Poor Things (2023)

Director: Yorgos Lanthimos

Screenplay: Tony McNamara

Based on the novel by Alasdair Gray

Cast: Emma Stone as Bella Baxter, Mark Ruffalo as Duncan Wedderburn, Willem Dafoe as Dr. Godwin "God" Baxter, Ramy Youssef as Max McCandles, Christopher Abbott as Alfie Blessington, Kathryn Hunter as Madame Swiney, Jerrod Carmichael as Harry Astley, Hanna Schygulla as Martha von Kurtzroc, Margaret Qualley as Felicity, Vicki Pepperdine as Mrs. Prim

An Abstract Candidate

 

There was something perversely delightful in seeing Poor Things in a multiplex in the afternoon, rather than at night at a specialist cinema. Despite having been a big prestige production, with a Best Picture nomination at the 96th Academy Awards, we are still dealing with a horror/dark comedy with very adult content and subject matter, sexually explicitly and proudly weird. Based on the work by Alasdair Gray, an acclaimed Scottish author and artist, and involving Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos, behind transgressive and idiosyncratic productions in his homeland like Dogtooth (2009), it makes me proud that a director I always admired in Lanthimos managed to find a way to enter the British film production industry, with this a British-US-Irish co-production, and not yet compromise his interest in the idiosyncrasies and weirdness of human behaviour.

What we get is a retelling of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein if taking the next logical step in how, once Victor Frankenstein created his being, the being becomes Dr. Godwin Baxter as played by Willem Dafoe, a begrudgingly accepted member of Victorian society and a teacher of human anatomy and surgery in London. Central to the film, as a huge contributor as a co-producer and the lead, is Emma Stone as the logical extension of the Bride of Frankenstein, or in this case the Daughter of Frankenstein in Bella. It is a slight spoiler, but she is a woman who originally committed suicide, throwing herself off London Bridge, only for Baxter to resurrect her with the mind of her unborn child in her womb placing the mother's mind, bringing to life a figure who starts as a grown woman with the mind of the child until she begins to mature psychologically. One of Baxter's students Max McCandles (Ramy Youssef) is hired to record her progress, falling for her but with Bella herself always the central character, as her growing self awareness leads her to want to leave the house she has lived in all her life.

It is fascinating to see Lanthimos break through over the years, and here he gets to have the most visually ambitious of his work, an alternative Victorian era world where Bella is our centre, beginning to grasp the world around her slowly in a confined and artificial world under a father she literally calls God. Her journey, played as absurdist and deliberately provocative, is learning back to Dogtooth in the prologue, under her loving father's thumb until he relents to let her have a worldwide affair with a chad named Duncan Wedderburn (Mark Ruffalo). Dogtooth was about a patriarchal figure forcing a confined world on his adult children with their own logic, but here there is the inverse to that film where God relents and lets her, after her discovery of adolescence and her sexuality at the dining table, go off with this womaniser aware of the necessary to let her grow. To the growing frustrations of Duncan, Mark Ruffalo eventually becoming one of the funniest figures in the film for how increasingly exasperated he becomes, Bella's journey becomes existential as she grows and learns of the world in her own way.

The obvious themes, set in the Victorian era, is definitely with "civilised" society as reflected in all the men in Bella's life, how she is meant to be to them in terms of acceptable behaviour and manners, but it does avoid locking this theme to the past, thus neutering the thought experiments of this theme, entirely because this is also set in its own exaggerated world. This forces one to experience Bella's journey personally without necessarily the danger of a realistic historical depiction of the past possible to use as a distancing tool to how this still connects to the current world. It becomes more hypothetical, with its incredibly luscious set designs and fictional worlds, Lisbon turned into a fantasy land with cable cars in the air, but still dealing with the problems which Bella starts to pick up from around herself, all whilst growing awareness from her impulsive interest in the outer world to awareness of others and empathy. I have heard of readings of her as well in terms of the autistic spectrum which, as someone with autism myself, should have been obvious but does consider how much nuisance needs to be considered, from a female viewer with autism, to give a proper reading on this. Certainly, with Bella, though she is initially set up as the child-woman who gains weight to her life as she matures, I do see something I have come to develop as I become older as an autistic person, seeing normalised behaviours meant to be rational as more increasingly subjective and even questionable in their acceptable in behaviour ticks. This is reflect especially here with the taboos Bella casually cuts down as pointless as she learns basic pleasures, learns about her sexuality and her liberation, and all with eventual self awareness. Even if her own perspective separate from others, which is bolstered by the profane sense of humour, hers is a progress towards to better.

It is a great performance by Emma Stone. Committed certainly and willing to work with a sense of complete trust and skill to pull it off, as was the case for the likes of Angeliki Papoulia in his earlier made films, it is not for the obvious aspects like the numerous scenes of nudity which makes this a difficult role, but the initial version of her as a child-woman which she documented was insanely challenging to accomplish without some emotional strain¹. With the help of the script by Tony McNamara, hers like everyone's dialogue is full of idiosyncratic language alongside her own idiosyncratic movements, really needed together to make Bella succeed as a character. Wordplay to her distinct turns of phrase filter through the many subjects she has to deal with, such as her befuddlement of not behaving as she is supposed to be to men, or the wrongs of sex work as a credible method of liberation for her and for pay. This is alongside that idea earlier mentioned, as an autistic viewer, that you can see her finding the negatively weird and irrational behaviour which is supposed to be "normal" with the curiosity I and likely others on the spectrum have felt.

At one point in Lisbon, especially with the distinct costume designs by Holly Waddington, I could not help but think of Frank Henenlotter's Frankenhooker (1990), a deliberately tasteless title for a ridiculous premise he literally had to create within seconds in a pitch meeting but made into a memorable horror-comedy, but this becomes the logical progression of what that film hinted at but could not get to. That being how male figures built the perfect woman literally and metaphorically, a daughter surrogate here for Godwin and a perfect lover Duncan, only for her to become fully of her free will, a force of energy stomping around whilst the men are the exasperated ones who cannot comprehend she will not just be their idealised template for them to own. Ruffalo, who got a Best Supporting Actor nomination alongside Stone for Best Actress at the Academy Awards, is the perfect figure for this, the erudite git who gets the funniest lines when he cannot control and dictate what Bella is as a person, finding her way in her own logic and prodding his contradictory mood swings.

You tend to forget, when multiplexes are a place of usually teen friendly films, that we still can have very adult films in violence and sexually explicit themes once in a while, but normally not screened in the middle of a pleasant afternoon, especially when this gets to Bella eventually learning the complex realities of life and how to be empowered whilst working in a brothel in France. The deadpan nature depicting this type of content, even moments of extreme violence, however has been with Yorgos Lanthimos since his earlier films. What I did not expect him, whilst his cinematographer Robbie Ryan was inspired by Francis Ford Coppola's 1992 adaptation of Dracula², was to also have gone from a template for the New Greek Weird Wave of films of stark minimalism to possibly being inspired by Tim Burton all whilst retaining his own maximalist style.

The first act, Bella's childhood before she leaves her father's home, is almost entirely monochrome with a fish eyed lens to distort the world around her. A part of this helps lead the viewer gently into this world, as much as a film with prominent CGI effects alongside the practical ones as Godwin's home is populated with incredibly strange and well done animal hybrids never explained but he clearly created, like bulldog chicken hybrids or the duck dog. Burton is apt a comparison as, whilst sexual desire only occasionally crept into his films, Burton liked played with the macabre and sickly humorous, and with some of his films being as gory as this occasionally gets into, there is unexpected bedfellows with this film even if we get into themes of its own creators. Lanthimos is not that different in the morbid humour here, barring that he adds as well his own touches, his own influences in the artistic style of the film and his interest the viewing humanity like a scientist watches bacteria under a microscope, examining their weird behaviours since Kinetta (2005).

The more explicit politics is different to Burton too, at least in how they are treated here openly, really cemented when we get to Bella being on a ship between oceans and beginning to learn the harsh realities of life through a legitimate cynic played by Jerrod Carmichael. It never becomes heavy handed here due to the sense of humour this introduces between these moments, be it Mark Ruffalo having a meltdown learning his money has been donated to charity, to the brothel Madame in France played by Kathryn Hunter, covered in tattoos, having a frank and thoughtful attitude to her profession, open to Bella's inquisitiveness and for all her female employees whilst with a habit of playful love bites for her young female employees. The one moment where this gets close to heavy handedness to a detriment is addressing Bella's origins, needed to close her arch and introduce Alfie Blessington (Christopher Abbott), who is arguably a stereotype due to the little time we get to fully flesh out his true evil. Of her past, he represents what is evil, the colonial soldier who says Jesus would beat her up with a baseball bat, as her husband from the past, for her sins, and yet abuses his staff for fun and believes in female circumcision. He is still worth having as he presents the last example of masculinity needed to be castrated in the film, the toxic patriarch, and the one closest to the period setting whose form still sadly permeates Western culture, the colonialist who with his home full of weapons and appropriate African icons distort the likes of the Christ's teachings to be pure white male empowerment fantasies, that of dictating the world to everyone not Anglo-Saxon or male. He is the true villain, as even Godwin for his crimes, including trying to create a new Bella, becomes in a nuisance to the film's virtue the father to her daughter she accepts and loves even for all his mistakes. In contrast, Blessington is the figure you need to see who makes even Ruffalo's Duncan just misguided. He argues, for a film already close to two and a half hours, that it needed to be three hours, to deal with the real challenge that enforces Bella's full growth as a figure, particularly as we could have gotten into more explicit issues of class conflict and colonial attitudes, and without losing the resolution we get, [Spoilers] involving goat's brains [Spoilers End].

In context to mainstream cinema, the stereotype rather than the reality including the image perceived of Best Picture Oscar nominees in the past, Poor Things is magnificently bonkers, transgressive and visually resplendent cinema that is to be appreciated. It is a delightfully expressive film, dealing with grim subjects still of the director's cinema but at a point he was able to escape being stereotyped to one form of cinema only. He fully emphasises the true meaning of the auteur theory, that this is his film but where we have to rightly credit as well the differences that came from the figures who contributed to this specific film - great performances, great scriptwriting, great production design from the sets to the model shot work, and a great score from Jerskin Fendrix, making his debut here in composing for a film, who at times evokes the scores Michael Nyman enriched the films of Peter Greenaway with, a huge compliment from my part to nod to. With knowledge Lanthimos tracked down Alasdair Gray before his 2019 passing to adapt the novel, only to learn of Gray's admiration of Dogtooth the film itself¹, adds a wonderful emotional bow to the work, which this was clearly a labour of love for Yorgos Lanthimos. He was able to clearly make a film without compromise, and Lanthimos and everyone in the production of this should pat themselves on the back, on the image onscreen or behind them, for the accomplishment.

Abstract Spectrum: Eccentric

Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): None

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1) Exclusive: Emma Stone and Yorgos Lanthimos on Creating a Woman Free of Shame in Poor Things, written by Emma Specter and published by Vogue for May 31th 2023.

2) Poor Things’ cinematographer on lighting a sex comedy, being inspired by Francis Ford Coppola, written by Jason Struss and published by Digital Trends on December 9th 2023.

Alps (2011)

From http://www.altcine.com/posters/
photo/AlpsPoster.jpg

Director: Yorgos Lanthimos

Screenplay: Yorgos Lanthimos and Efthymis Filippou

Cast: Aris Servetalis (as the Ambulance Medic); Johnny Vekris (as the Coach); Ariane Labed (as the Gymnast); Angeliki Papoulia (as the Nurse); Stavros Psyllakis (as the Nurse's father)

Synopsis: In modern day Greece, a small group of people - an emergency ambulance medic (Servetalis), a gymnast (Labed) and her couch (Vekris), and a nurse (Papoulia) - decide to create a service where they act like surrogates of the recently passed away for bereaving families and loved ones. The boundaries start to blur when the Nurse, becoming obsessed with a female tennis prodigy, decides to be her surrogate when she dies for her parents without informing the rest of the group.

At this point Yorgos Lanthimos is one of my favourite working directors. Still in his prime, which gives me hope for the future for a long career, even his English language debut The Lobster (2015), when other non-English directors have stumbled with Hollywood a-list casts and English dialogue, felt like he didn't have to change anything about his style at all and actually forced the outside influences to follow his viewpoint instead. Dogtooth (2009) was a significant milestone in modern Greek cinema outside the country at least from my perspective, awakening an interest in a new wave of films  from Greece with naturalistic minimalism in the look of the films but an interest in the surreal, but whilst his style matches other films like Chevalier (2015), Lanthimos especially now has a clear auteurist style of his own. His ability to transition to English and a Hollywood cast was incredibly easy for him because his work is all about an alien take of mundanity at its most farcical, taking ordinary life, especially conversations, and distilling them down until they are utterly strange, the actions and behaviour of his characters mundane in real life turned into something inherently bizarre.

Alps seamlessly fits between Dogtooth and The Lobster as the more quiet of an unofficial trilogy, dealing with a various philosophical topic of death like The Lobster dealt with the nature of romance and love, like the other two films using idiosyncratic little details in characters' behaviour and exaggerating them until they are absurd. How the gymnast's desire to become better is filter edthrough wanting to transition from classical to pop. How what one's work place mug for hot drinks or who their favourite actor dictates who that person is as an individual. In lieu to a film about people having to become the deceased, learning as much about them to pose as the love one as if death has not happened, the idea that a person can be charted as an individual by whether they like Jude Law or Brad Pitt becomes pertinent in Lanthimos' constant, prevailing obsession with how human beings act in a modern society, whether it's one created within a home with no knowledge of the outside world like in Dogtooth or this world in Alps where there's more freedom but characters needing rituals to function.

The rituals spike into more perplexing aspects which are done as part of said ritual, such as punishing a surrogate for failing at their work by forcing them to hang upside down repeating a phrase they use for a certain client. Not surprisingly the relationship between the surrogate and client breaks down but it's the customers who instigate this disintegration first. As the rituals become more complicated - a blind woman getting two surrogates, playing her late husband and a female friend of hers, to pretend to cheat on her - you also get sexual relationships which the leader the Medic prohibits. Eventually as well the Nurse 's actions, taking on clients without anyone else's knowledge, takes power away from the Medic which he reacts to severely when he finds out.

Lanthimos is also interesting in these films with how hierarchies of rules dictate people and how inevitably someone will transgress against them - one of the daughters in Dogtooth going against the rules to find out what's in the outside world, or Colin Farrell in The Lobster rejecting the rules of mandatory relationships to join the electronic music listening, anti-romantics in the woodland. Here in Alps, the Medic is a man who wants to help people but clearly, from the scene when he decides to create the surrogate group, has an ego and a desire to be a leader, lashing out in the sole scene of violence common in Lanthimos' films when his power is threatened. The rebellious Nurse is visibly trying to fill a void in herself by becoming the teenage tennis player, going as far as creating a mind bending meta moment when she introduces the late girl's boyfriend to her father.

Technical Detail:

Lanthimos follows the conventions of modern world cinema - slow paced scenes, static camera shots with minimal movement of the camera, the lack of scores and use of diagetic music, natural on-set locations - but he has managed to make it his own distinct style because his use of mundanity for surreal deadpan is perfectly matched by said cinematic style. Deadpan in the appropriate term for his films, but what's also important is that, for that to work, Lanthimos is usually dark humoured in his work, the minimal naturalistic tone working because the humour has a caustic existentialism to it. Capable of being more fantastical, as The Lobster proves, Lanthimos is yet someone who can quickly cut to more disturbing aspects of human beings even if the moments of violence can be sickly hilarious, the realistic look of his films emphasising this.

Abstract Spectrum: Surreal/Weird

Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): Low

As someone, due to a learning disability since birth, who has a distance to other people, which has led for all my struggles to it also to virtues like finding human behaviour in others absurd including that which is accepted as conventional social interaction, Lanthimos taps into something that immediately makes sense to me now and allows me to appreciate his work, of how people as social figures are more constructions and how absurd this is from a distance. He takes behaviour through the scripts of his films to an extreme of bland conversations and normal activities being abstracted. What would be rational and insignificant behaviour in another film turns into something more weird here.

Alps is a lot more subdued than Dogtooth or The Lobster, as barring an oddly sensual tone, not just the surrogate relationships -  such as the man who asks for a surrogate of a separated female lover to argue in second language English together and play a woman with diabetes, or the parents of the tennis prodigy suggesting the Nurse meets her "boyfriend" again - but even amongst the surrogates themselves, there's little of the extreme violence and more transgressive aspects of Dogtooth. Moments instead stand out are more casually strange, such as the game of impersonations of dead celebrities that reveals the Medic as a closet Bruce Lee fan, two people role-playing an argument in a lamp store etc., the subdued nature of Alps instead offering a different side of the same themes Lanthimos has tackled before and after.

Personal Opinion:

Somewhat lost in the shuffle between Lanthimos' two films before and after it, which I can attest to having only seen it now, but that doesn't detract from it being a great middle piece of a nice, loosely themed trilogy of movies. Knowing the director-writer is only just in his peak in popularity, with more films likely in the future, and even switching to the English language not affecting him, it adds a (strangely) good vibe to the likes of Alps more.

From https://screengrabsaz.files.wordpress.com/2016/06/01-181.jpg

Dogtooth (2009)

From https://garywarnett.files.wordpress.com
/2010/11/dogtoothposter.jpg

Director: Yorgos Lanthimos

Screenplay: Yorgos Lanthimos and Efthymis Filippou

Cast: Christos Stergioglou (as father); Michelle Valley (as mother); Angeliki Papoulia (as older daughter); Mary Tsoni (as younger daughter); Christos Passalis (as son); Anna Kalaitzidou as Christina

Synopsis: An older married couple (Stergioglou and Valley) keep their adult children - two sisters (Papoulia and Tsoni) and a son (Passalis) - in complete isolation completely cut off from the world outside. Having only lived in their world within the home and garden, the children are taught that only their father can leave by car into the dangerous outside environment beyond the gates, are provided a vocabulary each day to learn where a "phone" is a salt shaker and a "zombie" is a small, yellow flower, and that they have another brother living over the fence they cannot reach. The parents' decision to bring in a female security guard from his workplace (Kalaitzidou) to provide sexual favours for their son proves to be their undoing, bringing a corrupting influence on the older daughter.

Alongside his collaborators behind the camera (co-screenwriters and production team) and in front of it (the actors perfectly in tune to depicting the material sincerely), Yorgos Lanthimos is exceptionally talented in creating a very idiosyncratic oddness in the films I've seen, a style that can be compared to the original surrealists in France. He at least learnt the most vital rule of them, that rather than weirdness for weirdness' sake as that which fails most modern films, as can be witnesses in a work like Vernon Chatman's Final Flesh (2009), a film like Dogtooth can make a discussion about something as average as a spangled headband, and the truth in whether one could glow in the dark, become like an alien language heard in a dream. The ordinary is enough to create an odd mood in the viewer as something similar to what they see in their everyday life can become uncanny when viewed in a skewered lens.  The family depicted within this film - who have no names baring their status within the family - are like any within Europe, who deal with simple things as pick up groceries that they've ran out of and the children having to be told off for hitting each other, but the nature of how their relationships have been built are troubling.

The humour is exceptionally dark, willing to tackle a great deal of taboos within its simple premise. It evokes the case depicting in Samira Makhmalbaf's The Apple (1998), a real life incident where parents kept their two young girls locked up in their home away from the outside world, causing them to develop their own worlds and communication as a result. In vast contrast however to that film's sympathetic views of the parents, Dogtooth presents normalcy of this idea within a more unsettled tone and with the further issue that the children are clearly adults. Dogtooth's strangest quality is that it managed to be nominated for the 2010 Academy Awards for Best Foreign Picture; going between depicting incest to including hardcore sex, both in a tape the parents watch after a night of intimacy and (possibly real) acts from the cast, this is very dark movie even with its humour. The innocuous nature of the family's life, almost entirely set within the home environment baring the father's workplace, offsets some of the more eyebrow raising material - videotape to the head, assault of a cat with garden shears - but as much causing other sequences to crawl under the skin further, usually by inducing shocked laughter from a viewer as it would induce revulsion and disgust. The tightrope between humour and shock is a precarious trick the film manages to pull off in the end and its fits the material more to do this, the act of adding humour causing the horror of the material to stand out more within the concept of how absurd it is. The world of the family and its structure furthers this, where punishment for bad behaviour is to be forced to keep strong mouthwash within one's mouth until the mother tells that person they can spit it out. Prizes for following their parents' strict rules and instructions - chores to lessons such as being able to last longer underwater in the pool - are the sort one gives little children such as stickers and eventually toy aeroplanes, the real life ones that cannot be ignored flying above their house adapted into their world as the toys themselves.

A blatant satire of a patriarchal family - openly making reference to the training of a dog the family have as symbolic of this, going further where the father has everyone including the mother walk on all fours and bark to protect the home from threats like viscous domesticated cats - it avoids becoming redundant in this concept by depicting both the family as grounded and ordinary as possible and by filtering this all through the humour. There is something far and away more unsettling about the family through how clinical they are rather than the tone of the film being as completely sedate as its presentation is - the structure of the movie allowing the absurdity of them to shine through whilst the family itself, with its obsession with health and medical products, comes uncomfortable close to some form of perverse inward strength of the family guiding them by not letting the outside world corrupt them. Unlike Michael Haneke, while sharing visual aesthetics with him, I don't feel like I being forced fed heavy handed concepts because the humour provided makes the material more provocative. The mirrored traits of classic surrealism also make it more potent in themes, pieces of normalcy becoming mysterious objects or acts within a new light. A phone is kept hidden in the parents' bedroom, the mother locking herself in there when she need to phone the father, turning it into a secret treasure for the children and emphasised by it being a dial-up phone on a cord, causing it to have an archaic nature to it to add to the mystery. In their world, it's perfectly natural that the mother could give birth to twins and a dog for the children, warning she will give birth the twins if the daughters don't behave better. The use of language as well is perfectly in synch to surrealist writing, where the unexpected sexual enthusiasm of licking a "keyboard" has the perverted touch of it whilst the changing of words for others evokes, for myself anyway, René Magritte's famous written words "This is not a pipe". Lanthimos' knack, with co-writers, for intentionally stiff dialogue full of normal conversational pieces being strangely emphasised is another gift to the film, one which survived the transition to English for The Lobster (2015) mainly because, unlike another non-English director who may falter, it was intentionally awkward and mannered in any language. It even manages, in an inspired twist, to absorb pop culture into an important plot point, the viewing of Jaws (1975) and Rocky (1976) being the corrupting influence on the older sister, drastically altering her language and creating a new vocabulary of her own as a result onwards.

Technical Quality:

The style of Dogtooth - sedate, minimal camera movement - is one I'm not particularly fond of in most cases. It became common in a lot of the world art films I watched made in the 2000s and grew more when the "Slow Cinema" movement developed later in that decade in the films I than saw. Unless it's pure bad luck to see a lot of the more staler examples of this aesthetic style - single, still shots; modest editing which doesn't bring attention to itself; naturalistic and even muted colour palettes - this style has unfortunately cleansed away a lot of the unique, idiosyncratic voices you'd find in world cinema decades before, more so especially as digital camera have become more common. There are of course exceptions when the style is used well, and Yorgos Lanthimos uses it as his own trademark, the stillness alongside a muted colour palette adding to the mundanely of this family's own private world. He also uses it, with the use of cuts to the next image within the same scene, to both create a greater shock from some images but also, in the prolonged deadpan nature of some moments, a bigger punch line for the humour.

Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): Medium

It was an absolute guarantee that this would be added to the list, placed entirely within a world (both of Lanthimos' and the central family) that is familiar to the viewer with recognisable interactions and objects but completely alien at the same time. The other factor is that, while there is a narrative trajectory, it's a slight one completely open ended where it's the character interactions themselves and the minor details in their lives that become more important; perversely the same kind of material one can find in social realist drama but found here within intentionally abstract dialogue and behaviour. This didn't lose its teeth when it came to The Lobster either, becoming as strange with known actors as it does with the commendable cast here.

Within a narrative where the only possible escape for the children is when their juvenile dogteeth fall out, allowing them to enter the outside world as adults in a perverted form of reaching adulthood, it's as much the performances in this case that are as important for the abstract tone to work. Angeliki Papoulia particularly as the older sister stands out, as the one who becomes more rebellious and independent as the film progresses - stabbing her brother in the hand for having a toy aeroplane and later in a memorable moment dancing wildly at the parent's wedding university in a spasm against their will - but everyone has to make the world credible even if its humorous. It's funny, to emphasis to his children that the outside world is fraught with killer animals to keep them within the home, that to get a toy plane from beyond the gate the father has to get into the car and drive a few inches, pick the toy up, and then drive back into the home environment, but to make this work with some credibility the muted performances are done seriously rather than acted out as silly. The grimness of the material alongside its humour is enforced by this, adding to the weirdness of the piece, more so when the outsider Christina decides to take advantage of the children for her own desires, adding a macabre nature to the material where there is no definite good or bad person in the narrative, only individuals who act both like the viewer but also strangely. Again, when you get to Colin Farrell and Rachel Weisz in The Lobster acting the same way, the strangest of the material they had is reflected both in them rather than unknowns in the roles but also the style Lanthimos has created over the films. This also adds to the transgressive nature of the material as, acting like children in adult bodies, aspects of the trio of children's' behaviour in terms of violence and sexuality become much more provocative, from the brother's almost slow witted naivety to the younger sister's instinctive curiosity; it's not that far removed from the aforementioned film The Apple, which dealt with girls in the Middle East who were less than ten years old, un-matured for children their age kept from adapting to an outside world beyond their door, transported here by the younger casts' memorable performances exactly by with more uncomfortable consequences as a result of their ages and the things they feel as stunted adults.

Abstract Spectrum: Grotesque/Surreal/Weird

Abstract Themes: Real Sex; Sexual Kink; Language Manipulation; Adults as Children; Violence Against Animals; Unexpected References To Pop Culture; Oppressive Suburban Environments; Incest; Restricted and Closed-In Environments

Personal Opinion:

Between this and The Lobster, Yorgos Lanthimos is revealing himself already to be a completely unique individual, one who could always prove to be interesting in the films he makes over the next few years. Lanthimos stands out more so out of directors I look to with interest, and could join as a personal favourite, because while it can be toe-curling and transgressive he is deliberately humorous in his work, not merely able to spice films with dark humour like a Lars von Trier would but clearly making a comedy here with Dogtooth as he is a satire. I tend to neglect comedy, not because I am a lifeless cynic but because comedy springs usually in a twisted way from some of the directors I already like; again, Lanthimos is pretty bleak with the humour in a film like Dogtooth but he's clearly entrenched in comedy as a genre more than with other directors even if some may be appalled by the jokes he is telling.

He also emphasises that Greek cinema, in what I've seen, is a place unexpected in its willingness to deal with un-naturalistic tones and styles to depict real issues in their society. For a country that has dealt with a military dictatorship and economic collapse amongst many other things, their cinema which gets acclaimed is provocative and/or willing to use anything from magic realism to pastiche to make a point. The late Theo Angelopoulos had little qualms with his dramas touching upon dream sequences or very strange imagery, whilst the late Nikos Nikolaidis was willing to be controversial in the couple of films I've managed to see of his, his Singapore Sling (1990) as blood brother of Dogtooth but one that decided to go for the same tonal interests by way of a perverse film noir parody. Lanthimos is one of a few directors within the recent decade, films I still need to see, who've desired to break from any form of modesty and politeness in the films they are making and, considering the history and social background I don't have that a person from Greece would, it would be just as interesting to see what Greeks think of these films and how a film like Dogtooth would hit them. Would it be a strange movie or would it hit harder for someone who spoke the same language?