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Joe Alwyn
If Paul Thomas Anderson’s 2007 masterpiece There Will Be Blood is a movie about the relentless and often cruel pursuit of progress and (more importantly) profit that drives the collective psyche of the United States of America – with Daniel Day-Lewis’s Daniel Plainview as the personification of US greed and pitilessness – then Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist is about the view from the immigrant experience in those conditions.
Characters describing their dreams is a prominent part of Kinds of Kindness, Yorgos Lanthimos’s latest exercise in batshit what-the-fuckery. This salient feature of the picture – which the director cowrote with longtime collaborator Efthimis Filippou – is so striking because to describe the movie itself is like telling someone upon waking about a series of dreams you had during the previous night. In Kinds of Kindness, Lanthimos, the crown prince of Greek Weird Wave cinema, has crafted a movie that makes his last effort, the befuddling Poor Things, look like a classical Hollywood musical by comparison.
Yorgos Lanthimos delivers everything you might expect visually from him in his first period piece. The Greek director’s meticulous attention to detail and exacting standards are brought to bear in The Favourite. It’s a sumptuous, visually arresting examination of power struggles in the early 18th century English royal court. Many of Lanthimos’ thematic preoccupations are present as well: the blackest of comedy that highlights the worst instincts and actions of which humans are capable; how his characters wield power over others; the mingling of the humorous and horrific to shock and disturb his audience.
While the nihilistic aesthetic Lanthimos employed in films like The Lobster and The Killing of a Sacred Deer remains essentially unchanged in The Favourite, the effect becomes numbing here (especially in the final act) where it doesn’t in the earlier films. This is another morality tale like The Lobster and Sacred Deer. In The Favourite, the ultimate moral is: be careful what you wish for, because you might just get it.
