By Fergus Henderson. “Love has limits” proclaims Sarah Churchill (Rachel Weisz). “It should not” replies Queen Anne (Olivia Coleman). This playful aside, early on in Yorgos Lanthimos’ new film The Favourite, sets the tone for the rest of its crazed, raging runtime.

Anne and Sarah are secret lovers, encroached upon by Sarah’s fallen cousin Abigail (Emma Stone), their affair set against the lonely echoing halls of a never-ending royal palace. Queen Anne, nominally presiding over England at the beginning of the 18^th century, is lost to the world, motivated only be the intimacy and guidance of Sarah. After taking in Abigail, estranged now from her abusive family, their love will be tested, and its limits found.

Meanwhile, the war with France seethes invisibly in the background, relayed to a bewildered, emotionally untethered Anne by a series of made up fops who exist as comedic oddities on the film’s fringes. Anne herself is beset by gout, wheeled about in an hilariously decorated wheelchair, clearly emotionally decimated by the loss of her many children. We find her, as established by Coleman, at a point of profound emotional alienation and having ceded all power to Sarah who, early on in the film, accidentally introduces herself as the queen to a parliamentary group.

Anne’s desperate state only increases as a love triangle quickly arises, spiralling into power plays and plotting. This, along with the trials of saving face before her court whilst advising it on a war she barely comprehends, pushes her further inward and into suicidal depression. Despite how the enfolding love triangle between them all appears to give Anne some long lost power, it can only last so long, for Abigail has her own motivations. 

Director Lanthimos keeps the film’s atmosphere elevated to an ambiently hysterical pitch at all times, aided by cinematographer Robbie Ryan’s swooping camera and ghoulishly distortive wide angled lenses, enveloping us in this isolated world of Stuart era royalty. He delights, somewhat cruelly, in the utter strangeness of his subject matter. 

One need only look at his past films to see how all-encompassing his preoccupation with the unpredictable, volatile nature of our internal lives is. His filmography seems, up till now, to have charted a course straight into the scariest parts of this alienated humanity – from the unknowable freaks and fantasists of 2005’s Kinetta (a film I could only recommend to completists) through to 2017’s The Killing of a Sacred Deer, which pitted an unstoppable Greek myth against the immoveable object of a doctor’s will to have his way.

//www.youtube.com/watch?v=SYb-wkehT1g

There is something a little different going on here. The Favourite marks a distinct left-turn.

Gone, largely, are the arch and insular performances of his earlier films, replaced now by the awe-inspiring emotional acrobatics of its three leads, all of whom out-manoeuver a script that could have stiffened and anaesthetised them (as has been the case with previous Lanthimos stars.) Make no mistake, of course, tonally this film knows what it is: the verbal sabre rattling one might expect of such a period piece abounds, and the inherently funny spectacle of self-important people in silly outfits remains a constant. Likewise it takes a dim view on our pretensions to authority and hierarchy. 

Now, however, Lanthimos contends with the weighty power of Olivia Colman, who provides us with a forceful, embattled performance for the ages. She is simply out of control in this film, hobbling, lunging, falling, vomiting, screaming. She is sometimes still, rendered inert by her psychic pain and the indignity of being wheelchair bound. She is sometimes salacious and soliciting, pitting Sarah and Abigail against each other with wounded glee. At times she is petulant and childlike, lost amongst the rabbits she keeps as surrogates for her seventeen dead children. 

Weisz and Stone are impressively strong and vengeful, respectively, but this is Coleman’s film, and she is stunning.

Whereas with his previous films Lanthimos seemed to wallow in the cynical, indulging an almost nihilistic view of human behaviour, using his absurdism to hold you at arm’s length, here he seems incapable of preventing his leads from bringing humanity to the film. Their very presence in a shot enlivens it. One suspects that this is the point of the film: these societally repressed women possess a boundless power and interiority the likes of which is never even guessed at by the preening, posturing men who strut ineffectually around the plot’s periphery. They simply have to live in their own, necessarily secret world. 

Perhaps this is why, with women at the centre of his film for the first time, The Favourite pulses with an energy that far surpasses his previous work. 

As with his other films, the cinematography seems focused on making people look small and odd, capturing them in long takes from a distance and forcing us to see their activities as something alien and furtive. It can only be down to the sheer liveliness of the film’s energy that this tactic never becomes clinical or cruel. We are now privy to anachronistically contemporary dance sequences, slow motion duck races, tense mud-bath showdowns, scenes of long-shot visual comedy indebted to director Jacques Tati. There is even a character listed in the credits as ‘Nude Pomegranate Tory.’ 

The Favourite, lit with natural light, is a sensuous thing to behold, somewhere between the baroque compositions of Barry Lyndon and the raw power of a Pasolini film. It is simply much more vital, and much less punishing, than anything he has done before. This is finally a Yorgos Lanthimos film with nothing withheld, one whose absurdism seems generous and egalitarian. One you can really enjoy.

There remains plenty of darkness to be seen and felt. You will still leave with the distinct feeling that Lanthimos finds torment in the callousness and excess of the world. You will feel thoroughly odd throughout. The audience I was in was tangibly disturbed by the searching, hallucinatory note that the film ends on. But you will also finally get the sense that Lanthimos, like someone awakening from a nightmare, is starting to see the light. 

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