On the films of Yorgos Lanthimos and what the Greek Weird Wave produced.

Lanthimos is the most internationally visible director of the Greek Weird Wave — a loosely defined movement of Greek filmmakers who emerged in the 2000s making films characterized by formal control, dark absurdism, and a specifically Greek engagement with authority and family.

Dogtooth (2009) is the movement's defining film: a family whose children have been raised in complete isolation from the outside world, with deliberately falsified language and no knowledge of what exists beyond the compound. The film is about the arbitrary nature of social reality, about how power maintains itself through control of language and information.

The formal style — static camera, long takes, performances that are deliberately flat — creates a quality of clinical observation that refuses sympathy or condemnation. The viewer is positioned as a kind of anthropologist observing a system they cannot intervene in.

The Lobster and The Favourite are Lanthimos's most accessible films: they use the formal vocabulary of the Greek Weird Wave in genre contexts that are more legible to international audiences. The formal control is the same; the tonal register is more varied.

What connects all of Lanthimos's films is a specific conviction: that the social structures we inhabit are arbitrary, are maintained by force, and are more violent than they appear.