yorgos lanthimos

Bugonia (2025)

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Just a few short weeks back, Brandon and I covered the 2003 Korean sci-fi comedy Save the Green Planet! on the podcast, mostly because of our interest in the then-upcoming remake directed by Yorgos Lanthimos, Bugonia. At the conclusion of our discussion, I remarked that I was curious to see what Lanthimos would change for his version, and whether he would keep the film’s epilogue twist as it was in the earlier film, forgo it altogether, or tweak it in some small way. Ultimately, if you have seen Save the Green Planet!, then you’re not going to be surprised by the roads that Bugonia takes, but if you’re like me, you’re still going to enjoy the ride quite a bit. 

Michelle Fuller (Emma Stone) is a high profile female pharmaceutical executive that we first meet as she introduces “a new era” at work, one in which an “incident” (which remains unelaborated upon but about which we can make certain assumptions) has led to a “friendlier” face for the company. What this boils down to, mostly, is that she wants it made explicit to the workers in the office that they should take it for granted that they are allowed to go home at the end of their work day … as long as quotas are met, and people should obviously stay at the office if they have work to do. It’s typical corporate double speak, where a corporation wants to harvest the positive associations that come with a “kinder, gentler” approach to work-life balance in the wake of a public relations backlash, but still expects business to proceed as usual with no real change. It’s not a particularly flattering portrait, but it’s a familiar one. Outside of work, she has an extensive (and expensive) “reverse aging” routine that includes supplements, red-light masks, and extensive martial arts self defense training. 

Teddy (Jesse Plemmons) works for Michelle’s company, Auxolith, packing boxes. He’s so far down the ladder that his team—which includes a woman who’s continuing to work despite injuring her hand and is clearly too aware of how easy it is to get rid of a squeaky wheel who might file a comp claim—doesn’t warrant even the most perfunctory of pep talks about quotas and staying late. Following a diagnosis that has rendered his mother (Alicia Silverstone) comatose, he has fallen down a rabbit hole of online conspiracy theories that have led him to one conclusion: aliens from Andromeda have infiltrated human organizations with the intent of enslaving the human race, and his boss is one of them. To this end, he enlists the help of his intellectually-disabled cousin Don (Aidan Delbis) in abducting Michelle when she arrives home from work one day. From there, he locks her in the basement, shaves her head so that she can’t use her hair to contact her mothership, and proceeds to demand that she prepare a message to tell her fellow Andromedans to expect Teddy’s arrival as advocate for the human race against their invasion. Michelle, naturally, has no idea what he’s talking about. Or does she? 

If you’ve seen Save the Green Planet!, or even just saw the trailer, most of this is familiar to you. Teddy and his Korean counterpart, Lee Byeong-gu, even share the same backstory that their characters’ mothers are both hospitalized long term, and they share beekeeping as a hobby, with colony collapse disorder forming an integral part of both men’s alien-invasion hypotheses. The differences are pretty minor. Byeong-gu’s girlfriend in Planet! is replaced here by Teddy’s cousin; the plot point in which the captive CEO convinces the former to leave Byeong-gu by claiming that he doesn’t truly love her is replaced by a scene in which Michelle tells Don that the imminent arrival of the police puts him in serious danger. The biggest narrative change is probably the total excision of Planet!‘s subplot about two police officers, one an experienced but disgraced renegade and the other a young fast-tracked hot shot who circumvents his chain of command to consult the outsider. Although there is a police officer in this film, he’s unlike either of the two detectives, as he’s instead a socially awkward local police officer who is implied to have molested Teddy when he was the younger man’s teenage babysitter. If you’ve seen Planet!, you’ll likely recall that the two detectives therein had little bearing on the narrative and seemed to simply exist in order to give the film somewhere else to check in every once in a while and break up the monotony of spending the entire film solely in Byeong-gu’s basement. Here, those opportunities to give the audience a break come largely in the form of Teddy’s flashbacks to the time when his mother’s illness first began to affect her and his time having to still go into work while having his missing boss locked up in the basement, covered in antihistamine lotion (to numb her—or rather “its”—psychic powers). It’s a small difference, but by always keeping us in the same room as one of the two opposing forces at the movie’s core Lanthimos manages to ensure that the tension is always rising. 

Of course, the most interesting and notable difference here is that the kidnapped executive in Planet! was a man named Kang Man-shik, while Bugonia has Stone playing a girlboss CEO, and that one small change has a big impact. Because of the difference in the optics and the gendered dynamics alone, watching Byeong-gu and his short girlfriend abduct Kang is a very different experience from watching two burly men attack Emma Stone, one of America’s Sweethearts. The fact that we see her practicing for just such a possibility as one of her first defining character traits reminds us of the bleak truth that there’s no amount of power, wealth, or status that a woman can amass to guarantee her protection from a very determined crazy man, and even as a member of the executive class she’s still prepared for the possibility that she’ll have to fight for her life just like more conventionally vulnerable women. Stone plays Michelle with a quiet strength and dignity that she only allows to slip when she’s alone, and it’s a performance that’s so potent and visceral that it’s easy to forget that—regardless of the seemingly batshit nonsense Teddy picked up on the internet—she is nonetheless a banal force of evil, a stakeholder in the enforcement of a power structure that Teddy (and we) have every right to resent and pray for the downfall of. There’s no need to go overcomplicating it with aliens (or any other brain-rotted conspiracies); Auxolith made Teddy’s mother sick and faced no consequences, and that’s enough to make him hate Michelle, with all the rest of it being a hat on a hat. Still, in seeing a woman chained to a mattress in the basement of a man with demonstrable tendency to fly into a rage, we can’t help but sympathize with her, more than we ever did with Kang. 

There are a lot of little ideas and concepts to find within this text and pick over. I find it fascinating that Teddy ultimately does the same thing that Auxolith does with regards to reckless human testing, as he chemically castrated himself prior to the movie’s events and gives his unfortunate cousin the same injection prior to their taking of Michelle. Later in the film, Don tries to explain to Teddy that he’s having side effects from the drug, possibly even a sudden onset of chemical depression, which ultimately has tragic consequences. His kidnapping of Michelle in and of itself is an abduction of the kind that he believes aliens are guilty of. Like a lot of people who fall into these traps of conspiracies that engineer a more comprehensible world out of unconnected events, Teddy is a hypocrite, and that makes him and Michelle the same. And then, of course, there’s that ending. As one would probably expect from a remake helmed by Lanthimos, this is not merely a reheated dish, but a fresh take, even if you already know what all of the ingredients are. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Kinds of Kindness (2024)

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Kinds of Kindness is a dense text. A triptych of stories from director Yorgos Lanthimos that are only loosely connected by the appearance of a single minor character (with each of the major billed actors appearing as different characters in each segment), they are nonetheless in conversation with one another, as they are all about the way that kindness can be many things — sincere as well as selfish, sacrificial as well as superficial. The segments, titled “The Death of R.M.F.,” “R.M.F. is Flying,” and “R.M.F. Eats a Sandwich,” each relay a fable in which a character is “kind,” with consequences. 

In “The Death,” we first see a man with the initials “R.M.F.” (Yorgos Stefanakos) embroidered on his shirt pocket as he accepts an envelope of cash from a woman we later learn is named Vivian (Margaret Qualley), and watch as a man named Robert Fletcher (Jesse Plemmons) works up the nerve to run a red light and smash his Bronco into R.M.F.’s car, although neither man is seriously injured. The next morning, Robert tells his wife Sarah (Hong Chau) about the incident while she fawns over a piece of sports memorabilia—a broken John McEnroe racquet—that was received that morning from Robert’s employer, Raymond (Willem Dafoe), calling it Raymond’s best gift yet. Once he arrives at the office, we get a better picture of Robert and Raymond’s relationship; Robert is more of a pet or a toy for Raymond than an employee. Every aspect of Robert’s life is dictated by the older man: what clothes he wears, what drinks he orders at the bar, what he eats for every meal, when he sleeps and wakes and has sex with his wife. He even engineered Sarah and Robert’s marriage by having Robert fake an injury at a bar in order to gain her sympathy. But Robert can’t bring himself to kill a stranger in a car “accident,” which leads Raymond to ice him out, setting off a chain of events in which Sarah leaves him and a chance encounter—or is it?—with a woman named Rita Fanning (Emma Stone) make him more and more desperate to get back into Raymond’s good graces. 

In “Flying,” Denham Springs police officer Daniel (Plemmons) is dealing with the recent disappearance of his wife, Liz (Emma Stone), along with some other researchers on a ship that went missing, presumably in the gulf. While his partner Neil (Mamoudou Athie) and Neil’s wife Martha (Qualley) attempt to assuage his fears while also remaining realistic about the chances that Liz will be found, Daniel’s erratic behavior, which includes intimately and romantically brushing the hair of a suspect behind their ear, causes concern within the DSPD. When Liz and another survivor are found (flown back in a rescue copter piloted by R.M.F., giving the segment its title), she comes back … different. It was well established that Liz’s hatred of chocolate meant that it was banned from the house, but this newly returned woman devours chocolate cake with gusto. She smokes a cigarette for the first time, feels unconfident in her favorite outfit, and none of her shoes fit her anymore. Daniel becomes more and more suspicious that she is an impostor, but his attempts to explain to others that he thinks his wife is no longer his wife because she doesn’t remember his favorite song make him seem even more unstable than when she was missing. Liz, if this is Liz, seems to live only to please him, and after shooting a man in the hand during a routine traffic stop, he’s placed on suspension, where the two have nothing but time together, and he tests the limits of her emotional and physical generosity. 

In “Sandwich,” Andrew (Plemmons) and Emily (Stone) are two members of a cult, run by Omi (Dafoe) and Aka (Chau), that is seeking a woman with the power to heal and even reanimate the dead. Their search is specific; the woman will be about five foot nine, weigh about 130 pounds, and will be the survivor of a pair of twins. Their search brings them close enough to her old home that Emily sneaks away one morning to the house where her husband and daughter are still living and leaves a gift for her, which Andrew notices but promises to keep a secret, although she admits nothing. After a trip back to the commune compound, in which we get to see the cult’s grounds, practices, and yacht (specially designed for the awaited messiah), Andrew and Emily are sent on another expedition to the same town, where a woman named Rebecca approaches them and tells them that her twin sister Ruth (both Qualley) is the woman that they are looking for, but Andrew brushes her off. When another visit to her old house results in Emily being caught by her husband and daughter, he convinces her to have a drink with him, surreptitiously drugging and then sexually assaulting her. When she awakes the next morning, Omi and Aka are waiting for her outside, and for her “contamination” is exiled from the cult, although she hopes that finding Ruth will be her ticket back in. 

The first segment is a lot of fun, and there’s a lot of playfulness going on to toy with the audience and their expectations. Although the man with the embroidered initials “R.M.F.” is the first person that we see, this could be a misdirect, as we never learn Raymond’s last name, nor the middle names of Robert Fletcher or Rita Fanning, so any one of them could turn out to be the character who has a date with destiny and death. It also introduces several of the film’s recurring motifs. When a desperate Robert is trying to sell all of the sports memorabilia that he has accumulated as a result of Raymond’s gifts over the years, he’s unable to get a fair deal for it. Even as he repeats what must be Raymond’s words (notably calling out that yellow represented youthfulness on the helmet of a driver who died tragically while wearing it, just before he exchanges his aubergine turtleneck for a mustard one and sets out to try and win back Raymond’s affection), it’s clear that every bit of the older man’s largesse, his “kindness,” was all about control, and that even the gifts thereof are ultimately cheaper than they seem. 

That discussion of color symbolism cuts directly to an extreme close up of the yolk of an egg being fried, although Robert finds himself unable to eat it and tosses it out. That ties into a larger motif of appetite that runs throughout all three films. In “Flying,” the first thing that Daniel offers to do for the returned Liz is make her an omelet, which she declines, and the cult in “Sandwich” is particularly averse to eating fish, while Aka and (presumably) Omi’s son’s food intake is monitored, and he’s given conflicting directions from each of his parents. It’s most present in “Flying,” however. Throughout all of the film’s constituent segments, flashbacks and dreams are represented in black-and-white footage, and “Flying” features one such sequence in which Liz is seen resorting to cannibalism while deserted and awaiting rescue. It’s unclear if this is a real memory, a delusion, or even a projection of Daniel’s fears, especially since he seems to be the one most consumed with a desire for flesh; the beef he serves to Neil and Martha wouldn’t even be considered “rare” by most standards, he impulsively licks the wound of the man he shoots on Tulane Ave, and when he starts to test what lengths this “Liz” will go to in order to ingratiate herself to him, he asks her to excise and cook first her thumb and then her liver for him, as a test of her “kindness.” 

There’s also an interesting throughline about foot injuries, which I interpret to mean something along the lines of “kindness can shoot you in the foot,” but which also seems to have an undercurrent of dishonesty. In “Death,” Robert first attempts to recreate his meet cute with Sarah by pretending to injure his hand again, but is unsuccessful. Instead, he deliberately injures his foot in the bar bathroom by kicking the wall and breaking a couple of bones, which leads him to meeting Rita, who shows him sympathy and, well, kindness (although an air of mystery is retained regarding how altruistic this is and if it’s yet another one of Raymond’s manipulations). In “Flying,” it’s mentioned that the only other survivor from Liz’s ship has a leg infection that will likely result in the need for amputation, and it happens twice in “Sandwich,” as Emily’s husband lures her back to their old house to drug and assault her by spinning a lie about their daughter having hurt her ankle at ballet class and Emily herself injures a dog’s leg in order to have an excuse to meet with the veterinarian she believes is the savior. Notably, all of these injuries are used manipulatively; whether it’s a self-inflicted wound to get attention, a lie about an injury to get an ex to come over, or a recitation of something bad that happened to someone, they are all used to elicit “kindness.” 

Speaking of dogs, they’re present, in one form or another, in every segment. In “Flying,” Liz tells Daniel about a dream that she had when she was on the island (or which was about the island, it’s unclear to her and to us), where she was in a world where people were pets and dogs were the dominant species, and we get to see that world in the credits sequence of that segment. There is the aforementioned dog in “Sandwich,” whom Emily finds on the street and uses as a ticket to see Ruth. There are no animals in “Death,” however, unless one considers that Robert is Raymond’s dog. He fetches, he rolls over, he begs, and he performs for Raymond. Robert is his pet, his doll, he dresses him up and he picks out his food and he controls Robert’s entire environment. At one point, he directs him to go to a specific bar and order a non-alcoholic drink; Robert attempts to order bourbon, but the bartender asks him if he’s sure, and when he orders a Virgin Mary, it’s handed to him in seconds, having been waiting for him, just as a demonstration of just how far and wide the net of power Raymond controls is. It’s even telling that one of the scenes from Liz’s dreamworld of dogs-as-humans involves a dog driving an SUV who swerves to avoid a piece of human roadkill, which ties back thematically to the end of “Death,” which I won’t spoil. There’s a narrative present in all of them about the power that people have over animals; we all love our pets and we all are kind to them, but that kindness doesn’t change the fact that power flows only one way in that relationship, and that this may be true of all relationships. 

Before closing out, I want to talk about one particular scene in “Death,” wherein Robert confronts Raymond at his home to tell him that he can’t go through with his vehicular manslaughter plan. Initially, he has Vivian show Robert in, but the “scene” doesn’t feel right, so he has him do it again after sitting down in a chair, then has him take it from the top again and enter to deliver his news standing. When watching a film like this, in which a person takes on the role of “director” in their personal life, one can’t help but assume that the film’s director is also telling us something about themselves, or about the nature of control. I’m not sure that I’ve cracked what that is yet, or what Lanthimos is saying here. I have a feeling that this is one of those texts that only really reveals itself on multiple viewings, and with time. Both of my viewing companions for this screening were much more mixed in their opinions, but I’m feeling positive, and looking forward to what the next screening will reveal.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Podcast #207: Tenet (2020) & 2024’s Best Director Nominees

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Welcome to Episode #207 of The Swampflix Podcast. For this episode, Brandon, James, Britnee, and Hanna discuss the earlier works of this year’s Best Director Oscar nominees, starting with Christopher Nolan’s backwards-explosions sci-fi action thriller Tenet (2020). Enjoy!

00:00 Welcome

01:33 Harakiri (1962)
06:50 King of the Gypsies (1978)
10:24 Obsessed (2009)
15:35 New Orleans French Film Fest 2024
19:00 Our Body (2024)

24:06 Tenet (2020)
44:47 The Lobster (2015)
1:02:15 Birth (2004)
1:22:49 After Hours (1984)
1:39:47 Sibyl (2019)

You can stay up to date with our podcast through SoundCloud, Spotify, iTunes, TuneIn, or by following the links on this page.

– The Podcast Crew

Poor Things (2023)

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“We are a fucked species; know it.”
“We are all cruel beasts – born that way, die that way.”
“Polite society is fucking boring.”
“Polite society will destroy you.”
“All sexuality is basically immoral.”

Poor Things is the kind of movie about the total scope of life as a human being that allows characters to voice those kinds of abstract philosophical statements, often with immediate dismissive pushback from the poor souls hearing them.  In that way, it’s the culmination of everything provoc-auteur Yorgos Lanthimos has been working towards since early antisocial provocations like Dogtooth & Alps.  He’s always had a coldly detached fascination with basic human behavior & relationships, but he has yet to dissect & catalog them all in a single text the way he does here.  Every new Lanthimos movie feels like it’s poking at some assumed social norm as if it were a corpse he found in the woods.  Poor Things finds that naive interrogation at its most scientifically thorough & perversely fun, to the point where he articulates the entire human experience through repurposed dead flesh.  In doing so, he’s clearly made The Movie of the Year, and so far the movie of his career.

Emma Stone stars as the repurposed corpse in question: a suicide victim who has been reborn as a Frankenstein-style brain transplant experiment in a mad scientist’s Turn-of-the-Century laboratory.  Her monstrous “Daddy God” creator—played with pitiable Elephant Man anguish by Willem Dafoe—initially keeps his experiment on a short leash, confining her entire life to his grotesque but lavish home.  She eventually breaks free, though, as all Frankenstein monsters do, and ventures into the world as an adult-bodied woman with the mind of a rapidly developing child.  Her resulting interrogation of the world outside her home is intensely violent, as anyone who can picture an adult-sized toddler throwing a temper tantrum would expect.  It’s also intensely sexual, as she can find no joy more immediately self-fulfilling than orgasmic bliss but lacks basic understanding of that joy’s socially appropriate boundaries: assumed monogamy, acceptable dinner conversation, the stigma of sex work, when & where it’s permissible to masturbate, etc.  If she is meant to represent humanity at its most basic & untouched by learned social restrictions, she represents us as insatiably horny, violent beasts who have to consciously strive to learn empathy for each other because it is not innate in our souls.  It’s a hilarious, uncomfortably accurate assessment of the species.

If there’s any one particular social norm that Lanthimos naively interrogates here, it’s a gendered one.  Much of the reanimated monster’s exploration of Life is limited by the men who wish to control her.  First, her Daddy God confines her as a domestic prisoner, the same way all fathers of young women fear their freedom as autonomous adults.  Once she’s loose, a small succession of selfish bachelors aim to trap her again in the domestic prison of marriage: Ramy Youssef as an ineffectual Nice Guy, Mark Ruffalo as a dastardly fuckboy fop, and Christopher Abbott as a sociopathic abuser.  All the men in the monster’s life seek to control her in ways that stifle her self-development.  It’s a movie about male possessiveness just as much as it’s about the absurdities of Life & societal decorum in that way, and the heroic triumph at the center is mostly in watching the creature fuck & read her way out of her patriarchal bonds to become her own person.  At times, that sentiment is expressed through philosophical assessment of what it means to live as an ethical person in modern society.  More often, it’s a crass celebration of women being annoying & gross in public despite the men around them demanding they calm it down.  It’s oddly uplifting in either case.

Yorgos Lanthimos’s films have become more recognizably comedic since he broke through to a wider audience with The Lobster, and they’re all the better for it.  There’s a sense of playful collaboration here where the director allows each contributor freedom to run wild: Stone & Ruffalo in their sketch comedy acting choices, cinematographer Robbie Ryan in his fish-eye lens fantasia, screenwriter Tony McNamara in his violent perversions of vintage humorist quips.  It’s telling that the only work that’s directly alluded to onscreen (besides, arguably, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and its James Whale mutations) is Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest, another prankishly prurient comedy of manners.  Lanthimos has always morbidly poked at social norms & decorum with this same curious outsider’s perspective, but never before while taking so much obvious glee in the act, nor on this wide of a scope.  I rarely have this much fun thinking about how we’re “a fucked species” of “cruel beasts,” and how our rules of appropriate social interaction are so, so very “fucking boring.”

-Brandon Ledet

Dogtooth (2010)

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As a latecomer to his oeuvre, getting to know Yorgos Lanthimos as an auteur over the past decade has been a disorienting experience. The first film of his I ever caught was The Lobster – a coldly emotionless, abruptly violent farce that bizarrely parodies the socially accepted norms of dating rituals. Each film since has been a bewildering journey, as if I was tasked to put together the jigsaw puzzle of what he’s attempting to accomplish in his films without having seen the reference picture on the box it arrived in. I finally clicked with Lanthimos on The Favourite, but that film felt like the director meeting latecomers more than halfway – staging his usual emotionless trauma-comedies in a context where we’re more used to stilted, carefully veiled viciousness: the costume drama. Pure Lanthimos oddities like The Killing of a Sacred Deer—while amusing—still escaped me as a something I could fully embrace as personal favorites. It turns out that the answer key to fully comprehending Lanthimos’s Whole Deal was hiding in plain sight in the most obvious place: his breakthrough calling-card picture, Dogtooth.

Dogtooth is often mistaken to be Lanthimos’s debut feature as a director, despite being his third completed film, because it was the first to land his name on the international stage. For a solid decade I’ve heard flummoxed mumblings of how traumatizingly fucked up & darkly funny the film is from friends – to the point where I was actively dreading the experience of watching it, as if it were some depraved shock value gross-out like Martyrs, The Human Centipede, or A Serbian Film. I envy the audiences who stumbled upon Dogtooth totally unprepared without this decade’s worth or word-of-mouth build-up. Even with the warning, the film is surprising from start to end – both because it didn’t live up to the pointless, abject cruelty I had envisioned in my head and because it’s so far removed from recognizable human behavior that it was impossible to predict from scene to scene. More importantly, seeing Dogtooth early would have been helpful as a guiding roadmap to Lanthimos’s disorienting oeuvre. It’s a concise distillation of what the filmmaker has been delivering in each feature since: viciously traumatic hangout comedies. I think I get it now.

Three teenage siblings are raised in a walled-off Greek home, isolated from the world outside. That’s not to say that they’re merely physically imprisoned in their familial compound. They’re also intellectually cut off from the outside world via a radical homeschooling experiment conducted by their irrationally protective parents, one that scrambles their understanding of basic social concepts: the definitions of random vocabulary words, the mysterious nature of airplane technology, the mechanics of sex & romance, the production of entertainment media, etc. This is a plot template we’ve since seen echoed in raised-in-captivity films like Room & Brigsby Bear, but never with the specific, comically cold detachment Lanthimos injects into the material (and all material he touches). Although overflowing with difficult-to-stomach taboos like incestual rape & grotesque body horror, Dogtooth somehow always makes room to chuckle at the understated absurdity of its premise. By constructing such a bizarrely artificial, aggressively arbitrary version of insular familial socializing, it manages to have an indicting laugh at the way all familial bonds are arbitrarily established & enforced. It’s also in no rush to hammer that point home, either. Lanthimos instead forces us to stew in the discomfort, morbidly lingering on the absurd mechanics of the preposterous youth-in-captivity torture he’s envisioned.

If I had caught Dogtooth when it first reached the US in 2010, I might have been able to appreciate it purely as an absurdist portrait of the horrors of homeschooling. In 2020, I can’t help but view it as a primordial version of the director’s ice-cold oddities to follow; it’s most interesting to me in direct conversation with his later work. In either instance, I don’t know that I ever would have had the chance to fully fall in love with it. Excepting The Favourite, I always find Lanthimos’s work to be admirably unique & chilling, but not exactly My Thing. Dogtooth was no different in that respect. It did open me up to a better understanding of the director’s catalog at large, though, a clarifying primer I should have sought out much sooner than I did.

-Brandon Ledet

The Favourite (2018)

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When exiting our screening of The Favourite, we watched a confused man point to a theater lobby standee advertising the upcoming historical biopic Mary, Queen of Scots. “That’s the movie I thought I was seeing!” he complained to an impatient usher and amused passersby. “When does that come out?” I explained that he was only a week early and asked what he thought of The Favourite, having not been prepared for it. He chuckled and responded, “It was . . . different,” which is exactly the thing moms say when they want to be nice about hating something they know you loved. To be fair, The Favourite is “different” if you consider it a part of the same genre as Mary, Queen of Scots: Oscar Season costume dramas with famous actors playing dress-up & chewing historically accurate scenery in governmental battles of manners. Featuring Olivia Colman, Rachel Wiesz, and Emma Stone (and sometimes Nicholas Hoult) entangled in a barbed, sadistic 18th Century power struggle, the movie could easily be confused with something tamer & more buttoned up if you just quickly glanced at a TV spot or a poster. The Favourite is something much less palatable for wide-audiences, though, something deliberately off-putting in its self-amused cruelty: it’s the new Yorgos Lanthimos joint.

As disoriented & befuddled as my new theater lobby friend already was by The Favourite, it’s difficult to imagine how much more shaken he would have felt exiting a previous Lanthimos film like The Lobster or The Killing of a Sacred Deer. Would he have even made it to the end credits? No matter how wild or devilishly cruel The Favourite may seem in a costume drama context, it’s also a rare glimpse of Lanthimos on his best behavior. Many of his usual auteurist themes about the absurdity of “civil” behavior and the stripping of emotional artifice carry over into this work, but the dialogue is not as deliberately stilted and the violence not nearly as jarring. Part of this smoothing out of his most off-putting impulses is due to the setting; an 18th Century royal court is the exact right place for buttoned-up, emotionally distanced behavior, whereas it often feels alien or robotic in his more modern settings. It also helps that this is the first film Lanthimos directed but did not write (the screenplay was penned by Tony McNamara & Deborah Davis), so that his most upsetting impulses are somewhat dulled. The jokes fly faster & with a newfound, delicious bitchiness. The sex & violence veer more towards slapstick than inhuman cruelty. The Favourite is Lanthimos seeking moments of compromise & accessibility while still staying true to his distinctly cold auteurist voice – and it’s his best film to date for it.

To further complicate the question of whether The Favourite is a well-behaved historical costume drama or a provocatively cruel art film, it’s loosely based on a real-life conflict in the 18th Century court of Queen Anne (Colman). The Queen’s closest confidantes (Weisz as a childhood friend & Stone as a power-starved upstart) compete for her affection to siphon off a small fraction of the privilege & political weight bestowed by the Crown. How they compete is where the film deviates from what you’ll find in similarly staged costume dramas about power grabs between members of the court: gay sex, bitchy retorts, Paris is Burning style voguing – behavior more befitting a season of RuPaul’s Drag Race than anything you’re likely to find in Mary, Queen of Scots. It’s not that Lanthimos isn’t interested in the real-life historical dynamic he’s depicting or that he only uses the setting as set dressing. It’s more that he doesn’t let detailed historical accuracy get in the way of big-picture truths. The queer sexuality, useless fop men, “civil” power struggles, and absurdist displays of decadence (best represented in the court’s hoarding of pet bunnies & gambling on duck races) depicted in the film are exaggerated & modernized for comic effect, but they do often get to deeper truths about the era the movie might not have had the time or energy to mine if it were more factually behaved.

There are two hurdles to clear in appreciating The Favourite. The first is in accepting modern sensibilities’ intrusion on a historical setting. My confused theater lobby friend compared that temporal breach to A Knight’s Tale. I’d more likely use Barry Lyndon, Marie Antoinette, or Phantom Thread as reference points. That’s the easier hurdle to conquer either way. What’s more difficult to manage is Yorgos Lanthimos’s auteurist schtick. This is the closest I’ve come to fully falling in love with a Lanthimos pic, but I still felt my appreciation slipping the further he strayed from compromise in the film’s second half. The first hour or so of The Favourite is exquisite, outrageous comedy I love to pieces. Some extremely Lanthimosy choices in the more dramatic second hour gradually cool it off from there and I kind of wish the whole thing were pure sadistic fun because I am a frivolous fop at heart. Still, I left the theater immensely pleased in a way no previous Lanthimos feature, no matter how “different,” had affected me. I very much sympathized with the poor befuddled chap who left just ahead of me, though, as he feebly pointed to the standee advertising a much more accessible picture. A Knight’s Tale is not at all a decent enough primer for your first bout in the ring with this humorously cruel provocateur, no matter how well he’s behaving.

-Brandon Ledet

The Killing of a Sacred Deer (2017)

/ swampflix / 18 Comments

Does a bad ending, or even merely an unsatisfying conclusion, ruin a movie? I go back and forth on this a lot, sometimes within works with the same creators and producers. I considered last year’s 10 Cloverfield Lane to be one of the best movies of the year, and I really love 98% of Super 8, both of which suffer the same issue of a tonally inappropriate ending for a movie that was thematically about something other than, you know, stupid Cloverfield monsters (in the case of the former, at least it was justified by the retitle). Both of them are movies that I recommend to others with the caveats that they are nearly perfect but fail in a major way that, depending upon your consideration of the subject, may ruin your overall filmic experience.

The Killing of a Sacred Deer is one of these contentious films. I sat in the theater in a completely enraptured state watching the film’s first two hours, but in the film’s final moments, those joyous feelings turned to ashes in my mouth. My roommate walked out of the theater exultant, but I was underwhelmed. But before we get there, a quick synopsis.

Surgeon Stephen Murphy (Colin Farrell) has a well-ordered and successful life, as demonstrated by the sumptuous home he shares with his loving wife Anna (Nicole Kidman) and their two children, fifteen-year-old Kim (Raffey Cassidy) and elementary-aged Bob (Sunny Suljic). He also has a secret and unusual relationship with teenaged Martin (Barry Keoghan), which he keeps from his family and lies about to his anesthesiologist partner Matthew (Bill Camp). He meets with the boy clandestinely at a diner and buys him gifts, ranging from simple ice cream cones to expensive watches. Stephen eventually reveals this relationship to his family, although he lies that he met Martin when the boy’s father died suddenly; in fact, Martin’s father was a longtime patient of Stephen’s, who died under mysterious circumstances. Stephen’s family falls under the influence of Martin’s charms, especially Kim, but each member of the family begins to fall victim of an inexplicable paralysis that seems to be of Martin’s devising.

There’s a lot going on in this film, and there’s so, so much to love, especially in its small moments of subtlety and intricacy. When I told him that I had seen it, Brandon asked if the film was as Kubrickian and giallo-inspired as he had heard; although the fingerprints that underline Kubrick’s influence are all over the film, there’s no real giallo influence that I can discern. I didn’t happen to catch The Lobster, but I am told that the emotional distance evident in dialogue and the lack of inflection that the actors use in Killing is a commonality with director Yorgos Lanthimos’s previous work. I’m not sure how that stylistic choice fit with his earlier film, but it’s a resounding success here, as the cold world of surgeons and diagnoses, children getting slapped (and worse), long walks with ice cream, and even awkward sexual advances are all treated with the same clinical dispassion, instilling the film with a feeling of extreme detachment that resonates in every scene. This only increases the mood of growing tension that is intentionally invoked, as the audience feels their anxiety rising like a tide while the characters observe the changes in their world and worldview with infuriatingly cold tempers.

Beyond the overt characterizations, there’s a lot of subtlety that will no doubt provoke discussion and inspection. Kim’s recent first menstruation is mentioned on two separate occasions, including once as a point of pride for Stephen when talking to his work colleagues following a formal speech; what’s to be made of that? Early in the film, Stephen and Anna engage in some slightly kinky hanky-panky (all edited and filmed with the same dispassionate camera work as every scene) in which Anna lies down inverted on the bed (with her head at the foot of the bed and vice versa) and pretends to be a patient under anesthesia; when Kim later attempts to seduce Martin, she assumes this same position, implying that she possesses a knowledge of her parents’ sex lives that is both incomplete and inappropriate. Every relationship possesses an animalistic charge but lacks intimacy, except for Stephen’s mentorship (for lack of a better word) of Martin, which is initially framed as potentially sexual and abusive but ultimately proves to be something equally primal but much, much worse. It’s not absent from the film, however: after foiling an unsuccessful seduction attempt on the part of Martin’s mother (one scene wonder Alicia Silverstone), Stephen later returns to their home in a rage when Martin’s true intentions are revealed, and he threatens/promises to “fuck [Martin] and [his] mother, like [Martin] want[s],” so he is at the very least aware of this tension and how it could appear, but his understanding of the motives are all wrong.

It’s the small moments in which this film proves its great worth, but paradoxically that same sparsity and minimalism in its ending left me unsatisfied as the credits started to roll. Even if you don’t make the immediate connection to the myth of Iphigenia, which is mentioned overtly in a scene wherein Stephen meets his children’s principal to investigate possible causes of their bizarre malady, the phrase “sacred deer” is bound to ping some mental connections for anyone with a familiarity to Greek mythology. Even with that knowledge, there is still an expectation for some kind of explanation for Martin’s apparently supernatural abilities, which never comes. This absence is less disappointing than one would expect, but the film still feels somehow incomplete in its final moments. Perhaps that was intentional; perhaps the evocation of feelings of incompleteness (not necessarily dissatisfaction) was the point of the film as a whole. I’d have to give it another viewing before I could say for sure, but for now, I’m left as cold as the icy blues of the film’s color aesthetic and Kidman’s eyes, although the buoyancy of the film’s choices before its final frames lifts my overall estimation.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond