Poor Things (Yorgos Lanthimos, 2023)

Pride of Frankenstein

Yorgos Lanthimos' latest has an early scene of Bella (Emma Stone) holding a scalpel at an alarming angle and stabbing a corpse's eyeballs multiple times while her horrifically disfigured father Godwin Baxter (Willem Dafoe in heavy makeup) looks up fondly from the patient he himself is cutting-- and yet I agree with the assessment that the film is a comedy-- possibly Lanthimos' warmest most cheerful most wholesome work yet. 

The Favourite (Yorgos Lanthimos)

The apple of her eye

Yorgos Lanthimos' latest film The Favourite may be his oddest yet if you stop and consider his work so far, from breakthrough feature Dogtooth (about a family teaching a  skewed view of the world to its walled-in children) to the recent The Killing of a Sacred Deer (about a curse hovering over a physician's family) where metaphorical fantasy and (better yet) the machinations of human nature give his films a memorably loopy spin.

The Killing of a Sacred Deer (Yorgos Lanthimos)

Family Plot

With all the horror films that popped out last year (and continue to emerge this year) few if any come close to being as bizarre as Yorgos Lanthimos' The Killing of a Sacred Deer.

The Lobster (Yorgos Lanthimos)

Shellfishness

Yorgos Lanthimos' The Lobster is his unique brand of bizarre deadpan humor translated into feature-length English. The premise is imaginative: in a faintly futuristic society single adults or freshly single adults are checked into a resort and given forty-five days to find a suitable mate; if they fail, they're turned into animals, literally, the only upside being they have a choice of which.

"--have you thought of what animal you'd like to be if you end up alone?" the protagonist David (Colin Farrell) is asked.

"Yes. A lobster."

"Why a lobster?"

"Because lobsters live for over one hundred years, are blue-blooded like aristocrats, and stay fertile all their lives."

Dogtooth (Yorgos Lanthimos, 2009)

And while we're at it my preferred version of what Room was trying to do:

Family guy

Yorgos Lanthimos' Dogtooth starts off in possibly the only way it can possibly start: with a father coming home.

About the quietest, most quotidian beginning to a film that you can imagine, and that's on purpose. Father coming home, the house he comes home to large, with an expansive garden complete with pool and a high fence surrounding the property, but otherwise--nothing remarkable.