Yorgos Lanthimos's Fantasies of Control

The director's latest, Kinds of Kindness, which premiered at Cannes, is a return to his primary interest― what makes people submit.

- Alison Willmore

Evangelia Randou in Lanthimos's solo debut, Kinetta (2005).

LAST YEAR, Yorgos Lanthimos directed a dark comedy about a woman named Bella who was assembled from the body of an adult and the brain of a fetus in a Frankenstein-like surgery and who went on to fuck her way to self-actualization across a fantastical Europe. It was the most accessible thing the Athens-born director had ever made, which really says more about his overall body of work than it does about Poor Things.

Jesse Plemons in Kinds of Kindness (2024)

Lanthimos is one of film's reigning sadists, though he's always funny about it-if not funny haha, then funny in a tone so arid as to render the humor borderline subliminal. He makes films set in deadpan universes that sit at Dutch angles to our own and feature characters struggling to live in accordance with arbitrary and frequently cruel conventions. All of which is true of Poor Things as well. What sets it apart is the way that Bella, the wiped-blank heroine played by Emma Stone, rejects the rules and strictures she's told she has to abide by as she speedruns her way from child to woman of the world. Lanthimos, as unlikely as it seemed, had created a story of empowerment as well as something tailor-made to polarize the internet.

The frankness of the sexual content which begins with Bella's innocent explorations of her own body, progresses to her voracious pursuit of what she calls "furious jumping" with a louche lawyer played by Mark Ruffalo, and eventually brings her to work in a Parisian brothel-kicked off arguments about the degree to which Poor Things is mired in the male gaze. It seemed as though the only person who didn't care to weigh in on the validity of the film's feminism was the filmmaker himself, who shied away from the label like someone being introduced as a boyfriend by a person they thought they were just casually dating.