What Is Yorgos Lanthimos Trying To Say?

A bunch of random thoughts about Poor Things and Emma Stone.

It’s frankly weird as hell that Emma Stone has become a muse of sorts for Yorgos Lanthimos. A Greek director that rose to prominence making dance series, experimental theater plays and fucked-up music videos has become one of the main colleagues of Oscar winner and American sweetheart Stone. It’s as peculiar as it is incredible.

The two just released Poor Things, a modernish take on the Frankenstein story that can best be explained as Horny Barbie. It’s a dark comedy, sexual thriller and sci-fi mash-up. Emma Stone quickly went from her Superbad/The House Bunny ingenue phase to A-List star in La La Land/Easy A/Crazy, Stupid, Love to arthouse mainstay. It’s an interesting (and remarkable) maneuvering, but Lanthimos’ rise to a household name and three-time Oscar nominee is equally as compelling.

The thing about Yorgos Lanthimos movies is that they’re often evil at their core. Dogtooth and The Killing of a Sacred Deer are two of the more morally bleak movies I’ve seen. Both revolve around family lies, and we would never have time to unpack everything wrong (in a good way) with both. The Lobster, a rom-com squeezed into a horror film, is ultimately up to the audience and its interpretation of the final scene. I think the film leads to a more pessimistic outlook, but perhaps that’s just me.

The Favourite, Lanthimos’ awardsy jump to American theatergoers, is a love triangle that puts power above all, especially love. It’s all about the games that come with romance and how those are oftentimes (in this film’s perspective) more fun than the actual connections. Everything up until now has been pessimistic and cynical at best which is what makes Poor Things such an outlier.

Emma Stone’s Bella Baxter is as ingenue as it gets, frequently taken advantage of by the men in her life, but by hook or by crook, she eventually finds her independence and figures out what she ultimately wants. It’s easily the “happiest” of the Lanthimos movies, which is quite a statement considering this movie begins with a suicide, features quite a few mutilations and revolves around the deaths of innocents (and innocence).

This is quite the leap, but this about-face reminds me of the Noah Baumbach-Greta Gerwig collaborations. There’s a real difference when looking at Baumbach’s melancholic and distrustful early work to Frances Ha and beyond. Even a divorce movie like Marriage Story ends on a note of hope and tenderness, a far cry from the cruel The Squid and the Whale.

Baumbach and Lanthimos both have their old tricks, but the addition of a collaborator who also has a specific, more favorable worldview is the push and pull that the best directors allow to seep into their work. There’s something really beautiful about the end of Poor Things where Stone’s character comes face to face with her past life and any demons creeping around.

Lanthimos feels like he snuck into the American film world at the perfect time as his twisted ideas and more experimental techniques wouldn’t find a proper channel today without the stars and leverage that he’s collected with his earlier movies. It’s been a gradual incline when it comes to celebrity with a mostly unknown cast to Colin Farrell and Rachel Weisz to Colin Farrell and Nicole Kidman to Olivia Colman and Rachel Weisz and Emma Stone to Emma Stone and Mark Ruffalo and Willem Dafoe. A movie like Poor Things has no chance of being made without his Hollywood cache and star-studded casts.

It’s a minor miracle that Lanthimos and Stone found each other and have more collaborative work on the horizon. We already have The Favourite and Poor Things with the two already filming the short film Bleat, the upcoming anthology film Kind of Kindness and a new secret project. It’s that kind of partnership that makes the movies so exciting and if Poor Things is any indication we’re in good (undead) hands.

Also, I wasn’t really able to fit it into this piece but Mark Ruffalo may have given the best performance he’s ever given in Poor Things as the arch-villain Duncan Wedderburn. It’s quite possibly my favorite role of the year. Just unbelievable stuff from one of the best actors we have right now. He appears to be having the time of his life on a Yorgos Lanthimos set.