Friday One Sheet: POOR THINGS

Welcome to the wonderful world of Vasilis Marmatakis, the Greek graphic designer and illustrator behind one of my favourite posters of the past decade, an earlier Yorgos Lanthimos film, The Killing of A Sacred Deer, with its immense verticality, and static clinical limbo.

Marmakatis has been the mastermind of the key art for Lanthimos' films all the way back to his international breakout film, Dogtooth in 2009, along with other members of the Greek Weird Wave. Marmatakis' work is provocative, strange, and often strides a curious middle-ground between minimal and maximal design.

Across several key art releases for Lanthimos' latest film, Poor Things (all featuring avant garde depictions of Emma Stone's character), the newest, below, is done in collaboration with Empire Design, and is my personal favourite. This column has been keeping its powder dry, seemingly, for the third time being the charm.

Keeping all the textual elements at the top of the design, the title taking up the left half, with its skinny handwritten typography, and the festival laurels and credit block in line on the right half, this leaves the lion's share of space for the surreal image in the centre. The edges are matted in a creamy ivory with the distressed brush strokes of an unfinished oil-painting. Stone's arms are out of the frame, or do they exist at all? The 'incomplete' seems to be core to the idea of the source novel which has been described as an odd combination of Pygmalion and The Island of Dr. Moreau.

From Marmatakis himself on his design: "The idea is that all her insides are spilling out, as a metaphor of her emotions (and all the medical procedures depicted in the film). The five male figures are trying to balance on this emotional terrain."

Perhaps the most unsettling aspect goes beyond the cravat-esque tunnel to Emma Stone's innards, rather her dead-eyed stare directly at the observer. I feel this captures a lot of the passive confrontation of Lanthimos' cinema with sublime brevity.