The Greek auteur's extremely weird early work makes his English-language efforts look tame in comparison.
The Big Picture Greek filmmaker Yorgos Lanthimos stormed into the art-house scene with The Lobster in 2015, introducing his particularly queasy brand of weird to international audiences, though it pales in comparison to the bizarreness of his early work.
The director first received international attention after his third film, the Greek-language Dogtooth, became nominated for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, becoming the first Greek film to do so since 1977 and only the fifth to boast the achievement overall. Those who’d seen Dogtooth however, only to then watch the director graduate to the likes of The Killing of a Sacred Deer and The Favourite, know that Lanthimos’ absurdism isn’t merely quirky for comedy’s sake, but deeply rooted in violence and misery. Dogtooth concerns itself with three siblings disallowed from leaving their home and raised in complete isolation by their parents, absorbing a number of weird practices as they function within their own mini-tribe. After Dogtooth, Lanthimos remained in Greece in order to direct Alps, a similarly surreal drama that follows an organization of actors who act as stand-ins for the recently deceased in order to assist their family members with the grieving process. With Poor Things winning the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival and seemingly earning the auteur his best reviews yet, it begs the question of firstly, where this unique artistic voice came from and secondly, how they cultivated their craft from beginnings entirely divorced from Hollywood conventions. What Are Yorgos Lanthimos' ‘Dogtooth’ and ‘Alps’ Really About? Dogtooth and Alps may sport fairly straightforward premises, though it isn’t a Yorgos Lanthimos movie if you don’t have an ‘Ending Explained’ article primed for directly after. While Lanthimos’ first two films, My Best Friend and Kinetta are nigh-impossible to find, it’s the director’s third and fourth features that make for some exceptionally engaging analysis, particularly when compared to one another. Written with his co-writer Efthymis Filippou, both films concern themselves with the fabrication of another world. Dogtooth acts almost like a fictional social experiment, challenging the notion of children born in isolation and what kind of customs they would develop that deviate from our societal norms without a society to mimic. Their behavior in isolation grows disturbing, to say the least. They believe they have a brother on the other side of their fence who they throw supplies and stones to and test each other with games of pain tolerance. It’s only upon the elder daughter’s demand for Hollywood videotapes from a security guard who her father employs for sex work with the children that the illusion the parents have built starts to crumble. The kids were raised under the lie that they would be allowed to leave the house upon the loss of their dogtooth. When the corrupt influence of Hollywood comes into play, some decide to abandon the fictitious world they’re living in in favor of another one. They seek to escape to reality, but their idea of reality is totally misconstrued, resulting in tragedy born entirely from dishonesty and tyrannical protection. Alps offers a kind of mirror image to Dogtooth in the sense that it’s not about people in a fictional world entering reality but vice versa. The complications of Alps stem from one of the actors growing over-attached to her role as a grief aid. While Lanthimos would prefer to avoid comparison, stating in a Cineuropa interview that “the only thing the two films have in common is their two screenwriters,” he precedes this statement by calling these films opposites. In Alps, a protagonist attempts to escape the real world into this fictional one, becoming so absorbed within her role that she even breaks into the home of the grieving in order to maintain the fallacy against their will. Alps also distinguishes itself from Lanthimos’ larger body of work in that it is relatively light on comedy, shooting in dark interiors and dragging its characters deep into gloominess, whereas Dogtooth willfully contradicted itself with plenty of sun. Whether into reality or fiction, regardless of their knowledge of their destination, both films are about attempts to escape, an underlying theme that can be found in all of Lanthimos’ work, which generally follow alienated protagonists disillusioned by their society at large. How Weird Do These Yargos Lanthimos Movies Get? If we’re talking pure squeamish weirdness, Dogtooth definitely takes the top spot not just among Lanthimos’ Greek efforts but his entire filmography . The weirdness here doesn’t just come from gross-out moments or formal experimentalism but from the alien practices that its children practice. This includes the way the characters speak , the performances they put on for their parents , or the brother fondling both of his sisters whilst blindfolded in order to select his new sexual partner. Its absurdity renders it inherently comedic, but the underlying implications are nothing but sinister. For anyone who was traumatized by Titane’s brand of body horror will be surprised to find that Dogtooth actually did it first, featuring an alarmingly brutal scene in which the eldest daughter repeatedly tries to knock her dogtooth out by bludgeoning her mouth against the rim of a sink. Things get disgustingly ugly in Dogtooth, and while Alps remains closer to reality in that its queasiness comes more from its tone over its muted visuals, it’s hard to imagine Lanthimos even today pushing the boundaries further than he did during his breakout feature.Yorgos Lanthimos Inspired an Entire Weird Wave of Greek Cinema It wasn’t long after Yorgos Lanthimos that other works of Greek cinema began garnering attention as part of the Greek Weird Wave, influenced heavily by the financial distraught that consumed Greece for many years as of 2008, the effects of which are still felt today. Take Lanthimos’ producer Athina Rachel-Tsangari, whose directorial feature Attenberg concerns an emotionally stunted woman determined to see the world exclusively through the nature documentaries of Sir David Attenborough. Or Alexandros Arvanas’s Miss Violence, about the aftermath of a female child’s suicide and the unraveling of the mystery of why she died with a smile on her face. Many of the breakout films of the wave have dealt with themes of violence, trauma, alienation, and desperation in an attempt to define the line between functionally appropriate and lost in a world of one’s own. Yorgos Lanthimos’ films are never simply weird for the sake of it but are composed in such a way that they offer answers without an understanding of the question. Lanthimos often drops his audiences into the middle of situations without any context whatsoever . His reasoning is, as stated in an IndieWire interview, that he finds it “much more interesting if people are able to explore and get lost in the film,” likening it to “real life”. If it’s getting lost that Lanthimos wants his audiences to do, they’ve shown that it’s a rudderless trip they’re willing to take with him
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