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Eleftheria ‘Rania’ Kosmidou, a Lecturer in Film, coined the term for her new book, ‘Framing the Films by Yorgos Lanthimos: The Weird in Contemporary Greek Cinema, Brecht and the Uncanny.’

In the book, which is the first monograph published about Lanthimos’ filmography, Rania argues that the BAFTA Award-winning director’s distinctive style is a mixture of the Freudian notion of the uncanny and the influence of German playwright Bertolt Brecht.

She states that throughout Lanthimos’ filmography, the director deploys Brechtian alienation tools that distance the audience and make them think critically about what they are watching, causing them to become an active spectator. This is then combined with the aesthetics of the uncanny in which gothic and unsettling notions are core to the films’ narratives and style as familiar storytelling notions and characters then become unfamiliar to the audience.

Rania states that this pattern can be traced all through Lanthimos’ filmography, from the family drama Dogtooth (2009), the black comedy The Lobster (2015), the psychological thriller The Killing of a Sacred Deer (2017), the satirical period comedy The Favourite (2018) and in some of his more recent releases Poor Things (2023) and Kinds of Kindness (2024).

Rania said: “The work of Yorgos Lanthimos has previously been characterised as portraying a ‘certain weirdness’ or ‘brilliantly strange’, as they all feature a very distinctive style that often deviates from realism."

“What I found by researching his films is that all of them feature the Brechtian tradition of defamiliarised performances, in combination with the aesthetics of the uncanny and unnatural narratives."

“Through the prism of this ‘Brechtian uncanny’, I articulate how this style surfaces in performances, camerawork and in the narratives themselves. We repeatedly see familiar/unfamiliar narratives that become unfamiliar/uncanny through style (such as in music, performances, camera work). 

“It is for this reason that Lanthimos' style is distinct from horror, extreme cinema or absurdist cinema for example."

“Even in his more accessible films like The Favourite and Poor Things, in which the narratives abide by more familiar Hollywood storytelling, the way he tells the story and frames the shots are not traditional at all. Lanthimos takes what’s familiar to the audience and then makes it unfamiliar to the point that you’re watching something else entirely.”

Rania also explains that Lanthimos’ breakout hit Dogtooth in 2009 kicked off a new cinematic style in Greece – a new wave of 'weird' films (dubbed the Greek weird wave internationally) that dealt with the institution of family, patriarchy and capitalism as allegories for the Greek financial crisis of the time. 

Framing the Films by Yorgos Lanthimos: The Weird in Contemporary Greek Cinema, Brecht and the Uncanny, was published by Palgrave Macmillan on January 14.

The banner image is by Atsushi Nishijima and is provided courtesy of Searchlight Pictures.