From “Dogtooth” to “Bugonia”: How Yorgos Lanthimos Made Strangeness Irresistible
In the landscape of modern cinema, Yorgos Lanthimos has emerged as a glorious anomaly: a filmmaker who wields absurdism and discomfort like surgical instruments. With deadpan dialogue, unnerving silences, and an unblinking camera trained on the joke that is the human condition, Lanthimos has carved out one of the most distinctive directorial voices of the 21st century. Before he was the toast of Cannes and the Oscars’ strangest darling, he was quietly sharpening his tools in the fringes of Greek media, directing commercials, music videos, and even the opening ceremonies of the 2004 Athens Olympics, a grand, symbolic spectacle that hinted at the theatrical instinct to come.
But beneath the glossy surface of that mainstream work simmered something stranger. Since then, Lanthimos has made a career out of exposing the raw edges of human emotion. Sometimes irreverent, often deeply unsettling, but always unforgettable, his films hold up a cracked mirror to the audience, reflecting our flaws, our rituals, and the absurd machinery of our lives. With his latest film, Bugonia, another collaboration with his muse, Emma Stone, in theaters now, we thought it was the perfect time to reflect on an auteur working at the peak of his powers—even if he just said he was taking a break from filmmaking.
From Greek Beginnings to Experimental Precision
Lanthimos’ first feature, My Best Friend (2001), co-directed with Greek comedian Lakis Lazopoulos, was a domestic comedy aimed squarely at Greek audiences. The film’s tale of friendship curdling into betrayal was commercially successful at home but invisible abroad. Even so, the seeds of his later sensibility were there: a taste for comic surrealism and a camera that lingered just a little too long, hinting at unease beneath the everyday.
With Kinetta (2005), his solo debut, those instincts exploded into full view. The film follows three strangers who obsessively reenact homicide scenes in an empty resort town, a premise as bizarre as it sounds. Shot largely with a handheld camera, Kinetta trades narrative clarity for visual experimentation. The jittery movements and lack of dialogue demand either the viewer’s full attention or their surrender. That divisive quality would become a Lanthimos trademark: films that force audiences to lean in or walk out.
Dogtooth: Breaking Through the Fence
Everything changed with Dogtooth (2009). Co-written with longtime collaborator Efthimis Filippou, the film presented an authoritarian family unit that had sealed itself off from the world. In their isolated villa, the parents redefined language, fear, and even reality for their adult children in a microcosm of control so perverse it could only feel plausible.
With its sun-bleached cinematography, static framing, and emotionless performances, Dogtooth felt like a home video shot by aliens. Roger Ebert called it “a series of family photographs of a family with something wrong with it.” The film’s precision and perversity stunned audiences at Cannes, where it won the Prix Un Certain Regard, and later earned an Oscar nomination for Best Foreign Language Film. Overnight, Lanthimos became the face of the Greek Weird Wave, his minimalist absurdism marking him as a major new voice in world cinema.
Refining the Ritual: Alps
Lanthimos and Filippou followed with Alps (2011), about a clandestine group that impersonates the recently deceased for grieving families. If Dogtooth was a howl against parental control, Alps dissected the emptiness of identity itself. The film’s rigid framing and clipped, ritualistic dialogue turned everyday interactions into alien ceremonies.
For all its deadpan absurdity, Alps showed Lanthimos growing more deliberate, sculpting discomfort with geometric precision. It won Best Screenplay at Venice and marked the end of his Greek-language period. Next, he would take that same unnerving tone to English-speaking audiences.
The Lobster and the Leap to International Acclaim
When The Lobster (2015) premiered at Cannes, it was clear Lanthimos had made the jump from arthouse curiosity to international auteur without losing his bite. His first English-language feature imagined a dystopia where single people are transformed into animals if they fail to find love within 45 days, a premise that plays like Orwell rewritten by Kafka and deadpanned by Monty Python.
Once again co-written with Filippou, The Lobster married absurdism to emotional precision. The stilted dialogue and flat delivery created a deliberately alien rhythm, making every human interaction feel like a bureaucratic ritual. Lanthimos used sterile hotel corridors, symmetrical compositions, and an icy palette to underline the artificiality of societal norms.
With a cast including Colin Farrell, Rachel Weisz, and Olivia Colman, The Lobster won the Jury Prize at Cannes and earned an Oscar nomination for Best Original Screenplay. It was a breakout moment. Lanthimos had successfully exported his surrealism to Hollywood without compromise. His aesthetic of discomfort had become desirable.
The Sacred and the Strange
Two years later came The Killing of a Sacred Deer (2017), a clinical horror film steeped in Greek tragedy and moral dread. Farrell returned, joined by Nicole Kidman, in a story about a surgeon confronted by an otherworldly teenager demanding retribution.
Here, Lanthimos refined his visual grammar to chilling effect. Gone were the handheld experiments of Kinetta; in their place came Kubrickian precision: wide-angle tracking shots, slow zooms, and coldly symmetrical compositions that drained warmth from every room. The result is a film of suffocating inevitability, where emotion is replaced by ritual and guilt seeps from every frame.
At Cannes, Sacred Deer won Best Screenplay and cemented Lanthimos as a master of psychological unease. By now, his fingerprints of deadpan delivery, ritualistic dialogue, and moral absurdity were unmistakable. He was no longer an outsider but an auteur in full command of his cinematic language.
The Favourite: Mastery Meets Mainstream
In 2018, Lanthimos made his boldest leap yet with The Favourite, a lavish historical comedy that somehow felt entirely his own. Set in Queen Anne’s court, the film traded dystopia for decadence but retained his fascination with power and manipulation.
This time, however, Lanthimos loosened the emotional leash. The performances, especially Olivia Colman’s Oscar-winning turn, were still stylized, but the film pulsed with wit and vitality. What truly set it apart was the camera work. Lanthimos employed fisheye lenses, extreme wide angles, and fluid tracking shots that turned palace corridors into distorted mazes. His visual style became a character in itself, bending space to reflect the instability of courtly politics.
The Favourite earned ten Oscar nominations and grossed more than any of his previous films combined. Yet despite its accessibility, it remained unmistakably Lanthimos in its ability to be darkly funny, emotionally detached, and formally daring. In an era of safe period dramas, he made one that felt dangerous.
Poor Things and the Ascent to Cinematic Royalty
By the time Poor Things arrived in 2023, Lanthimos was no longer the Greek outsider; he was one of cinema’s reigning visionaries. Adapted from Alasdair Gray’s novel, the film reimagines Frankenstein through the lens of feminist liberation, following Bella Baxter (Emma Stone), a woman resurrected by a mad scientist who embarks on a journey of self-discovery and rebellion.
The film is perhaps Lanthimos’ most visually audacious yet. He leans fully into surrealism. Fisheye lenses warp perspective, dreamlike camera sweeps collapse time and space, and the sets pulse with color and imagination. Gothic interiors melt into fantastical cityscapes, creating a world both artificial and alive. Beneath the spectacle lies a biting critique of patriarchy and the reconstruction of identity, elevated to mythic proportions.
Poor Things became his most commercially successful film, sweeping major awards (including Best Actress for Stone) and confirming that his idiosyncratic vision had achieved mainstream resonance. In a cinematic landscape dominated by franchise sameness, Lanthimos proved that strangeness could still captivate.
Kinds of Kindness and Scaling Down the Grandeur
If Poor Things represented Lanthimos at his most extravagant, Kinds of Kindness (2024) marked a return to stark minimalism in a triptych of interconnected tales exploring submission, control, and the desperate need for meaning. Reuniting with Emma Stone and other frequent collaborators, Lanthimos strips away the ornate world-building of his previous film to expose the bare mechanics of human power dynamics. The film’s three segments, each steeped in deadpan cruelty and absurd devotion, form a mosaic of obedience and rebellion, in which faith, love, and identity become commodities to be bartered. Visually, Kinds of Kindness abandons the baroque excess of Poor Things for an austere, almost clinical palette. Static framing, harsh lighting, and deliberate pacing heighten its moral discomfort. It feels like a companion piece to The Killing of a Sacred Deer, a return to cold precision after a fever dream, reminding audiences that beneath Lanthimos’s playful provocations lies an artist still fascinated, perhaps obsessed, with the cost of surrendering one’s will.
Bugonia: Marrying Mental Illness with the Magnificent
In his newest film, Lanthimos treats viewers to a world in which frenetic, schizophrenic logic and the fantastic collide. Lanthimos’ favorite (no pun intended), Emma Stone, plays a businesswoman abducted by two conspiracy theorists, made vulnerable to her kidnapping solely by her hubris. We become enmeshed and entranced by our characters’ deranged and despondent manner, imbued with a naturalistic quality that belies the absurdity of the narrative.
Bugonia offers frankly and succinctly what current filmmakers so often struggle to convey: a perfect example of the cognitive dissonance between logical thought and conspiracy theory in the era of social media. Straight, clean shots and slow pans mimic the sterile, contained manner of our heroine, as well as the unflinching, albeit misjudged, actions of her captors. In his most recent cinematic masterpiece, we can see Lanthimos’s ever-perfected ability to blend the absurd with the abject horror of human existence. Fantasy and banality exist at once in his worlds, offering us reprieve from the predictability of our modern existence.
The Anatomy of an Auteur
Across his career, certain signatures remain constant. Lanthimos’s dialogue is unnervingly stilted, his humor dry to the point of existential despair. He frames characters with geometric rigor, turning human interaction into performance art. His camera, whether handheld and restless or gliding with mechanical precision, always implicates the viewer, forcing us to question our comfort.
His films unfold like rituals: language reduced to code, emotion stripped of sentimentality, and behavior rendered alien. Yet within this cold precision lies something deeply human: a fascination with our attempts to make meaning, to impose order on chaos. He shows us the absurdity of our social scripts, but also their necessity.
As his career continues—hopefully, the break he says he’s taking is to recharge his batteries—the question is no longer whether Lanthimos belongs among cinema’s greats, but where he’ll take us next. Whatever the answer, it will be strange, unsettling, and entirely his own. Because that’s the world according to Yorgos Lanthimos, and we are all, willingly, trapped inside his lens.
Featured image: Yorgos Lanthimos and Emma Stone on the set of POOR THINGS. Photo by Atsushi Nishijima. Courtesy of Searchlight Pictures. © 2023 Searchlight Pictures All Rights Reserved.
