Yorgos Lanthimos: Tyranny and Freedom

The outside world awaits - Credit: Searchlight Pictures

Planes fly mysteriously overhead. City lights twinkle in the distance. In the cinema of Yorgos Lanthimos, what lies out of reach is always the object of our protagonist’s fixation – specifically because it is always denied them.

Across Lanthimos’ filmography, there is an apprehension with subjugation. In The Favourite (2018), higher status at court becomes exceptionally alluring as two women vie for power, desperate to avoid slipping down the social ladder in a male dominated environment. In The Lobster (2015), intimacy and sexuality are coldly managed and enforced by a sterile, totalitarian society. People without partners are rounded up by police and turned into animals, while those who are caught masturbating have their hands forced into toasters. Needless to say, Lanthimos has a knack for depicting dystopian societies in the most absurd of ways.

However, it is in his first widely-released film and his most recent work where we can find these themes being explored best: Dogtooth (2009) and Poor Things (2023). In these two masterpieces, there is a stark dichotomy between inside and out, between confinement and freedom. Oppression characterises the lives of our protagonists, with their desire to escape persecution acting as their primary motivation throughout the film. The Greek New Wave filmmaker shows a keen interest in how people function under subjugating societies, conveying the clandestine, complex battle between oppressive regimes and the dizzying power of the human spirit.

Almost fifteen years after it was released, Dogtooth has remained one of the most startling depictions of parental abuse in the whole of cinema. The film is part absurdist drama, part dark comedy, and part coming-of-age psychological thriller. Though baring similarities to Arturo Ripstein’s The Castle of Purity (1973), Dogtooth is utterly unique.

The story follows the lives of three children who have never left their parents’ home. Father (Christos Stergioglou) has constructed a bizarre reality for his offspring, which ensures they will never leave the property. Meanwhile, Mother (Michelle Valley) educates the children, providing them with vocabulary of new and exciting words: “The new words of the day are ‘sea’, ‘highway’, and ‘excursion’. ‘Sea’ is a leather armchair with wooden armrests, like the one in the living room.”

The film opens with a close-up on the tape recorder that conveys such misinformation. Lanthimos places the symbol of their intellectual suppression at the forefront of the narrative: the plot must result in their enlightenment. Of course, it won’t be easy. The parental control that dominates every facet of their lives is wholly fastidious and meticulously structured. Moreover, Father has brainwashed the children into thinking that they can only leave the grounds of the house when they have lost their dogtooth.

This is only one example of how Father shrewdly indoctrinates his children, often leading to rather surreal results. He teaches them that cats are dangerous predators, with one even having killed their brother who lives over the wall: “The animal that threatens us is a ‘cat’ – the most dangerous animal there is. It eats meat, children’s flesh in particular. However, if you stay inside, you are protected.” Father provides the children with lessons in barking to ward off their enemy, one that lies just outside the borders of their little paradise.

In this, there is something oddly reminiscent of George Orwell’s depiction of the propaganda employed by dictatorships. Both in Animal Farm (1945) and 1984 (1949), Orwell artfully exposes how despots incite fear of external, non-existent threats in their subordinates. Like Stalin did Trotsky, Napoleon demonises Snowball, causing everyone at the farm to believe he is the agent behind all of their misfortune.

Similarly, Big Brother vilifies Emmanuel Goldstein as the malicious perpetrator of all society’s ills. Hilariously, Father’s demonstration of how to bark away the cat to protect the family home is much like Orwell’s Two Minutes of Hate: he adroitly directs any subversive emotions the children may have towards his and Mother’s governance of the house towards a nebulous, external enemy – in this case, the ordinary housecat.

In doing so, the desire to venture outside is quashed. As planes fly overhead – juxtaposing the children’s stasis with the movement of the external world – they occasionally drop into the garden, ready to be plucked out of the grass by the fastest offspring. They are taught that there is no need to leave: everything can and will come to them – if they behave themselves. However, Older Daughter (Angeliki Papoulia) becomes increasingly fascinated by the promise of an external world, prepared to do almost anything to reach it.

This is where she and Bella Baxter (Emma Stone) coincide. Both desperately want to get outside, to see the universe that exists outside the boundary of domestic spaces. Both have a domineering, controlling patriarch that tries to keep them from leaving, though their reasons differ. And much like the opening in Dogtooth, the opening shot of Poor Things is right in line with the themes of the story: a woman jumps from a bridge, escaping a life characterised by miserable oppression and torment.

The similarities continue as we see how both Bella and Older Daughter demonstrate a curiosity with sex and stimulation. However, this innocent interest ends up at different ends of the spectrum for the two characters; sex becomes an act of liberation for Bella, but a manifestation of Older Daughter’s terrible, mounting persecution. On top of this, these women overcome such subjugation by spilling blood: Bella shoots Alfie in the foot, whereas Older Daughter knocks out her dogtooth so that she may leave the compound, the very title of the film acting as an emblem of the cost of freedom under totalitarian regimes.

While Lanthimos demonstrates interest in how people’s sensory systems are affected under autocracy, sensory deprivation also becomes a common manifestation of such oppressive regimes. The daughters in Dogtooth are denied sexual education, becoming stunted as a result. In The Lobster, a woman is blinded for breaking a primitive society’s central tenet. Meanwhile, Alfie Blessington attempts to remove Bella Baxter’s vulva for what he considers unruly and uncooperative behaviour.

In a society that erodes our most natural senses, dancing becomes an opportunity to embrace the weird, the primal, the ebullient and turbulent emotions that can no longer be repressed. In an homage to Flashdance (1983), Older Daughter bubbles over and releases pent up existential angst into a frenzied display of movement. The stiff, formal society of Britain’s Stuart Period in The Favourite is transgressed through dance in a flagrant disregard for custom or pretence.

Interestingly, the dancing in The Lobster is the only example that differs, showcasing how the dystopia has expunged the potential for romance from even the most intimate of mating rituals: slow dancing. Finally, in Poor Things, Bella’s newfound sense of rhythm is repeatedly curtailed by Duncan Wedderburn (Mark Ruffalo) on the dancefloor as he tries to reel her in, to hold her close to him and control her.

In this last example, we can see how Lanthimos often frames such dictatorships as arising from men’s obsession with ownership. When Duncan realises he cannot have Bella all to himself, he threatens to kill her. Confused, she asks: “So you wish to marry me, or kill me? Is that the proposal?” Similarly, Father wants to keep his children at home for his entire life, so that they may resemble the plant he has in his office, or the dogs in cages at the canine training facility.

With such deft thematic exploration, coupled with such daft dialogue, Lanthimos’ work has quickly become some of the most ground-breaking, fascinating cinema of the 21st Century. One would say that it is due to his singular style, stunning cinematography, and captivating characters. However, it is also due to his fascination with despotism, how a tyranny upheld by lies is constantly threatened by the liberating power of truth, and how blood is often required to obtain true, lasting freedom.

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