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The Favourite (2018; Directed by Yorgos Lanthimos)

The Hollywood awards-season breakthrough from idiosyncratic Greek arthouse auteur Yorgos Lanthimos is a mordant dark comedy of society, manners, love, and politics. The Favourite features a central triangle of defining, superb performances from three very different actresses (and a fourth fine turn from a rising male actor) and displays technical virtuosity that doesn’t merely impress but deepens and defamiliarizes genre material that might have slipped to the predictable. Lanthimos and his team painstakingly re-create the royal court of early 18th-century Britain, but The Favourite possesses and transforms the period costume drama like a parasitic wasp, devouring it from the inside out and turning it into a work with a skewed and troublingly absurd view of privilege, power, and human nature.

In 1708, Great Britain’s final Stuart monarch Queen Anne (Olivia Colman, who won a Best Actress Oscar for her performance) is constantly unwell and adrift in her own court. Her country battles longtime enemy France in the War of Spanish Succession, and her friend, confidant, court favourite, sometimes lesbian lover, and defacto regent Sarah Churchill, Duchess of Marlborough (Rachel Weisz) argues for its continuation, with property taxes across the realm to be raised to fund the effort. Sarah’s motivation to keep the war going is threefold, though largely implied: it increases the prestige of her husband the 1st Duke of Marlborough (Mark Gatiss), who commands British forces, allows the Churchills to skim money from the war purse to fund their extravagant lifestyle and building projects (including Blenheim Palace, the opulent near-royal-level palatial home in Oxfordshire begun in Sarah’s lifetime, later the birthplace of their descendant and historical biographer Winston Churchill), and sends her husband away from court so that she may tryst with and influence the Queen unimpeded by his presence.

She is opposed by parliamentarian (and later Earl of Oxford and Earl Mortimer) Robert Harley (Nicholas Hoult, in that fourth and often overlooked excellent performance), who wants to end the war and avoid tax rises. At this time, Sarah’s penniless cousin Abigail Hill (Emma Stone) arrives at court and takes work as a scullery maid, but her intelligence and cunning sees her rise to a lady of the bedchamber to Queen Anne, which sees her enter into direct conflict with Sarah over closeness to and influence over the moody and ill queen. Their increasingly hostile rivalry over the queen’s affections is used by Harley to leverage his power in the government over the 1st Earl of Godolphin (James Smith), who sides with the Duchess while opposition leader Harley is fed information by Abigail, who also hooks a future husband in military officer Samuel Masham (Joe Alwyn).

Working from a script by Deborah Davis and Tony McNamara, Lanthimos, who usually writes his own films with inimitable deadpan absurdism, emblazons his peculiar brand on The Favourite visually, tonally, and thematically. The production values re-creating the upper-crust world of the early 1700s are exquisite, although Lanthimos and his cinematographer Robbie Ryan rarely linger on sumptuous details of the set or costume design. Lighting is pale and natural, coming in the day from sunlight through windows and at night from flickering candlelight, like Stanley Kubrick’s period epic Barry Lyndon. The camera moves with disarming fluidity in the historic spaces that provide the film’s setting (Hatfield House and Hampton Court Palace, primarily) that is the result of neither Steadicam nor track dolly work. These tracking shots, panoramic pivots, and Lanthimos’ use of wide and fisheye lenses turn these elegant spaces into inhospitable and claustrophobic gilded cells, with metaphorical bars of ambition, jealousy, loneliness, and regret.

Lanthimos also pushed his actors to detach from the meaning of their lines, putting them through absurd, experimental-theatre rehearsals of bizarre physical contortion exercises to render their performing reactions ever more instinctual. The result is more strange, primal defamiliarization, encouraging random deadpan absurdities to burst through the rich psychological and interpersonal atmosphere being crafted. Weisz, who worked with Lanthimos on The Lobster, stays focused laser-like on the Duchess’ manipulative steeliness, while Stone and Colman, comic actresses at their core, employ the atonal liberty to explore unpredictable respective corners of Abigail’s faux-naive ingratiating instincts and Queen Anne’s fickle and emotionally needy grasping nature. Hoult leans into both Harley’s clever, ruthless string-pulling and his sartorial clowniness; he can give the appearance of being connivingly ahead of the game and humiliatingly baffled at the same time. The numerous pages and footmen are slow-witted, awkward, and terrified of the changeable queen. Most bizarrely, Alwyn and Weisz share a dance at a ball which departs wholly from historical accuracy and becomes a weird and hilarious semi-modern, semi-improvised vogue that drives a jealous and self-conscious Queen Anne to call an end to the whole affair.

Lanthimos also continues his career fixation on animals. One scene features ducks racing in slow motion in a drawing room to the delight of ludicrous aristocrats (Godolphin owns the duck racing champion and ridiculously walks it on a leash). The shifting power dynamic between Sarah and Abigail is imparted through a series conversations during live-bird shooting sessions, with the increasingly assured and Machiavellian Abigail moving from a place of sympathy for the creatures to efficiently blasting them from the sky, once so vindictively close to Sarah as to splashback bird blood on her face. Most charged with symbolism are Queen Anne’s 17 pet rabbits, one for each child she had borne and lost. Sarah considers them morbid and tells the queen so, but Abigail feigns affection for them to get into Anne’s good graces before becoming so confident in those graces as to casually threaten injury or death to one of them.

The rabbits also feature in Lanthimos’ arty closing superimposition shot, contrasting Colman’s Queen Anne grimly determined to assert her power over a prostrate Abigail while hopping bunnies fill the background. Lanthimos cultivates ambiguity in this moment, but it’s fairly unambiguous, honestly. The rabbits are Anne’s isolation and tragic regret, her diminishing health and mental acuity made manifest, hopping unrestrained through her prison-like palace rooms. Abigail lets them loose as she lets the Queen loose, leading her to assert greater control over official affairs such as the war and taxes than under the stewardship of Sarah Churchill. But the animals, like the queen, go out of Abigail’s control, and the final shot is a re-assertion of royal authority over the wheedling influence of court favourites. Power is still power, The Favourite reinforces, even if it lies in the unreliable hands of the capricious, the self-interested, and the barely-competent. As if, today, we needed this point to be made clear to us.