional distance of characters, highlighting the unnatural, forced rites they follow. These awkward interactions between characters are not just uncomfortable, but they also reveal the artificiality of the social rituals we engage in ourselves — as well as the emptiness that can come with them.

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The Killing of a Sacred Deer

In this later culmination of his stylistic evolution, Yorgos Lanthimos puts forward a psychological horror with scenic pacing that often unsettles the audience. As his last film to write before Poor Things came along, this is also a story that portrays the insanity of certain mundane behaviors and expectations. Namely, it takes the human tendencies toward guilt, pride, and vengeance to unexpected levels, building a very theatrical rendition of a surgeon’s family in tragedy. The surgeon, Steven (Colin Farrell), encounters increasingly devious interactions with Martin (Barry Keoghan).

The situation becomes truly frightening when Martin makes clear the leverage he has over Steven and his power over that family. That power is represented in a weirdly abstract, supernatural way while Lanthimos presents Steven’s own transgressions as grossly human.

‘The Killing of a Sacred Deer’

This juxtaposition is yet another reason why the film is compared time and again to classic Greek tragedies — making it all the more poignant coming from Lanthimos as a Greek filmmaker. Inevitable demise and the actions we take have always had a place in storytelling like this, but here he also uses his ability to display those unexpected consequences in a world lacking general familial warmth.

The emotional stiffness of Steven’s present life devolves into a dense, chaotic mess when facing the concepts of choice and consequence. Among social distrust and the ability to make mistakes in positions of power, not even death is ruled out as a possible outcome. That’s a lesson this surgeon learns the hard way, and hard lessons aren’t a foreign concept in Yorgos Lanthimos movies.

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The Favourite

Wit is definitely a trademark of Yorgos Lanthimos movies, and The Favourite has it in spades. Set in the past rather than the near future or modern day, this dark comedy focuses on the dysfunctional dynamic of period politics under Queen Anne of 18th-century England (Olivia Colman). Using visual language to supplant the image of unwellness in the mind of the audience, Lanthimos pushes boundaries with the mise-en-scene as much as with his lenses and camera angle choices to draw a distinct exaggeration of Queen Anne as a character.

The court itself is not only visually striking but also has that quintessential mundane absurdity that Yorgos Lanthimos movies are known for. He pits the three main characters against each other to an interesting degree. They play games typical of a high court melodrama in more intimate quarters between themselves, Anne facing a play of wits between her long-standing confidante Sarah (Rachel Weisz) and shiny new Abigail (Emma Stone). Audiences watch the interactions between them in a chess match of sex and fast-talk among other things, getting a clear view of how Lanthimos’s modern sensibility informs the abstracted nature of a period drama.

‘The Favourite’

In other words, from the visuals to the narrative, Lanthimos puts a stamp on the film to show off its mood and a clear opinion of human nature. As in the rest of his works, desires like power, favor, and recognition play a powerful part in the overall trajectory of this movie’s sharp script and a keen eye for actor interplay. With that, the audience gets a sense of humanistic bleakness paired with delight, thanks to the manipulative dynamics explored within the narrative.

Read More: Being Charlie Kaufman: The Self-Consciousness of Absurdist Comedy

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Social rituals are bizarre, and we don’t always know how they came to be. The same is true of our high expectations of each other: From love to ambition to revenge and manipulation, humans have ways of acting that don’t always suit our conscious reasoning. It’s through the stilted dialogue of films like The Lobster or devious showcases of wit like in The Favourite that those traits are demonstrated so easily by Yorgos Lanthimos.

His keen understanding of human nature is accentuated by his ability to use cinematic language and human behaviors within his films to unsettle his audiences, no matter the genre. Be it a drama, a comedy, or a downright horrific tragedy, there’s something to learn from all Yorgos Lanthimos movies.