Yorgos Lanthimos delights in discomfort.
Lanthimos built a career on ritualized absurdity and moral distortion, spinning stories where love, control, and social order are pushed to the brink of the surreal. From Dogtooth's domestic isolation to Poor Things's sexually-charged, Frankensteinian fantasy, his movies dissect the rules that govern human behavior with deadpan precision and feral wit. It may not be a necessarily enjoyable ride, but, for me, it's always worth enduring the turbulence.
Last week ended with the theatrical release of Bugonia, the newest entry in Lanthimos' filmography and his fourth consecutive collaboration with the inimitable Emma Stone. A reimagining of Jang Joon-hwan's Save the Green Planet! (2003), the film follows two eco-conspiracists, Teddy (Jesse Plemons) and Don (Aidan Delbis), who become convinced that a high-powered CEO (Stone) is an alien from the Andromeda galaxy sent to destroy Earth.
Lanthimos, born in Athens in 1973, once claimed he wasn't a film buff as a child. After his mother died when he was 17, he enrolled in the Hellenic Cinema and Television School Stavrakos, where the films of Andrey Tarkovsky, John Cassavetes, and Robert Bresson started to influence him (likely candidates). He kicked off his career directing television commercials and music videos, and eventually, co-directed the strange sex comedy My Best Friend with Laki Lazopoulos in 2001. You wouldn't recognize it as a Lanthimos film if you went in blind.
But Lanthimos' next film, Kinetta (2005), which he directed alone, sees him settle into the oddness that defines his filmography. When he released his breakthrough film Dogtooth (2009), the winner of the Un Certain Regard prize at Cannes, he gave credence to the so-called "Greek Weird Wave." This movement, coined by critics, refers to a generation of directors -- Lanthimos, Athina Rachel Tsangari, and Babis Makridis, to name a few -- who rejected realism in favor of unsettling, sometimes dreamlike (nightmarish) worlds.
In 2015, The Lobster, a bizarre dystopian romance in which single people are transformed into animals if they fail to find a partner, became the director's first English-language film. From here, he jumped from one disquieting story to the next, including moral, clinical drama Killing of the Sacred Deer (2017) and the cynical triptych Kinds of Kindness (2024). One might not understand every narrative turn of these movies, but, for Lanthimos, the lack of clarity is the point, instilling curiosity in his audience.
"Me, personally, what I want is to allow people to be engaged actively in watching the film," he told The Independent in 2017. "I like to construct films in a way that makes you feel a bit uncomfortable, [but so you'll still] be able to enjoy them, be intrigued [and] start to think about the meaning of things -- and hopefully by the end of it, you'll have some strong desire to keep thinking about them."
For this edition of Playback, I'm rolling back the tape on Lanthimos' unnerving and very, very weird filmography.
Kinetta (2005)
Lanthimos' first solo feature film, Kinetta (2005), turns an empty seaside resort into a stage for obsession, as three strangers compulsively restage murders to fill the silence of their lives.
The three unnamed protagonists are a photographer (Aris Servetalis), a maid (Evangelia Randou), and a cop (Costas Xikominos). The film is elliptical and nearly wordless. Dialogue is replaced by routine; meaning is buried in the strange gestures of each character. This minimalist approach hints at the alien detachment and ritualized behavior that would become hallmarks of Lanthimos' later style.
This is by far the worst-received film by Lanthimos -- 17% on Rotten Tomatoes! Still, it's undoubtedly an essential entry, as it lays the foundation for his style. In retrospect, the frayed narrative stirred and confused audiences, but today, we've come to expect this from the offbeat director.
Dogtooth (2009)
In Dogtooth (2009), a father and mother (Christos Stergioglou and Michelle Valley) build a world of lies, raising their children in total isolation where ignorance is enforced. On a confined compound in suburban Greece, the parents feed their one son (Christos Passalis) and two daughters (Angeliki Papoulia and Mary Tsoni) lies about the outside world, teaching them irregular rules. The most restrictive gives the film its name: they can only leave once they lose a "dogtooth."
In a tone-setting opening scene, the parents teach their children the wrong definitions of words like "sea" or "excursion." From there, Lanthimos creates a razor-sharp indictment of the family unit. Its absurd premise -- parents controlling everything their children know and understand -- inflates the way all parents shape perception itself, molding how we see the world long before we have any say in it. Unexpected disruptions -- including an outsider, Cristina (Anna Kalaitzidou), brought in to seduce the son -- unravel the family's brittle equilibrium.
Dogtooth cemented Lanthimos's style -- and the existence of the Greek Weird Wave. This icy thriller typifies the director's style, an uncanny world framed by deadpan absurdity and themes of alienation. Its cynicism is encrusted by a humorous and toxic sheen, glimmering just enough to make the horror go down smooth.
The Lobster (2015)
The Lobster (2015) imagines a world where loneliness is punishable and love is a bureaucratic act of survival. Lanthimos' first English film, winner of the Jury Prize at Cannes, etched the director into the annals of Hollywood.
In a dystopian near-future society, recently single people are sent to a hotel with 45 days to find a romantic partner; if they fail, they'll be transformed into an animal of their choosing. David (Colin Farrell), an awkward and unconfident man, checks into this hotel with his brother (who is already a dog), and navigates the surreal rules of coupling. There, he befriends two men: Robert (John C. Reilly) and John (Ben Whishaw); and attempts to find love before he turns into his animal of choice: a lobster.
Even when David escapes and stumbles upon the singles, a ragtag group of runaways in the woods, he finds himself subject to strange rules, particularly that romance is forbidden. This exaggerated world drops us into the contradictory, often hostile landscape of modern dating. Its allegorical precision, buoyed by surreal, deadpan humor, makes it one of Lanthimos' best. Not to mention, Farrell's anti-type-casting is an inspired choice.
The Favourite (2018)
Courtly power games turn viciously erotic in The Favourite (2018), where affection is just another form of warfare. Lanthimos' first collaboration with Emma Stone is perhaps his most accessible, likely because Tony McNamara and Deborah Davis wrote it. Still, this royal dark comedy is a barbed, backstabbing affair.
The Favourite takes place in 18th-century England, during the reign of Queen Anne (Olivia Colman). Her confidante, Sarah Churchill (Rachel Weisz), effectively governs the country. Abigail Hill (Stone), Sarah's impoverished cousin, turns up at the Queen's estate looking for a job. The two cousins vie for the respect -- and romantic attention -- of the Queen, each wanting to become the "favourite" in the eyes of her royal highness. What transpires is a battle of egos. This contest twists and turns, neatly fitting into Lanthimos' films of desperation, and downright cynicism about the human condition.
What makes The Favourite among Lanthimos' best films is the performances by the three leads. Stone and Weisz deliver some of their finest work, while Colman's colossal performance earned her the well-deserved Academy Award for Best Actress.
Poor Things (2023)
Reborn with a child's mind in Poor Things (2023), Bella Baxter (Stone) discovers pleasure and freedom on her own terms.
In late-Victorian London, rendered in Lanthimos' lush imagination, the mad scientist Dr. Godwin Baxter (Willem Dafoe) resurrects a dead woman by implanting her unborn child's brain into her body. The doctor raises Bella as his daughter, but as her curiosity boils over, she demands to wander -- or more directly, pursue her desires, driven by sexual impulse and, eventually, intellectual cravings. This curiosity leads her through a doomed romance in Portugal, an awakening to human cruelty in Alexandria, and, ultimately, to an understanding of what it truly means to be alive ... anywhere.
The lust-drunk Poor Things works, in large parts, thanks to its remarkable cast. Mark Ruffalo channels the folly of masculinity into a comic masterclass as Duncan Wedderburn, while Dafoe complicates his cold surgeon with a touching paternal intimacy. It's no wonder Stone won the Academy Award for Best Actress for her fearless, full-bodied reimagining of the Frankenstein myth. The narrative is feverish, yet its momentum propels you through this uncanny world tied to Bella. This tale of liberation is strangely optimistic; still, it doesn't lack the director's macabre sensibilities.
Bugonia (2025)
Two conspiracists kidnap a powerful CEO, certain she's an alien sent to trigger the planet's destruction. In Bugonia (2025), their delusion spirals into a dark, hilarious mirror of paranoia and the human urge to believe in something -- anything -- terrible.
The two conspirators are Teddy and Don (Plemons and Delbis), living alone in rural America. Bugonia introduces the two cousins as they prepare to kidnap Michelle Fuller (Stone), the CEO of a pharmaceutical company, where Teddy works. Teddy is convinced Michelle hails from the Andromeda Galaxy, as part of a destructive plot to destroy humankind and the Earth. This is how Teddy makes sense of the destructive force of the pharmaceutical industry, and, well, the destructive nature of late-stage capitalism at large.
After the cousins successfully abduct Michelle, they chain her to a bed in the basement and insist she arrange a meeting with the Andromedan emperor. When Michelle unsurprisingly denies their delusions, Teddy's frustration begins to boil over. It's enough to say that things escalate in Lanthimos' fashion, where desperation drives each character to a point of no return, whether it's an uproar of violence or spiraling psychological turmoil.
After acting together in Kinds of Kindness (2024), Plemons and Stone reunite to deliver, arguably, their best performances to date. Plemons delivers a nail-biting performance as Teddy, whose paranoia, despite being so far-flung, somehow feels tangible. His conspiratorial ideations emerge from a place of sincere disillusionment with a system that feels rigged against itself. How can humankind cause itself so much destruction? It's only logical to look outward. On the other hand, Stone carefully adopts Michelle's corporate composure, cracking slightly at the seams as she verbally jousts with Teddy.
Bugonia doesn't follow the same deadpan delivery as many of Lanthimos' films. In fact, Bugonia strays from the Greek director's dreamlike narratives (for the most part, that is). Instead, this new film is a damning, clear-eyed critique of both conspiratorial fanaticism and the devastating powers that be. Reviving Jang Joon-hwan's 2003 Save the Green Planet! with such present-day relevance stirs the very discomfort we'd rather ignore. Here, Lanthimos leverages his uncanny, exaggerated lexicon to condemn humanity's death spiral. What scares me the most is that by the end, the question of whether or not the corporate CEO is an alien or not is irrelevant -- we're damned just the same.