This year at TAIFAS – Balkan Film and Culture Festival, I may have missed the mouthwatering local dishes, but I did catch the focus on Yorgos Lanthimos, featuring a retrospective of his earlier films: Dogtooth (2009), Alps (2011), and The Lobster (2015). I was slightly surprised by his presence in the festival program. If around ten years ago (before The Lobster), cinephiles associated him par excellence with a revival of Greek cinema, nowadays, it’s easy to forget he hails from Balkan cinema. Lanthimos may be the European director who has veered into an international career the most successfully in the last decade — you don’t think of him as a Greek director anymore but as a mainstream filmmaker who belongs to the world.

Looking back, how do Lanthimos’s “homegrown” films hold up now, when a production like Kinds of Kindness (2024) gathers the crème de la crème of Hollywood? What’s been gained and what’s been lost, I wonder, feeling that his films have progressively become weaker and more self-indulgent as he ventured into territories much more accessible to a wider audience. To what extent is the current Lanthimos, already the recipient of several Oscars (either directly or through his actors), the same as he was? When did he cease to be a true representative of Greek cinema?

On the one hand, it’s assumed that every filmmaker’s dream is to break into English-language cinema (since that’s where you really “make it”). Yet, when a director surpasses their local film industry, they’re often accused of selling out, losing touch with their roots, or no longer making films for their previous audience. Indeed, many filmmakers lose their “local flavour” or end up making weaker films by abandoning what once made them interesting or simply struggling to adapt to a different landscape (an example would be Wong Kar-wai’s 2007 English-language film My Blueberry Nights, which, despite starring big names like Jude Law, Natalie Portman, and Rachel Weisz, feels forced and a poor self-imitation). For Lanthimos, however, this transition to English-language cinema seems to have happened extremely naturally, partly because he had already made a name for himself on the international scene long before making a film in another language. Dogtooth, his third feature, made a splash when it was nominated for Best Foreign Language Film at the Oscars in 2009. Incidentally, or perhaps not, Lanthimos moved to London in 2011, so entering a new industry wasn’t exactly a stretch.

While The Lobster is undoubtedly the turning point in Lanthimos’s filmography – the moment that marks an irreversible “before” (local) and “after” (global, with major studios and big stars) – from a thematic standpoint, it doesn’t feel like a significant schism or compromise. True, it’s profoundly different in terms of production model. For one thing, it’s considered a British film; here’s where Lanthimos stops making Greek films, only returning, if at all, in the form of tragic references in The Killing of a Sacred Deer (2017), where the story revisits the kind of deterministic family issues that plagued Oedipus. The Lobster also marks an important shift towards international pedigree casts – having Colin Farrell in the lead role contributed not only to the film’s deadpan melancholy but also to its renown, with a slew of other famous actors, like Rachel Weisz, Léa Seydoux, John C. Reilly, and Ben Whishaw.

The Lobster marked the beginning of big budgets and high production value, but also a progressive shift toward higher notes of fantastic and whimsical, still probing the dark and alienating corners of the human psyche but with more entertainment and artifice, and less opacity.

Beyond that, the transition to another model of filmmaking was quite smooth, as The Lobster still embraced the absurd, populated with strange, lonely figures that earned Lanthimos his reputation as a key figure in the so-called Greek Weird Wave. The bizarre institution where people are turned into animals if they don’t find their soulmate is perhaps only a slightly more fantastical story than the extreme yet grounded-in-some-reality oddities exhibited by the “do-gooders” in Alps or the self-isolated family in Dogtooth. The dark humour, even if it’s used more sparingly, the interest in power dynamics and various formulas of authority governing others’ lives, the psycho-sexual quirks and surreal, violent outbursts are also present and will continue to persist in The Killing of a Sacred Deer (2017), The Favourite (2018), and Poor Things (2023) (and likely in Kinds of Kindness, which I haven’t yet seen but my colleague Andrei Șendrea dissected with relish). However, these aspects have diluted over the years; The Lobster marked the beginning of big budgets and high production value, but also a progressive shift toward higher notes of fantastic and whimsical, still probing the dark and alienating corners of the human psyche but with more entertainment and artifice, and less opacity.

Re-watching Alps and Dogtooth – after having most recently seen Lanthimos’s extravaganza Poor Things – I was struck by how nihilistic and unadorned these earlier films are, seemingly affirming the stereotype of European films as dry, austere, and always revolving around drama and violence. They too explore bizarre narratives, but there is still a palpable sense of reality. Alps follows an organisation where members act as “substitutes” for recently deceased individuals to help their loved ones with the grieving process, while Dogtooth depicts one of contemporary cinema’s most dysfunctional families, where the three (nearly adult) children are brainwashed and prevented from growing up, resulting in them becoming ticking time bombs – on the one hand innocent, on the other ready to erupt into aggression.

I find these Lanthimos dramas far more approachable and resonant, as the frightening yet touching essence of human nature shines through these alienated realities much more powerfully. Lanthimos’s newer works, like Poor Things or The Favourite, dissipate the human element into convention, seemingly hiding it behind the beautiful façade of genre film and simplifying it into far more decipherable, predictable narratives. To be sure, Lanthimos excels at spectacle and extravagance; there’s something delightful about Lanthimos as a director of reinterpreted period films, setting aside any reservations one might have about revisionist intentions regarding the place of women in history. But at the same time, these earlier films feel denser, more shrouded in their own mystery, less gratuitously playful than the whimsical indulgences of his newer productions.

These earlier films feel denser, more shrouded in their own mystery, less gratuitously playful than the whimsical indulgences of his newer productions.

Looking at them as Greek films, signed by a local filmmaker, Alps and Dogtooth also convey a sense of close collaboration, a specific moment in time, coming across as projects between friends who grew up in theatre and the industry together – a personal idea influenced by a discussion I had with actress Angeliki Papoulia (the lead in both films and supporting in The Lobster), who spoke very personally about her close collaborations with “Yorgos”. Could it be the feeling of the right people in the right place at a pivotal moment in Greek cinema’s rebirth that lends these films a certain aura of familiarity? Or is it simply the allure of so-called unknown actors compared to the big stars whose presence on screen we’re already used to?

Indeed, Lanthimos has maintained this practice of close collaborations over the years – one of his most interesting traits, as actors from one film consistently appear in others. Colin Farrell is in The Lobster and then The Killing of the Sacred Deer; Olivia Colman has a minor role in The Lobster before playing Queen Anne in The Favourite; Rachel Weisz plays in The Lobster and later in The Favourite; Willem Dafoe appears in both Poor Things and Kinds of Kindness; Emma Stone, currently his most consistent collaborator, stars in The Favourite, Poor Things, Kinds of Kindness, and the upcoming Bugonia, set for release next year. This migration of familiar faces from one project to the next has always seemed to provide a very satisfying unity to Lanthimos’s filmography, making it flow seamlessly and feel like an ongoing work between friends.

Perhaps that’s the paradox I felt revisiting these old Lanthimos films featured in the retrospective at Taifas festival: they belong to an earlier stage, profoundly shaped by their context (with Dogtooth emerging during Greece’s financial crisis), and thus, are inherently different. Yet I see in them what still interests Lanthimos today: considering his body of work as a whole, his filmography appears to follow a continuous progression, exploring the same themes and types of idiosyncratic characters with communication issues, juggling the same humour, but softened for the present day into a less radical, more viewer-friendly formula that says less while using more.

Dora Leu

Graduated with a BA in film directing and a MA in film studies from UNATC; she's also studied history of art. Also collaborates with the Acoperisul de Sticla film magazine and is a former coordinator of FILM MENU. She's dedicated herself to '60-'70s Japanese cinema and Irish post-punk music bands. Still keeps a picture of Leslie Cheung in her wallet.