Yorgos Lanthimos makes utterly bizarre, often surreal movies about abusive relationships disguised as love. Most Yorgos Lanthimos movies trap or confine their subjects, whether in their home, a hotel, or a castle. Most involve characters acting scenarios out, tinkering with possibilities, or just straight-up acting with a kind of deadpan that purposefully reads like they’re in a production rather than real people. And all of them question whether love and sex are the greatest liberators or the most oppressing jailors.
Yorgos Lanthimos is a man with stunningly creative ideas for how to tell a story and what story to tell in the first place. The movies themselves are perverse, demonstrating more graphic and personal violence than most movies would dare. Most of his movies also revolve around intimate relationships built on precarious power imbalances or outright physical violence. Lanthimos can’t help but be exploitative in every way as he masterfully depicts different aspects and kinds of exploitation again and again.
In celebration, awe, and maybe a little flattering disgust over his twisted mind, we ranked the Yorgos Lanthimos movies by how sick they are in terms of being visually bonkers, having an outlandish story, displaying physical violence, and being sexually perverse. None of his movies are tame by any means. Even his lowest-ranked movies on this scale are still quite disconcerting. And the movies at the top are just outright upsetting.
7. The Favourite
Perhaps technically the most acclaimed of the Yorgos Lanthimos movies, The Favourite is the least disconcerting. It’s among the most realistic and grounded of his films, despite taking place in a castle. There’s no outlandish plot or magical realism. It’s all just good old-fashioned rivalry. It’s also the Lanthimos movie least abusive to its characters, which is ironic, given the condition Sarah (Rachel Weisz) is in at the movie’s conclusion.
But The Favourite otherwise lacks some of Yorgos’ sickest inclinations. Sure, he’s a man making a movie about lesbians who spend a lot of time in bed together, and sure, that intimacy is weaponized to torture each other over and over again, usually to Queen Anne’s (Olivia Colman) twisted pleasure. But if the most visually or physically upsetting thing in the whole movie is Abigail (Emma Stone) stepping on a rabbit or splattering blood on Sarah’s face shooting pigeons, it’s a pretty tame affair by Lanthimos’ standards.
6. Kinetta
Kinetta was Yorgos Lanthimos’ first movie back in 2005. It’s kind of a practice run for some of the themes that would return again and again in his movies. It’s very experimental in style as a group of random individuals reenacts and films intimate partner violence. If this was the only one of Yorgos Lanthimos’ movies ever made, it’d be pretty clear the guy is pretty weird. Who even has the idea to make a movie like this in the first place? And it’s purposefully rendered with poor performances, making Kinetta all the odder to watch.
5. The Lobster
One of his most popular, Yorgos Lanthimos debuted the first of his English-language movies in 2015 with The Lobster. It’s a shockingly bizarre movie set in a world where anybody who does not find themselves in a relationship before too long is turned into an animal. If a plot like that is this low on the sicko-meter, you know this guy and his work are truly out there. The Lobster sports some of the signature animal abuse found in many of the filmmaker’s exhibitions. It also ends with David (Collin Farrel) contemplating gauging out his eyes so he can be blind like the Shortsighted Woman (Rachel Weitz) becomes by the film’s end.
But The Lobster ranks low as far as Lanthimos’ movies’ oddity because the abuse is institutional and the commentary on intimacy and relationships is mundane. In most Lanthimos movies, characters directly control and abuse other characters. Here, the whole society is taken advantage of by whatever authority demands people be married, and the hotel that David stays in is merely carrying out this greater purpose. When David escapes the hotel and winds up joining an anti-marriage rebel group but falls in love with somebody based on the smallest similarly anyway, it’s in stark comparison to how people wind up married back at the hotel. The whole affair demonstrates the absurdity of marriage as an institution and laments the inevitability of falling in line with societal norms regardless of our best intentions. This isn’t sick, it’s just sad. Farrel’s deadpan delivery is bracing, though.
4. Alps
Kinetta walked so Alps could run. Alps takes the concept of a group of random individuals acting out violence and splits it into two different aspects: acting out intense scenarios and violence among partners. The four principal characters of Alps form a group that people can hire to have them come and pretend to be dead loved ones, reenacting situations together. The scenarios begin innocent enough, but as they become more intimate and demanding, so do the Coach’s (Johnny Vierkis) expectations. He’s already depicted as a fair bit abusive from the start when he berates and refuses to let the Gymnist (Ariane Labed) dance to pop music. It’s topped off by the physical abuse he commits against her and the Nurse (Angeliki Papoulia). Alps is all about men exacting control through intimacy and violence and contains no catharsis whatsoever.
3. The Killing of a Sacred Deer
Barry Keoghan’s performance alone launches The Killing of a Sacred Deer to the top of this list. For as deadpan and creepy as Farrel was in The Lobster and is again here, Keoghan puts him and everyone else in this movie to shame. The Killing of a Sacred Deer is one of Lanthimos’ most stark explorations of control, several layers deep. Does a surgeon control the fate of his patient? Does a father control the desires of his daughter? The movie’s made complete with a more subtle magical realism than The Lobster. Keoghan’s Martin magically has control over the sickness and health of Farrel’s characters’ children. There’s no explanation, it’s just fact. This total lack of exposition ups the creepiness, as does the extreme violence ultimately committed against Martin. The fact that he’s a teenager makes it all the more sickening.
2. Poor Things
Poor Things is both the most narratively satisfying and the most surreal of all the Yorgos Lanthimos movies. It takes place completely in a fantastical, resplendent version of our world. It’s also by far the deepest exploration of everything Lanthimos has ever pondered, chiefly, whether intimacy is a tool of liberation or oppression. Emma Stone is completely and utterly unhinged in this movie in the best of ways, giving a performance nearly matched by most of her costars but also overflowing with the sense that Lanthimos just really enjoyed an excuse to make a movie where Emma Stone is constantly naked.
It’s noteworthy that Poor Things is a film about female liberation created predominantly by men. While it’s told from a female perspective, it can’t help but feel like it was made for a male gaze first and foremost with the way that all of its naked bodies and crass language are strewn about. But it also totally works. Bella (Stone) is basically a child discovering sexuality from scratch and nonetheless feels honest to the experience of any pubescent person who has somehow managed to forgo the indoctrinations of patriarchy and capitalism until now.
Bella encountering these terrible forces for the first time at this pivotal moment in her life lets Lanthimos make sickeningly honest commentary on classism and sexism. Its final act and a half are quite on the nose, explaining verbatim to the audience that Bella is a self-emancipated woman free to be with whomever she wants to be with and how she wants to be with them, no matter the desires of any man otherwise. None of this is even to mention the completely outlandish coloring, costumes, sets, prosthetics, and sound design that craft a completely opulent, inexplicable world for Poor Things to inhabit. Plus, the dialogue is a mile a minute of dense, colorful language. It’s a work of gross genius that succeeds because it manages to be at once perverted, sincere, and gorgeous.
1. Dogtooth
Nothing in Poor Things or any other of the other Yorgos Lanthimos movies before it can hold a flame to Dogtooth. The movie that brought Yorgos to his original acclaim, Dogtooth traps three adult-ish children in a remote compound with two parents who actively contort their reality by teaching them the wrong meanings for a litany of words. They’re also not allowed to leave the house until their “dogteeth” fall out. Over the course of the movie, the kids slowly start to chip away at the edges of the cruel fantasy their parents, especially their father have constructed. But not before incest takes over the household because, like so many of Lanthimos’ subjects, these are horny young people, and they have no other concept of healthy relationships.
There’s graphic violence against animals and an innocent woman, but Dogtooth is at the top of the sicko list because there’s no discernable reason for the parents’ behavior. In every other movie, the subjects have motives. They’re jealous, they’re out for revenge, or society has created a norm that renders cruelty an inevitability. But here, there’s no justification. Just pure, unadulterated abuse and cruelty. It takes a true sicko to make a movie this twisted render the rationale: “Just because.”
Yorgos Lanthimos movies are always unique and powerfully acted, generally perverse, and usually going a step too far. But that’s what makes these movies so great. Not every naked body or lesbian encounter is always strictly “necessary.” Yet, without the excessive exposure, odd speech patterns, deadpan deliveries, and weird reenactments, they’d just be movies with odd plots. They wouldn’t be the masterworks of marrying oddity with penetrating depictions of violence, abuse, intimacy, and lingering questions as to why any of it exists in the first place.