A World on Film: Yorgos Lanthimos

   I admit it: I screamed, startling everyone else in the theater, when Emma Stone’s cult-fanatic character in Yorgos Lanthimos’s Kinds of Kindness, released this past summer, sliced into the paw of a stray dog with a razor blade so she could take the animal to test the powers of a young and beautiful veterinarian (Margaret Qualley) said, like Jesus, to be able to heal the sick and raise the dead. I can’t endure cruelty to animals, and my husband will never forget the Satyajit Ray festival we attended years ago, when I shrieked, “Not the horse!” at a screening of Jalsaghar (The Music Room), whose final scene consists of the financially ruined feudal lord’s careering his mount into a ditch on what proves to be the last ride for both of them.

In fact, that scream at the willfully bloodied paw was not my first Kinds of Kindness scream. The movie, Lanthimos’s ninth and latest as director in a career stretching back to the early 2000s in his native Greece, is actually three short movies, about an hour long apiece. They form a trilogy of sorts if you swap the temporal order of the first and second episodes, all three linked into a triptych by the participation of a single bit-part character, “R.M.F.” (Yorgos Stefanakos), who is murdered in the first episode and resurrected by Qualley’s veterinarian, Ruth, in the third. An ensemble of actors, several of whom are veterans of previous Lanthimos films (Stone, Qualley, Willem Dafoe, Joe Alwyn, Stefanakos) play assorted roles in all three episodes. All three episodes feature incidents of unspeakable and nearly unwatchable violence deliberately inflicted by their perpetrators in order to satisfy the demands of other, more powerful and more nasty people whose love and approval they crave.

In the first episode Robert (Jesse Plemons) is a particularly craven and bootlicking employee of Raymond (Dafoe), a Gavin Newsom-haired tycoon who monitors every aspect of Robert’s life, down to picking out his wife for him and also having Robert secretly feed her abortion drugs when she is pregnant so that children won’t interfere with his job performance. When Robert refuses to carry out an order to stage an auto accident that will kill a fellow employee (R.M.F, as we eventually figure out), Raymond, who is also Robert’s lover, brutally cuts him off. Desperate to win back his job and Raymond’s favor, Robert contrives to run over R.M.F.’s body in a parking garage with his SUV. Not once, but over and over until his crushed anatomy is good and dead–because Lanthimos’s camera never cuts away from any scene of willful human savagery. That was me howling “No!” if you happened to be in the theater with me that day.

In the second episode Plemons plays a police officer, Daniel, whose marine-biologist wife, Liz (Stone), gone missing on a research expedition and thought dead, is found on a desert island (by an unseen R.M.F, a helicopter pilot) and returned to him. But when she can’t fit into the shoes she left behind and starts acting in unfamiliar ways, he suspects her of being an impostor. The suspicion drives him mad. He acts erratically on his police job, getting suspended for shooting a driver during a routine traffic stop. At home he torments Liz by starving himself, distressing the woman who wants only to save her marriage (or perhaps she is an impostor, of a particularly masochistic bent). He tells her that the one thing he will eat is one of her fingers—and Liz, desperate, hacks off her thumb with a knife and serves it on a plate. This is a spectacle that you absolutely don’t want to watch, but you must, because Lanthimos insists upon showing it to you. In the movie’s finale, like some macabre version of a Grimm’s fairy tale, Daniel ups the ante and tells Liz that what he next wants to eat is her liver. This time we are spared the spectacle of Liz slashing into her abdomen, although we do get to see via a jump cut the organ itself in a wet brownish mound on the living-room floor next to her corpse.

Compared to this, carving a gash into a dog’s paw with a razor blade ought to seem anticlimactic—except that it comes off as all the more ghastly because the victim is a mute and trusting beast. Emily (trailing along Plemons as her nerdy sidekick, Andrew) is an eager-beaver acolyte in a New Age-y religion whose main tenets seem to consist of wearing ugly sandals, sweating out “contaminants” in a communal sauna, and having sex with the founder, Omi (Dafoe). She gets expelled from the sect’s compound after her ex-husband (Alwyn), who seems nice at first but swiftly proves otherwise, slips a mickey into her drink and rapes her while she is unconscious, leaving behind his toxic semen that cannot be sauna-ed away. Mutilating the dog is part of Emily’s scheme for worming her way back into Omi’s good graces by delivering up the female Messiah, Ruth.

What amazed me about this three-hour spectacle of sadism was the reaction of the rest of the audience that afternoon, which was mostly…laughter. And this was a substantial audience for a midweek matinée. Kinds of Kindness was a summertime hit of 2024, its release timed to catch the wake of Lanthimos’s earlier art-house blockbuster Poor Things (2023), another Emma Stone vehicle that had grossed $118 million at the box office on a $35 million budget and won four Academy Awards, including Best Actress for Stone. Poor Things in turn followed another Lanthimos hit, the period-piece The Favourite (2018), also featuring Stone along with Lanthimos veterans Olivia Colman and Rachel Weisz, that had grossed $96 million on a $15 million budget. Lanthimos clearly has a built-in following, but I had to wonder why this crowd was guffawing quite so loudly.

Certainly there are laugh-out-loud moments, if of a mordant nature, here and there in Kinds of Kindness. Early in Episode Two, Daniel and the just-rescued Liz wax sentimental at a dinner with Daniel’s cop-partner best friend (Mamoudou Athie) and his wife (Qualley) over the home videos they made of each other during cheerier days. Cut to one of the videos: the four doing a foursome on a creaking bed. Cheap gag, but yeah, funny. In Episode Three, Emily, clad in her girlboss pantsuit, roars around in a purple Dodge Challenger (the real-life property of Stone’s husband) at speeds that exceed her driving skills. When she finally succeeds in kidnapping veterinarian Ruth and races maniacally to hand her over to cult-leader Omi, she crashes the Challenger into the compound gate and kills her. This may make you laugh—although what you are laughing at is a vehicular homicide.

You may read Kinds of Kindness as satire: of corporate capitalism and its exacting hierarchies (Episode One), of brutish marital misogyny (Episode Two), of organized religion with its rites of baptism, penance, and communion (Episode Three). And many do. The phrases “black humor,” “dark comedy,” and “wickedly funny” crop up repeatedly in media reviews. But the movie’s themes are actually something else: domination and submission, power and weakness, the indignities that people are willing to endure in order to be accepted by others, and pure, relentless viciousness, physical and mental, all sauced with dubious sexual frisson. And this was exactly what its audience had come to see. Kinds of Kindness hasn’t proved to be quite the blockbuster that Poor Things and The Favourite had been—Rotten Tomatoes surveys indicated that many viewers found it confusing and off-putting—but there were enough who admired it.

Before Kinds of Kindness, the only Lanthimos film I had ever seen was The Favourite, his “historical” foray into the court rivalry between two ambitious ladies-in-waiting (Stone and Weisz) of Britain’s Queen Anne (1665-1714, played magnificently by Colman). “All About Eve with bustles,” wrote a reviewer, and I was looking forward to something baroquely delicious: catfights, décolletage, and powdered wigs to rival the ones that played starring roles in Amadeus (I was not disappointed in the last). Perhaps it was the masturbation: the stagecoach passenger compulsively exploring the space inside his unbuttoned breeches, Stone’s Lady Abigail thrusting her fingers deep under the nightgown of the morbidly obese monarch, or Abigail again, consummating her marriage via a hand-job for her new husband (Alwyn) while she talks about other things and refuses to look at him. Perhaps it was the Marquis de Sade overtones: “stripped and whipped” as female punishment, pelting a naked man with oranges as sport for be-rouged aristocrats. (I am prescinding from even thinking about whether any of this could have actually happened in the court of Queen Anne, who, while admittedly enormous of girth and gout-plagued, was a straight-laced Anglican devoted to her husband, Prince George of Denmark, who was very much alive when some of the film’s action takes place.) Or perhaps it was all the arty fisheye-lens shots, an increasingly irritating camera tic of Lanthimos’s. But what clinched it for me was the movie’s finale: Stone’s Abigail, having connived the permanent exile of her rival, Lady Sarah (Weisz), flexes her newfound power by pressing her foot onto the back of one of the seventeen rabbits that Anne keeps as pets in memory of the seventeen children she lost to miscarriages and childhood illness. The bunny screeches with a high-pitched wail of pain. I thought: I never want to see another Lanthimos movie in my life.

Still, the 50-year-old Lanthimos is currently the leading directorial phenomenon in an increasingly creativity-starved industry, and he could be said to exemplify a Zeitgeist. The Favourite garnered innumerable accolades, including an Academy Award for Best Actress for Colman. The American Film Institute (AFI) named it one of the ten best films of 2018. Stone won the Best Actress Oscar for her performance in Poor Things, another AFI favorite (listed as one of its ten best films of 2023). So I streamed the following movies of his: his Greek-language Kinodontas (Dogtooth, 2009), The Lobster (2015); The Killing of a Sacred Deer (2017), and, of course, Poor Things, which I had boycotted during its theater release. I omitted only his Greek-language debut film O kaliteros mou filos (My Best Friend, 2001, and billed as a “sex farce”), a 2005 film, Kineta (Kinetta), re-released in the U.S. in 2019 to ride the Favourite wave, or Alpeis (Alps, 2011), his last Greek-language movie before he transitioned to the Anglophone cinematic world that has given him big budgets, name stars, and vast amounts of kudos.

All four movies have certain motifs in common with each other and with Kinds of Kindness and The Favourite, even though they are of clearly different genres. The Killing of a Sacred Deer, for example, is a version of the Greek myth of Agamemnon, who hunts and kills a stag belonging to the goddess Artemis; she retaliates by casting a deadly calm that prevents the wind from filling the sails of the ships he has assembled for the Trojan War. In order to lift the curse, Artemis demands that he make a human sacrifice of his daughter Iphigenia. In Lanthimos’s version the Agamemnon figure is a booze-happy cardiac surgeon (Colin Farrell) who kills one of his patients on the operating table after downing a few on the morning of the procedure–something he has kept hidden from his family. The dead patient’s teen-age son, Martin (Barry Keoghan in a creepy simulation of adolescent awkwardness), insinuates himself into the household to demand that the surgeon choose one of his own children to murder by way of expiation, or he will subject the entire family to drawn-out and agonizing deaths. And he proves that he is quite capable of carrying out that threat: The children’s health begins to fail in frightening ways.

Poor Things has similar literary filiation. It is a retelling of the Frankenstein story, adapted from a 1992 novel by the Scottish fantasist Alasdair Gray (1934-2019): A late-Victorian mad scientist (Dafoe) reanimates a pregnant woman who has jumped to her death by implanting in her head the brain of the fetus she was carrying. The resulting product (Stone), named Bella Baxter and resplendent in leg-of-mutton sleeves the size of basketballs but with the mind of an infant, combines Rousseau-ian blank-slate innocence with a massive polymorphous-perverse carnal appetite clearly meant to exemplify the freedom that women would enjoy if only they could liberate themselves from social convention. Poor Things is the most expensive of Lanthimos’s productions so far, and it revels in garish aniline-dye colors and an aquarium’s worth of fisheye-lens panoramas of exotic settings (blame Lanthimos’s cinematographer, Robbie Ryers) as Bella copulates her way around the Mediterranean.

The two earlier movies lack specific literary connections, although there is plenty of the surreal. Dogtooth centers around a father (Christos Stergioglou), CEO of a factory making some sort of industrial product, who has infantilized his young-adult son and two young-adult daughters by imprisoning the three of them in the family’s lavish suburban home, barring them from all knowledge of the outside world, and deliberately feeding them misinformation about supposed terrors lying beyond their locked gates. (The sense of claustrophobia is enhanced by Lanthimos’s framing: The camera regularly cuts off heads and feet.) The father takes strict charge of his offspring’s sexual development as well, importing a female security guard from the plant (who is also his own mistress) to service the son. When she proves traitorous by introducing the daughters to contraband VCR movies (and also, on the side, to lesbianism), he orders the son to pick one of his sisters as his sex-partner.

The Lobster involves a husband (Farrell) whose wife has left him for another man. He is obliged by the laws of the country he inhabits to check into a remote hotel where he is given 45 days to find a romantic partner among the other guests, at which point he will be precipitously remarried and sent off on a cruise-honeymoon. Otherwise he will be turned into an animal of his choosing (his choice is a lobster), ejected into the surrounding forest, and possibly hunted to death by other hotel occupants. He and the other guests spend their days frantically searching for members of the opposite sex with whom they might have some slight superficial thing in common—a physical defect, a taste in food, a personality trait—that is their idea of compatibility. A variety of bloody acts from stabbing to being eaten by wolves ensues.

The phrase “black humor” (or its cognates, such as “wickedly funny”) has been applied to all these movies, just as it has to Kinds of Kindness and The Favourite. So has the assumption that they are all social satire of one sort or other. Dogtooth? Homeschooling, patriarchy, the nuclear family. The Lobster? Societal privileging of monogamous marriage and stigmatization of singles. The Killing of a Sacred Deer? Nuclear family again, plus bourgeois hypocrisy (Martin pimps his mother to the doctor, among other things). Poor Things? More patriarchy, including patriarchal religion: Bella calls her creator “God.” But what is most notable about these movies is that most of what they show is distinctly not funny. There is the relentless sexual coupling, so affectless and devoid of eroticism despite its explicitness (watch the beautiful young people in Dogtooth grinding at each other without pleasure) as to seem better-suited to a sex-education class. And, in fact, it is a sex-education class, in Poor Things. Bella goes to work at a Paris brothel where the customers are uniformly physically and morally repulsive; one of them brings in his two young sons to watch their father fornicate and learn about the birds and the bees. (That scene had to be cut in the U.K. to satisfy child-pornography laws). In The Killing of a Sacred Deer, the children’s mother (Nicole Kidman) pleads with her husband’s anesthesiologist to tell her whether her husband was drinking on the day of the patient’s death—and also manually stimulates him. Was I expected to laugh at this one, too?

There is the obligatory brutality to animals and humans: The son in Dogtooth stabs a cat to death with a pair of pruning shears, and the father, later, enraged over the smuggled VCR tapes, beats his daughter ruthlessly with one of the cassettes and, later, his mistress even more ruthlessly with a suitcase. When, at the end of The Lobster, Colin Farrell’s character takes a steak knife into a restaurant men’s room in order to gouge out his eyes so he will have something in common with a woman he has fallen for (Rachel Weisz) who has been maliciously blinded, I had to fast-forward—sorry. (There is also a hotel guest who murders his dog and another guest forced to put his hand into a toaster as punishment for masturbating.) But the real abuse is of the mental variety, all the more disquieting because it is willingly endured, even pleaded for. In Kinds of Kindness, Robert humiliates himself with gusto, begging obsequiously for a second chance to take his boss’s homicidal orders and his cheesy gifts. Lanthimos’s oeuvre is about control and being controlled, as inexhaustible human desires.

Armand White, film critic for National Review, has accused Lanthimos of trying to fashion a “theater of cruelty” but misunderstanding the intentions of the concept’s originator, Antonin Artaud, by mistaking them for “fashionable nihilism.” White is undoubtedly correct as far as he goes. In his 1938 collection of manifestos, The Theater and Its Double, Artaud contended that the modern “masses” could not comprehend the sublime lessons of Greek tragedy—the gods’ profound indifference to human suffering in Oedipus Rex, for example—because the diction, the images, and the stage conventions of ancient theater were archaic and alien to them. But modern “psychological” theater, with its emphasis on reducing “the unknown down to the known, to the everyday, the ordinary,” cheated audiences out of the profound experiential realization conveyed in the ancient tragedies, that we “are not free” despite all our exertions of will, and that the “sky can still fall on our heads.” Artaud’s proposed theater of cruelty would offer audiences the same shocking atrocities that that Greek tragedy offered—murder, mayhem, sexual violation—but in a contemporary manner that would ensure that contemporary audiences would take from them the same profound lessons about man’s helplessness in the face of his fate “that the theater was made to teach us…above all else.”

This is obviously not Lanthimos’s intention, not least because he evidences no interest in any experiences beyond the here and now. The worlds in his movies are usually fantastical, but they are closed worlds, with their own rules. Nor is what Lanthimos is offering his audiences simply nihilism as White contends. What he is offering them is ritual—hence the startling similarities of incident and motif from film to film. And the specific ritual he is offering is the ritual of sacrifice: It’s a tedious cliché to point out that we in the West live in a profoundly post-religious age, and it’s equally tedious to point out, as Ross Douthat already has, that the yearning for religion nonetheless continues to live, in the shape of substitute mystical ideologies: “effective altruism” or climate-change fervor, for example. But what Lanthimos is offering isn’t ideology, quite the contrary. It’s visceral and primitive, and it has been the central defining religious feature of human civilizations around the globe, including, for millennia, our own in the West, since time out of mind. In his essays on sacrificial violence, the philosopher René Girard (1923-2015) pointed out that ritual sacrifice typically involves the scapegoating of the victim within a set framework, so that the victim’s death has the function of affirming the harmony of the community. Girard wrote: “The desire to commit an act of violence on those near us cannot be suppressed without a conflict; we must divert that impulse, therefore, toward the sacrificial victim, the creature we can strike down without fear of reprisal, since he lacks a champion.”

In Lanthimos’s movies, the sacrificial victim is a central figure, and it is very often the protagonist himself or herself. Thus, the systematic exposure to submission, self-harm, obscenity, grotesquery, and ugliness as the ritual process of self-obliteration continues to its all-consuming end. These are rites that demand no belief in anything, but, rather, mere vicarious participation. In Poor Things the brothel madam (Kathryn Hunter) tells Bella, “We must experience everything, not just the good, but degradation, horror, sadness. This makes us whole, Bella.” And that seems to be what Lanthimos’s audiences come to see. In an era in which the study of the arts has gone mind-numbingly ideological, and too many movies seem to be morality plays about racism, sexism, and so forth (Killers of the Flower Moon, Women Talking), the films of Yorgos Lanthimos tap into a human psychic dynamic that seems raw and real and beyond the reach of cultural censors. The laughter of the audience may very well be the laughter of self-recognition: This transgressive thing is why we are here. I can’t say that observing this phenomenon has made me like any of Lanthimos’s films, because, in fact, I don’t. But I can understand why the appetite for them remains insatiable.