Greek cinema has long attracted critics and scholars more than the general public, and it remains far less visible internationally than, say, Swedish cinema. Its history falls roughly into three periods: 1900-1942, 1942-1974, and 1974 to the present. Production nearly ceased under the Metaxas dictatorship (1936-41). The postwar decades then brought a studio system modeled on Hollywood’s, turning out around two hundred films a year until its collapse in the late 1960s. After the fall of the junta, a new auteur cinema emerged, shaped by Theo Angelopoulos, the “poet of Greek cinema,” Michael Cacoyannis, whose work carried Greek culture abroad, and Costa-Gavras, the most overtly political of Greek filmmakers.
The generation that came of age during the post-2008 economic crisis was labeled the “Greek Weird Wave,” a term popularized by the British press around 2011. Its hallmarks are allegorical storytelling, deliberately deadpan performance, and sealed worlds governed by arbitrary rules. Yorgos Lanthimos is its most internationally prominent figure.
From Kinetta to Dogtooth
His debut, My Best Friend (2001), was a comedy rooted in Greek television and a commercial failure. Kinetta (2005), set in an off-season seaside town, is where his formal signature first appears: a small cast and a camera whose distance and framing produce persistent estrangement. Dogtooth (2009) brought that style to maturity. A father confines his adult children within a compound, controlling their reality through a falsified vocabulary. It is an allegory of authoritarianism, and an implicit commentary on Greece’s dictatorial past, that established the template for his later closed worlds, from Alps (2011) to The Lobster (2015).
Method: the Artificial Dystopia
Each Lanthimos film constructs an artificial society that exposes the absurdity of social convention. He declines psychological explanation. Dialogue is flat and literal, spaces are bare, and characters voice even their most shameless desires without embarrassment. The goal is not to retell myth but to build a self-contained logic whose rules the viewer must infer. The effect Is defamiliarization: because the world is emptied of context, its violence reads as procedure.
The Killing of a Sacred Deer (2017) sharpens this clash between milieu and character. Martin’s candor and uncomfortable intimacy make him the film’s most frightening figure, precisely because everything around him is already predetermined and he alone says so aloud. Drawing on Euripides’ Iphigenia in Aulis, the film fuses ancient tragedy and retribution with a clinical modern setting.
The Killing of a Sacred Deer : Power as Game
The Favourite (2018), a black comedy set in Queen Anne’s court, treats power as gambling. The stakes are not money but status and influence, and humiliation is both a pervasive threat and a tool. The Queen, afflicted and unstable, is the most abject figure in this economy and easy prey for Abigail and Sarah. As each pushes her wheelchair, she shapes the Queen’s decisions. The gesture can be read as an image of manipulating a society paralyzed by power. Women hold the center of the frame here for the first time, and the question of gender becomes more explicit in his work.
Poor Things: The Possibility of Change
Poor Things (2023), adapted from Alasdair Gray’s novel, reworks Frankenstein. Bella Baxter (Emma Stone), a woman reanimated by an eccentric surgeon, must learn the world anew, and her curiosity drives the film. It asks whether human beings can change, and whether this world allows for social and gender equality. Only Bella’s childlike perspective makes an answer possible. Unburdened by norms, she exposes how behavior is censored and how conventions are imposed, and how disregarding them can be both unsettling and exhilarating. The film’s ambivalence has divided critics: whether Bella’s sexual self-discovery is emancipatory or still framed by a male gaze remains debated.
Gender and Violence
Much criticism reads neoliberal and capitalist governance, both patriarchal, as a threat to the individual and the family in recent Greek cinema. I agree, but I think too little attention has been paid to how deeply gendered and misogynistic these systems are. Women in these worlds are subjugated, which gives their acts of resistance political weight even as those acts draw them toward destruction. Why, and how, are young women in his films pushed toward death, literally or symbolically? At a time of rising gender-based violence and femicide in Greece and elsewhere, it is worth re-examining how women are conceptualized in works that are otherwise formally progressive.
Kinds of Kindness and After
Kinds of Kindness (2024), an absurdist triptych shown at Cannes, returns to Lanthimos’s early register: eccentric relationships, eroticism, and unsettling power dynamics, with the same actors reappearing in different roles in each segment. With Bugonia (2025), he continues to examine power, belief, and control.
