Yorgos Lanthimos films are weird, but some are weirder than others. A look into the surprising versatility of a cult favourite.
I appear to be in the minority that thought Yorgos Lanthimos’ Kinds Of Kindness was broadly sane. Yes, it’s split into three bits with titles like “RMF Eats A Sandwich”, Emma Stone has a little dance break for no specifically plot-cogent reason, and everyone talks a bit like a GCSE French listening assessment. Oh, and I’m not blind to the three dogs driving a car.
That Kindness feels, to me, surprisingly rational perhaps speaks more to the level of oddity we’ve come to expect from the Greek director. Take any of its three plots and you’ve basically got the makings of a classic thriller: a man struggles against the boss who plans his every move; a woman returns home from a shipwreck, but may not be who she seems; a couple drive across the US to find a person with extraordinary powers.
Compare these to some of Lanthimos’ previous work (a man escapes a hotel resort which wants to turn him into a lobster, or a reanimated corpse learns about independence by furiously jumping around Europe), and these set-ups start to seem a bit vanilla.
Part of the reason behind his semi-mainstream cult status, though, is the auteur’s rare ability to vary some of his stranger sensibilities without sacrificing his distinct style. Because he frequently works with some of the same actors on multiple projects, the variation is even easier to spot.
Take Olivia Colman in The Lobster, for example. In an early scene, her unblinking hotel manager explains the mechanics of her enforced animal-surgery establishment with near-complete emotional detachment. Working with his co-screenwriter, Efthimis Filippou, Lanthimos’ dialogue certainly has a more clipped, clinical edge than the scripts he doesn’t have a hand in himself, but the sense of the uncanny still mainly stems from his actors’ willingness to, well, not really act.
Compare that scene to Colman’s Queen Anne in The Favourite, though, and Lanthimos reveals an entirely different side of himself as a director. Screaming, crying and furiously jumping her way into an Oscar win, Coleman’s performance for the same director could not be more different. It’s hard to think of another filmmaker developing their style to include films at two more opposite extremes.
Take Wes Anderson as possibly his most mainstream contemporary. Both have mined deadpan performance styles and stilted dialogue for common effect. Both abandon cinematic convention to tell stories with emotional impacts almost despite their uncanny methods of presentation.
But where Anderson seems to attack his films with tight focus and precision, Lanthimos’ oddness feels wilder and free flowing. The rehearsal process which featured heavily in the recent Poor Things press tour reportedly didn’t use the film’s script at all – instead whiling the hours away with theatre games and trust exercises between its stars. It makes sense for filmography in which almost anything could happen at any moment. Where an Anderson film unfolds like an eccentric, but beautiful, cuckoo clock, Lanthimos’ work is more like the swirling patterns of a fallen oak tree.
Anderson varies the way he presents his dialogue somewhat, too – there’s a definite distinction between the deflated melancholy of something like The Darjeeling Limited and the pomposity of The Grand Budapest Hotel. But, like his precise filmmaking style, there’s far more consistency and rigidity in Anderson’s work than Lanthimos’.
Read more: Yorgos Lanthimos’ next film, Bugonia, is out in late 2025
What’s maybe most interesting about Lanthimos, though, is this variation doesn’t seem to have emerged in a straight line. Though The Favourite and Poor Things – both from scripts written by Tony McNamara – briefly made it seem like the director’s deadpan roots were lost in the past, Kinds Of Kindness brings back some of his uncanny emotionlessness with aplomb.
Still, the reversal doesn’t quite take Lanthimos back to square one. The performances in Kindness might be a far cry from the operatic intensity of Mark Ruffalo in Poor Things, but they’re not exactly The Lobster either. Instead, his dive into Oscar contention seems to have bled through even into his smaller budget, more experimental work, which makes Lanthimos one of the strangest, and most interesting filmmakers operating at such a high level – he’s a filmmaker that can change.
