Tropic Sprockets / Yorgos Lanthimos: The Power of the Unexplained

By Ian Brockway

Being a lover of Kafka and Italo Calvino, I am newly interested in the films of Yorgos Lanthimos who has an upcoming period drama out entitled, “The Favourite” which just won the Grand Jury Prize at Cannes, about Queen Anne and Sarah Churchill. If his past films are any indication, few directors are so bold, thoughtful or so unsettling.

His first notable film was “Dogtooth” (2009), which focused on a family run like a cult. The five family members live by their own language, they act violently, only watch old videos and are only allowed to leave if their teeth fall out. Most striking is the plane that flies overhead almost constantly. The family is taught that if they are lucky, they will catch the plane one day, for it is a toy. Sometimes the father beats his family, sometimes he spoils them. Events happen without reason. Mind-control is paramount.

His next film was “Alps”, where an underground group of grieving people take on the guise of their newly deceased family members. Central to the film, is a dead tennis player and the young woman who assumes her identity. The young woman’s parents don’t seem to notice or care that she has assumed the persona and the viewer is not quite sure what is real.

Next, “The Killing of A Sacred Deer” is probably the most disturbing. A surgeon (Colin Farrell) is involved with a teen boy (Barry Keoghan). After several meetings, the boy tells the doctor that he is responsible for the death of the boy’s father and that his entire family will get sick and die if the doctor does not kill one of his kids (or his wife) as a sacrifice.

The doctor obviously thinks he’s joking until his son can’t move.

What follows is a horrible scenario of guilt and in-fighting between the family, wondering just who will be sacrificed.

“The Lobster” is the most fanciful of the director’s projects to date, yet it still has a very dark edge.

A newly single man (Colin Farrell) is brought to a hotel and told that he has 45 days to find a mate or else he will be turned into an animal of his choice.

Sex is forbidden, but masturbatory stimulation by the hotel maid is a rule. Meanwhile single people hide in the forest and are relentlessly hunted.

In Lanthimos’s work, seemingly irrational or eerie events unfold naturally as in a dream. People frequently become naked or fight visciously without warning. Dialogue is often spoken without feeling or intonation and circumstances occur with little prior cause or effect.

While Yorgos Lanthimos is offbeat and not for every eye, he is refreshing in this age of formulaic filmmaking. He forces his audience to ponder, to be curious and perhaps to create more, in order to process what we all see.

This process of speculation, of wonder in watching is becoming lost in the cinema of effect. To see something unexplained or even unexplainable on-screen is a rare and rich element to me, and this irrationality or mystery in the unexplained is the source of all good literature.

Write Ian at [email protected]