Few viewers would choose to live in a Yorgos Lanthimos film, but his work is so good it makes us feel that we do. Like Lynch or Von Trier, Herzog or Buñuel, he conjures a world with its own internal logic; that’s heightened and strange and semi-detached from our own. In his early years, the director was part of a trend that was known as the Greek Weird Wave, and painted warped portraits of a troubled country on the brink of meltdown. Then the rest of the planet caught up and sent his career fully global. Whatever our nationality, we’re all Greek Weird Wave now.
Early and latter-day Lanthimos are both on display this month with the re-release of his breakthrough film Dogtooth (2009) and the public unveiling at the Venice Film Festival of his latest work, Bugonia. It’s oddly touching to revisit Dogtooth after all these years and be reminded of a time when it looked as if it might be a fascinating one-off, a niche property, and as far removed from mainstream cinema as its luckless protagonists are from their immediate neighbours.
Lanthimos’s antic dark fable spins the tale of three kids holed up inside a handsome walled compound. The authoritarian father tells them they can’t venture outside because the streets are prowled by ravening wolves. He arranges a visiting sex worker to dutifully service his son, and home-schools the trio in a lexicon of false nouns. “Sea” is the word for the leather armchair in the lounge, he explains, while those sweet yellow flowers in the garden are called “zombies”. Every evening the brood watch a diet of old home videos, gorging themselves on a feedback loop of oppressive family history. Dogtooth won’t be for all tastes, but it’s biting and brilliant and tells us that the gated community is a kind of hell. Even a nice-looking one, with zombies on the lawn.
Prisoners escape: that’s the natural arc of a drama. And so it was with Dogtooth itself, which hopped the fence, played in cinemas worldwide, and helped furnish its director with an international career. Adjustments, no doubt, had to be made along the way. The Favourite (2018), his lavish Queen Anne-era drama, felt to me like Lanthimos-lite, never entirely at ease with its stately source material, whereas the blackly comic anthology Kinds of Kindness (2024) resembled an album of B-sides: electrifying in patches and treading water in others. But The Lobster (2015) – a deadpan sci-fi about a surreal singles hotel – was sublime, while Poor Things (2023) made the most of a spectacular wide canvas and showcased Emma Stone’s Oscar-winning turn as the feminised Frankenstein’s monster gone rogue. It was uproarious, bold and knotty: rare qualities in a film that was optimistically pitched at a popular audience.
I’m currently attending the Venice Film Festival, which typically unfolds in a state of mild chaos. Random passers-by strike a pose on the red carpet and invariably attract a gaggle of photographers. Thunderheads roll in seemingly out of nowhere. Queues disintegrate into free-for-alls the second the cinema doors are thrown open. All of which is to say that it provided the perfect backdrop for the premiere of Lanthimos’s latest picture, which played to a packed house in between the downpours.
Bugonia is adapted from a South Korean cult movie – Save the Green Planet! (2003) – although it remains very much in the Lanthimos register, nodding back to Dogtooth with its focus on a grisly home confinement. This time around, the setting is the humble clapboard house of wonky Teddy Gatz, who’s played by the reliably excellent Jesse Plemons. Teddy flies an American flag from his porch and mainlines conspiracy theories on his bike ride to work. These flights of fancy are at least partly rooted in reality insofar as they relate to pesticides, forever chemicals and the crimes of Big Pharma, but they have led their consumer to a dark and dangerous place. Teddy is convinced that Stone’s Michelle Fuller, an icily efficient corporate CEO, is secretly an alien, part of the Andromedan race. He decides to chain her up in his basement until she contacts her mothership.
“I think you’re in a kind of echo chamber,” Michelle tells him, which is undeniably true, except that perhaps she is as well, given her rich life and assistants and sterile glass-fronted office. Ted keeps bees, planet Earth’s great pollinators, and reveres their harmonious, perfectly balanced society. But the world has turned discordant, disconnected; everybody is now living inside their own private cell. And thanks to the chemicals that Michelle’s company pumps out, the bees are all dying, and may take the world with them, too.
It’s always a risk when a talented, distinctive European director moves country to make films in a language other than their own. They’re like rare native flowers (proper ones, not zombies), which often fail to bloom when replanted in foreign soil. Bugonia, though, offers proof – if further proof is required – that Lanthimos has made the transition more successfully than most, and that his mordant freeze-dried sensibility speaks to audiences all over. It’s a fabulous film; I loved it to bits. The director whips up a bravura example of 21st-century American Gothic that relocates his preoccupations to the stripmalls and business parks of Nowheresville USA, populated by corn-fed lost souls who are wired to explode.
Teddy knows in his guts that hapless Michelle is an alien, and refuses to be swayed by her increasingly desperate denials. But this may in the end be a moot point, a distraction. Essentially everyone’s an Andromedan in a Yorgos Lanthimos film. They speak their own inner language and seldom act as they should. They’re mercurial and treacherous; a mystery to their families and frequently to themselves. That’s the planet Lanthimos shows us, and who’s to say it’s not true? Berserk and bizarre, Bugonia plays out in an alien nation that feels worryingly close to home. Its people, I fear, aren’t outliers or freaks. They’re our nearest and dearest; they’re our parents; they’re us.
‘Dogtooth’ is back in cinemas now, while ‘Bugonia’ is released on 7 November
