Kinds of Kindness (Yorgos Lanthimos, 2024)

Margaret Qualley, Jesse Plemons, and Willem Dafoe in Kinds of Kindness

Cast: Emma Stone, Jesse Plemons, Willem Dafoe, Margaret Qualley, Joe Alwyn, Hong Chau, Mamadou Athie, Yorgos Stefanos, Hunter Schafer. Screenplay: Yorgos Lanthimos, Efthimis Filippou. Cinematography: Robbie Ryan. Production design: Anthony Gasparro. Film editing: Yorgos Mavropsaridis. Music: Jerskin Fendrix.  

Poor Things (Yorgos Lanthimos, 2023)

Emma Stone in Poor Things

Cast: Emma Stone, Mark Ruffalo, Willem Dafoe, Ramy Youssef, Christopher Abbott, Suzy Bemba, Jerrod Carmichael, Kathryn Hunter, Vicki Pepperdine, Margaret Qualley, Hanna Schygulla. Screenplay: Tony McNamara, based on a novel by Alasdair Gray. Cinematography: Robbie Ryan. Production design: Shona Heath, James Price. Film editing: Yorgos Mavropsaridis. Music: Jerskin Fendrix. 

Attenberg (Athina Rachel Tsangari, 2010)

Evangelia Randou and Ariane Labed in Attenberg

Cast: Ariane Labed, Vangelis Mourikis, Evangelia Randou, Yorgos Lanthimos, Alexandros Niagros, Kostas Berikopoulos. Screenplay: Athina Rachel Tsangari. Cinematography: Thimios Bakatakis. Set decoration: Dafni Kalogianni. Film editing: Sandrine Cheyrol, Matthew Johnson.

I don't know much about the so-called "Greek New Wave" (which has also been called the "Weird Wave," from the uncanny quality of some of its films) beyond the work of Yorgos Lanthimos, who has broken out into international prominence. And now I've seen Athina Rachel Tsangari's Attenberg, which isn't really much like Lanthimos's work, except that he has an on-screen role in it and was one of its producers. It's the story of Marina (Ariane Labed), a young woman who works in a steel mill and tends to her father, Spyros (Vangelis Mourikis), who is terminally ill. When she's not doing that, she's with her friend Bella (Evangelia Randou), talking about her alienation from other human beings and about sex -- the latter involving some experimentation with various forms of kissing. Oh, and occasionally doing some routines that look like John Cleese's old "silly walks" bit for Monty Python. Marina looks on human behavior with the kind of distanced curiosity with which she watches the TV nature documentaries by David Attenborough. (A mispronunciation of his name gives the film its otherwise inexplicable title.) Eventually she has sex with an engineer played by Lanthimos, and encourages Bella to have sex with the dying Spyros. He dies, Marina and Bella scatter his ashes, and the film closes by watching trucks hauling dirt from a mine. Yet somehow Attenberg is strangely watchable, enough to keep me pondering its oblique view of the characters and their world.

The Favourite (Yorgos Lanthimos, 2018)

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Alps (Yorgos Lanthimos, 2011)

Aris Servetalis in Alps

Nurse: Angeliki Papoulia
Stretcher-bearer: Aris Servetalis
Coach: Johnny Vekris
Gymnast: Ariane Labed
Lamp Shop Owner: Efthymis Filippou
Teenager: Nikos Galgadis
Tennis Player: Maria Kyrozi
Tennis Player's Mother: Tina Papanikolaou
Tennis Player's Father: Sotiris Papastamatiou
Nurse's Father: Stavros Psyllakis
Nurse's Father's Girlfriend: Konstadina Papoulia
Blind Woman: Eftychia Stefanidou

Director: Yorgos Lanthimos
Screenplay: Efthymis Filippou, Yorgos Lanthimos
Cinematography: Christos Voudouris
Set decoration: Anna Georgiadou
Film editing: Yorgos Mavropsaridis

Like his Dogtooth (2009), The Lobster (2015), and The Killing of a Sacred Deer (2017), Yorgos Lanthimo's Alps is a fable about hubris, a kind of screwball tragedy. The Alps are four people who have taken it upon themselves to relieve the suffering of those whose loved ones have recently died. This they do by acting as surrogates for the dead, reliving moments the bereaved once shared with their loved ones, which can range from conversations to care-giving (one of the bereaved is blind) to sex. The head Alp, who calls himself Mont Blanc, is an ambulance driver, and another Alp, who calls herself Monte Rosa, is a nurse, which puts them both in a good position to locate those in need of their services. The other two are a young gymnast and her hypercontrolling coach. We first meet them when the gymnast is performing a floor routine to the accompaniment of "O Fortuna" from Carl Orff's Carmina Burana. She protests that she wants to perform to pop music, but he sternly insists that she's not ready for that yet. The gymnast, however, is deemed ready for her first turn as a surrogate, and the opportunity affords itself when the ambulance driver brings in a young accident victim, and the nurse takes over care of her as a patient, ingratiating herself with the young woman's parents. But the nurse has other plans: She wants to take over as the surrogate and pocket the money earned herself. So when the patient dies, she tells the other Alps that the woman has gone home to recuperate. What plot Alps contains centers on this subterfuge and its discovery. Other Alpine relationships form the rest of the story, which like most of the films directed by Lanthimos and co-written with Efthymis Filippou, becomes engagingly weirder as it goes along. Some critics have objected to the detached tone of the film -- Roger Ebert called it "a sterile exercise" -- and following it is sometimes like trying to work a puzzle in the dark -- Christos Voudouris's cinematography literally keeps some scenes in the shadows -- but Lanthimos is, as usual, a filmmaker like no other.

The Killing of a Sacred Deer (Yorgos Lanthimos, 2017)

Colin Farrell in The Killing of a Sacred Deer

Steven Murphy: Colin Farrell
Anna Murphy: Nicole Kidman
Martin: Barry Keoghan
Kim Murphy: Raffey Cassidy
Bob Murphy: Sunny Suljic
Matthew Williams: Bill Camp
Martin's Mother: Alicia Silverstone

Director: Yorgos Lanthimos
Screenplay: Yorgos Lanthimos, Efthymis Filippou
Cinematography: Thimios Bakatakis
Production design: Jade Healy
Film editing: Yorgos Mavropsaridis

This is only the third film by Yorgos Lanthimos that I've seen, but I'd say that he and his screenwriting partner, Efthymis Filippou, have a beef with people who play god. In Dogtooth (2009) it was the parents who attempt to create their own utopia by keeping their children ignorant of the outside world. In The Lobster (2015) it was the manager of the hotel that purports to find its residents new mates. And in The Killing of a Sacred Deer it's that archetypal god-player, the surgeon, who finds that the son of a patient he may have killed on the operating table has a mysterious power over him and his family. Behind this film lies a Greek myth about hubris, specifically the story of the punishment meted out by the gods to the house of Atreus, as reflected in the Euripedean tragedy Iphigenia in Aulis, which is referred to in the film as well as its title. But Lanthimos isn't interested in a direct transmutation of the Greek legend into modern terms. His film is a droll, underplayed, and often quite chilling tale that keeps one foot in reality while plaguing the characters with forces that come out of myths about the Fates and the Furies. It's as creepy as any horror movie you can name, but because the cast is so skilled at underplaying I found myself laughing -- a little nervously, yes -- at the absurdities in which their characters found themselves as much as I was flinching at the mental and physical pain they were undergoing. Sex in the film is a kind of torment: Anna Murphy seems to be able to get off only by first lying in an awkward position, dangling from the bed, and she is forced to give the rather unpleasant anesthesiologist (who may have been the one who really killed the patient) a hand job to gain information about their tormentor. That tormentor, Martin, seems to have an attraction to Steven Murphy that he tries to fulfill by pimping out his own mother. Much is made of the fact that Kim, the daughter, is having her first period. And so on. The Killing of a Sacred Deer is such an accumulation of odd details that it almost founders underneath them, and if you're looking for a conventional narrative payoff, go elsewhere. But there is a strange genius at work here, and I'm eager to see more from Lanthimos, including The Favourite, which is getting extraordinary attention now in awards season.

Dogtooth (Yorgos Lanthimos, 2009)

Angeliki Papoulia, Mary Tsoni, Hristos Passalis, Michele Valley, and Christos Stergioglou in Dogtooth

Father: Christos Stergioglou
Mother: Michele Valley
Older Daughter: Angeliki Papoulia
Son: Hristos Passalis
Younger Daughter: Mary Tsoni
Christina: Anna Kalaitzidou

Director: Yorgos Lanthimos
Screenplay: Efthymis Philippou, Yorgos Lanthimos
Cinematography: Thimios Bakatakis

Dogtooth might be taken as a satire on helicopter parenting, were it not that the imagination of Yorgos Lanthimos seems too expansive to be confined that way. The film begins with Mother providing vocabulary lessons to her children, except that the definitions of the words are hilariously incorrect: The word "sea," for example, means "a large armchair." And soon we meet Father, who is bringing home Christina, a young female security guard from the place where he works. She is securely blindfolded during the trip, and when they get there she is shown to a room where she and the Son strip and have sex -- a task the Father occasionally hires her to perform. Other than that, the three children, all of them young adults, have no contact with the outside world -- they've been told that they can go outside only when they shed one of their "dogteeth." They live in an expensive house surrounded by a high wall, and are never allowed outside. They have a television set, but it is used only for home videos. When a cat wanders onto the grounds, the Son kills it with garden shears, and on learning of the intruder the Father slashes his clothes and smears himself with fake blood, then tells them that cats are the most dangerous creatures on Earth and has them get down on all fours and bark like dogs, training them on how to respond if another cat should make its way into their enclave. Eventually, however, the world intrudes, largely because of Christina, who gets bored with the perfunctory sex with the Son, who refuses to gratify her orally, so she teaches the Older Daughter the fine art of cunnilingus, setting off some experiments with licking between the two daughters, usually involving body parts like the shoulder or the inside of the thigh. Christina also gives the Older Daughter some videotapes in exchange for her sexual favors. We gather from the Older Daughter's parroting of lines from the movies that they include Rocky (John G. Avildsen, 1976) and Jaws (Steven Spielberg, 1975). When Christina's transgression is discovered, she's banished from the enclave and the parents decide that one of the daughters should take her place in gratifying the Son. But the damage has been done: Older Daughter knocks out one of her canines with a dumbbell and, bleeding profusely, hides in the trunk of the Father's Mercedes. The macabre humor of Lanthimos's film lends itself to all sorts of interpretations: Is it, for example, a lampoon of homeschooling? A fable about the repressive power of society? A knock on utopian theorizing? Dogtooth never quite goes as crazily baroque as Lanthimos's The Lobster (2015) -- or, to judge from the reviews, his latest, The Killing of a Sacred Deer (2017) -- but its consistent exploration of a warped worldview is fascinating.

The Lobster (Yorgos Lanthimos, 2015)

Colin Farrell has had an odd career, never quite making it to major stardom, but continuing to work in sometimes offbeat films like the wonderful In Bruges (Martin McDonagh, 2008). And when it comes to offbeat, there are few films that march to a more eccentric drummer than The Lobster, in which Farrell has tamped down his typically assertive persona and bloated his trim figure with an unhealthy-looking paunch. It's not quite the transformative performance that often wins Oscars for actors, though it has earned Farrell quite a few nominations from critics groups as well as one for a Golden Globe. Farrell plays David, whose recent breakup with his wife has caused him to be sent to a hotel whose residents are given 45 days to find another partner. If they fail to do so, they are turned into animals -- David tells the hotel manager (Olivia Colman) that he wants to be turned into a lobster. He is accompanied to the hotel by his brother, who has already been turned into a dog. But ... oh, there's no point in going on with a summary. It's a film of multiple turns and revelations, each of which has to be discovered by viewers with their own fresh insights into the quite unusual vision of its director, Yorgos Lanthimos, and his co-screenwriter, Efthymis Filippou. It's part dystopian fantasy, part tragicomedy, part satire, part fable. Farrell is quite good, as are Colman, Rachel Weisz, John C. Reilly, Léa Seydoux, and Ben Whishaw as the present and former residents of the hotel, some of whom have escaped into the woods to avoid being transformed and are now in a kind of guerrilla war with the residents. Comparisons to Kafka's stories have inevitably been made, and while it's not quite of that exalted original order, The Lobster is one of the few recent films that feel fresh and daring.