The Greek director who has become one of the most-recognised authorial voices in contemporary international cinema. His specific tonal register — deadpan absurdism delivered without comedic framing — has shaped a small but distinct contemporary movement.
Yorgos Lanthimos was, by 2009, working within the Greek Weird Wave — a small movement of Athenian directors (Athina Rachel Tsangari, Babis Makridis, Argyris Papadimitropoulos) producing low-budget films built around absurd premises delivered in deadpan register. Lanthimos's Dogtooth (2009) was the breakthrough; the film won the Un Certain Regard prize at Cannes and was nominated for Best Foreign Language Film at the Oscars.
He transitioned to English-language production with The Lobster (2015) and has since produced increasingly major work: The Killing of a Sacred Deer (2017), The Favourite (2018, four Oscars), Poor Things (2023, four Oscars including Best Actress for Emma Stone), and Kinds of Kindness (2024). The progression from low-budget Greek-language production to major English-language Oscar-winners has been one of the most-significant career trajectories in contemporary international cinema.
The Emma Stone collaboration has, across The Favourite, Poor Things, and Kinds of Kindness, become one of the most-significant working director-actor partnerships of the 2020s. Stone has appeared in three consecutive Lanthimos films and won her second Best Actress Oscar for Poor Things in 2024.
Lanthimos's specific tonal register is deadpan absurdism delivered without conventional comedic framing. The films present obviously-absurd premises (a hotel where single guests are turned into animals after 45 days; an aristocratic court whose rivalries are conducted through ducks and dance numbers) as if they were ordinary realities. The characters discuss the premises matter-of-factly. The camera frames the action without ironic commentary. The audience is left to register the absurdity without the film's apparent assistance.
What this produces is a specific dramatic experience that conventional cinema does not deliver. The audience must constantly hold two interpretive frameworks together — the surface frame in which the characters' world is normal, and the secondary frame in which the surface is obviously not normal. The discomfort the films produce is, in some sense, the structural reading the films are designed to produce.
Lanthimos's transition from Greek-language to English-language production is one of the more-discussed contemporary cases of an international director moving to mainstream-Hollywood scale. The Greek-language films (Kinetta 2005, Dogtooth 2009, Alps 2011) were extremely low-budget. The Lobster (2015) was his first English-language feature; the budget was approximately $4m. The Favourite (2018) was around $15m. Poor Things (2023) was around $35m.
Each step up in budget has produced different working conditions. The Greek films were made with a small group of regular collaborators (Efthymis Filippou as co-writer, Aris Servetalis as recurring lead). The English-language films have featured major international actors (Colin Farrell, Olivia Colman, Emma Stone, Willem Dafoe) and significantly more elaborate production design. The films have, by general critical consensus, retained the Lanthimos register across the scale increase; the work has not become less specifically his with the larger budgets.
Lanthimos's filmography is interested in specific recurring concerns. Social rules followed without question. Bodies as material for transformation. The family as a unit of control. The relationship between language and reality (his characters often speak in deliberately formal or stilted registers that the films do not explain). Surveillance and power. The films are not allegorical in any straightforward sense — they do not, as a rule, map onto specific contemporary political situations — but they share a structural interest in the absurdity of how social structures actually operate.
Poor Things (2023) is the film that most-clearly extends these concerns. The protagonist Bella Baxter is a young woman whose brain has been replaced with that of her infant daughter; the film tracks her psychological development from infant-in-adult-body to fully-developed adult across the runtime. The premise is, on its surface, absurd. The film treats it as the structural premise of a coming-of-age drama. The Emma Stone Best Actress Oscar honoured a performance that operates simultaneously as physical-comedy work, dramatic transformation across the runtime, and an extended argument about how social development actually proceeds.
If you've never watched a Lanthimos film:
Luis Buñuel, Michael Haneke, the Greek theatrical tradition, the broader European art-cinema register of the 2000s, and the deadpan-absurd tradition that runs through Aki Kaurismäki and Roy Andersson.