After two semi-mainstream, over-the-top comedies—The Favourite and Poor Things—Yorgos Lanthimos returns to his misanthropically demented roots with this film, which re-teams him with his Greek screenwriting compatriot Efthimis Filippou. The duo were responsible for some of Lanthimos’s most twisted and eerily fantastic early films.
Here they unleash a triptych of stories that all revolve around one omnipresent character mysteriously named R.M.F. Aside from that, the thematic through line tends to focus on dominance and submission in a variety of extremes ranging from mutilation to rape and everything in-between. The film is not for those faint of heart, that’s for sure.
It’s all delivered in Lanthimos and Filippou’s wonderfully deadpan and detached manner, which will no doubt be off-putting to many; much
of the dialogue is delivered in stiff, lurching, often unemotional vocal patterns. Yet for those willing to stick it out, the film is rife with numerous WTF moments and is gloriously saturated in sparse and glaring atonal music that amps up the emotional fortitude to 11. Ultimately, the entire event feels like a sick-and-twisted update on The Twilight Zone.
The assembled core cast of Jesse Plemens, Emma Stone, Willem Dafoe, Margaret Qualley, Hong Chau, Mamoudou Athie, and the enigmatic Yorgos Stefanakos, are all mesmerizing in their displays of fetishism, subordination, anger, confusion, and the like.
There are many jarring elements dotted throughout the stories that will undoubtedly induce cringes, grimaces, and unease in some viewers (I exclaimed “FUCK ME!” under my breath more than once) and those expecting the loopy absurdist fantasy elements that populated Poor Things will have another think coming as this film is edgy and mean spirited, but also funny in a bizarrely satirical manner.
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