Yorgos Lanthimos is Not Your Friend

Last year, Yorgos Lanthimos directed a dark comedy about a woman named Bella who was assembled from the body of an adult and the brain of a fetus in a Frankenstein-like surgery and who went on to fuck her way to self-actualization across a fantastical Europe. It was the most accessible thing the Athens-born director had ever made, which really says more about his overall body of work than it does about Poor Things.

Lanthimos is one of film’s reigning sadists, though he’s always funny about it — if not funny haha, then funny in a tone so arid as to render the humor borderline subliminal. He makes films set in deadpan universes that sit at Dutch angles to our own and feature characters struggling to live in accordance with arbitrary and frequently cruel conventions. All of which is true of Poor Things as well. What sets it apart is the way that Bella, the wiped-blank heroine played by Emma Stone, rejects the rules and strictures she’s told she has to abide by as she speedruns her way from child to woman of the world. Lanthimos, as unlikely as it seemed, had created a story of empowerment as well as something tailor-made to polarize the internet.

The frankness of the sexual content — which begins with Bella’s innocent explorations of her own body, progresses to her voracious pursuit of what she calls “furious jumping” with a louche lawyer played by Mark Ruffalo, and eventually brings her to work in a Parisian brothel — kicked off arguments about the degree to which Poor Things is mired in the male gaze. It seemed as though the only person who didn’t care to weigh in on the validity of the film’s feminism was the filmmaker himself, who shied away from the label like someone being introduced as a boyfriend by a person they thought they were just casually dating.

Watching the world discover Lanthimos by way of one of his least characteristic and, honestly, weakest films has been akin to watching someone you know become the internet’s latest main character, stripped of other context with their actions scrutinized via a very specific lens. Lanthimos is many things — a champion absurdist, an arguable nihilist, an occasional edgelord, and an artist who has maintained a decidedly Euro sensibility despite having worked in English with Hollywood actors since 2015. His movies have the brain-burrowing quality of an insomniac’s thought spiral and are so insistently off-kilter that the Greek Weird Wave, the movement he’s sometimes described as being a part of, feels less like
a trend in national cinema and more like a summary of how his distinct sensibility has filtered through to some of his peers. If he considers himself a feminist — and there’s no reason to believe he wouldn’t, even if there is a “please clap” quality to Bella’s journey in Poor Things that leaves it lacking in conviction — it has felt largely incidental until this point.

His work does have an awareness of the role that gender plays in the abuse
of power and in sexual violence, and his films feature their own fun-house-mirror versions of patriarchy. But when it comes to the degradations his characters are subjected to, he’s equal opportunity. The most challenging aspect of his movies, which run the gamut from the brilliant (Dogtooth, The Favourite) to the irritatingly opaque (Kinetta, The Killing of a Sacred Deer), has more to do with the impassivity of his gaze and the delectable swagger behind it. He skewers his characters like he’s pinning butterflies to corkboard, and it’s not always evident whether that’s done in service of some greater purpose or out of a more basic desire to provoke. Kinds of Kindness, his hilariously hostile follow-up to Poor Things, is a return to the director’s primary interest, which has always been control. In particular, he’s fascinated by what makes people continue to obey, how they fumblingly fit themselves into roles laid out for them, why they might submit to the will of others even when it causes them harm.

The anthology film, which premiered earlier this year at Cannes, is made up of a trio of surreal fables rife with coercion, druggings, assaults, and self-mutilation. In its first section, Jesse Plemons plays a man who lives his entire life — from the clothes he wears to the house he lives in, the woman he marries, and the size of their family (he puts an abortifacient in his wife’s coffee to maintain their childless state) — according to the dictates of his boss (Willem Dafoe). In the second, Plemons is a cop who subjects a woman (Stone) who claims to be his missing wife to a series of escalating tests in order to prove she’s an impostor. (The ensemble, which includes Joe Alwyn, Mamoudou Athie, Hong Chau, and Margaret Qualley, recurs across each part.) And in the third, Stone belongs to a cult whose members pledge sexual fidelity to its two leaders and are in search of a messiah — a position that involves being able to raise the dead but also having the correct distance between your nipples. Lanthimos has made inroads with American audiences, but Kinds of Kindness brings to mind his earlier and less approachable work, which is in Greek and focuses on the dynamics of people devoted to inscrutable group activities that involve turning yourself over to someone else’s whims.

There’s also an obsessive cop in Kinetta, Lanthimos’s barely parsable 2005 solo debut, one consumed with coaching a hotel maid and a photoshop clerk through reenactments of violent crimes, a project they keep coming back to despite its appearing to make them miserable. There’s a cultlike collective in his 2011 Alps, a group of four people who, as a service to the bereaved, fill in for people who have died, wearing the deceased’s clothing and parroting past conversations — a process that leads one of its members, played by Lanthimos’s favorite non-American leading lady, Angeliki Papoulia, to become destructively overinvested. These aren’t films about people who overcome limitations and discover themselves but something uneasier: films about people who barely have a sense of self at all and who accept being told what to do because they’re at a loss otherwise.

It’s fair to say that all of Lanthimos’s movies are meant to be received as comedies, even 2017’s The Killing of a Sacred Deer, which takes on the contours of a thriller when members of a family learn they’re required to sacrifice one of their own. But he isn’t in any way a warm filmmaker, which may have something to do with how so many of the oddball enterprises his characters are involved in read as distorted versions of filmmaking with someone in charge of direction and others playing parts. His characters are unfailingly stilted and juvenile and a little alien, designed to keep the viewer at arm’s length rather than to invite sympathy. Given how regularly his films veer toward debasement, that distance serves as a protective measure, a means of making the ludicrous and disturbing situations he conjures up easier to tolerate.

The most excruciating sequence in his entire filmography, in 2009’s Dogtooth, rests entirely on the mechanical behavior of its participants. Papoulia, as one of three adult siblings who were raised in stunted isolation, is directed to have sex with her brother by their parents, who have created a whole mythology about the dangers of the outside world but who fully buy into the idea that men have urges that must be tended to. Lanthimos shoots the encounter in a series of frank, static shots that leave nothing to the imagination until the end, when the film cuts to Papoulia’s character in profile, her brother visible only in the reflection of the mirror as he moves above her, her face contorted in an involuntary grimace. This framing is echoed in Kinds of Kindness in a scene in which one of Stone’s characters is roofied and then raped, her head jostling as her unconscious body is assaulted by someone offscreen. These aren’t moments anyone would trumpet as feminist, though what’s upsetting about them isn’t that they feel exploitative — it’s that they’re presented impassively, with no more compassion than prurience and with an unsparing gaze that provides no guidance for what a viewer is supposed to feel aside from discomfort.

There’s something haunting about how Lanthimos keeps returning to these dynamics. He treats the desire to be dominated as an elemental aspect of human nature, though it’s one he prefers to explore on a granular level. He may not offer empathy to these characters, but he doesn’t hold himself apart from them. If the triumphant found-family ending of Poor Things rings false, that’s only because it provides closure when his efforts are very much ongoing.

It’s ridiculous to allow the executive you work for to decide what you should read at night and how many children you can have, but it’s worth reflecting on the forces shaping each of our own decisions on those matters. That’s not an especially friendly way to think about how we all exist in the world — but then Yorgos Lanthimos was never your friend.