Yorgos Lanthimos (born Athens, 1973) has come to represent a singular voice in contemporary cinema — one that blends absurdist logic, formal rigidity, moral distortion, and dark humor into films that feel both distant and uncomfortably close. His emergence, first in Greek cinema and then globally, has reshaped not just what stories are told, but how they’re told. Having recently premiered Bugonia at Venice 2025, it’s a moment to reflect on how he built a body of work that stretches genre, challenges expectations, and collaborates with actors who can inhabit extremes.

Lanthimos’s first steps weren’t in art-house kitsch but in commercials, short films, and avant-garde experiments. His breakthrough came in 2009 with Dogtooth (Kynodontas), co-written with Efthymis Filippou. This was the film that announced him: a family isolated, children who have never left the property, rules invented and enforced by parents, and a world where language, behavior, even lips moving have become controlled performance. Dogtooth won the Un Certain Regard prize at Cannes and was nominated for the Best Foreign Language Film at the Oscars.

He then followed with Alps (2011), another collaboration with Filippou, in which a group of people impersonate recently deceased family members as a service. It’s uncanny and unsettling, pushing familial grief into ritual mockery. Alps was nominated for the Golden Lion at Venice. Through these early works, he was already building what many call the “Lanthimos universe”: characters trapped in constructed systems of behavior, the grotesque disguised as the everyday, moral ambiguity instead of clear heroes.

In 2015, The Lobster marked Lanthimos’s first major foray into English-language cinema. Starring Colin Farrell and Rachel Weisz, it blends dystopia, romance, and dark satire — animals as threats, relationships as bureaucratic structures. It won the Jury Prize at Cannes.

Then came The Killing of a Sacred Deer (2017), again with Filippou, which took his style further into psychological horror territory; The Favourite (2018) shot into mainstream awareness: with Olivia Colman, Emma Stone, and Rachel Weisz, it earned 10 Oscar nominations, won Best Actress for Olivia Colman, and further demonstrated his ability to combine absurd power dynamics, court intrigue, and witty cruelty.

Most recently, Poor Things (2023) became his most commercially visible and formally ambitious film. With Emma Stone in the lead, it won the Golden Lion at Venice, amassed multiple Academy Award nominations (11) and took home multiple Oscars (Best Actress, Production Design, Costume Design, Makeup & Hairstyling).

Lanthimos’s signature style mixes the surreal and the didactic, creating settings where reality is distorted: unnatural rules, off-kilter dialogue, deadpan delivery, and grotesque or absurd situations that reveal the fragility of human norms. He does not adhere to a single genre: his films move between dark comedy, psychological horror, satire, speculative fiction, and historical drama. What emerges is a kind of auteur genre of its own — influenced by absurdism (Kafka, Beckett), but deeply cinematic in its framing and visual austerity.

His recurring collaboration with screenwriter Efthymis Filippou is foundational. Together, they shaped Dogtooth, Alps, The Lobster, The Killing of a Sacred Deer — works that are often uncomfortable, provocative, and meticulously constructed. In later films like The Favourite and Poor Things, Lanthimos increased scale, star power, production design, but still kept his personal voice — the tension between the bizarre and the human.

He has changed Greek cinema’s visibility: from locally provocative experiments to films that win Oscars and Golden Lions. His style has influenced a generation of filmmakers interested in subversion, absurdity, and what lies beyond conventional morality.

In many ways, Lanthimos has built his own genre-space: discomfort + dark logic + formal precision + moral ambiguity (often framed in confined settings). Whether you love or resist his films, you cannot ignore them. He forces us to see what we don’t want to see — to question what we think we already understand.