‘Bugonia’: Where Yorgos Lanthimos is taking cinema's Greek Weird Wave

Lanthimos leads the Greek Weird Wave, that strange, surreal film movement that emerged from Greece’s financial crisis in the late 2000s. Born from economic collapse and social unrest, these films rejected traditional Mediterranean exuberance for deadpan absurdism and gritty explorations of sex, gender, politics, and family. Other essential makers include Athina Rachel Tsangari, Panos H. Koutras, Yannis Economides, and Argyris Papadimitropoulos. Tsangari’s Chevalier is a savage satire of toxic masculinity set on a boat where six men compete in measuring contests for unclear stakes; Pity, by Babis Makridis, is a fascinating take on how compulsively the grieving can get addicted to receiving sympathy. These films never claimed to have answers to Greece’s troubles; they simply provided an unorthodox, unsettling perspective.

Lanthimos announced himself with Dogtooth (2009, streaming on MUBI), a disturbing examination of deranged parenthood where parents manipulate their children and keep them sealed off from the external world, a film so unnervingly original it earned an Oscar nomination for Best Foreign Language Film. Then came The Lobster (2015, Netflix), his English-language breakthrough, where singles have 45 days to find a partner or be transformed into animals, a ridiculous dystopian premise rendered with deadpan precision. The film finds humour in the uncomfortable: breakfast scenes where the newly coupled taunt the desperate singles, a setup that’s motivational torture.

With The Favourite (2018), Lanthimos became more playful yet no less acidic: a period satire about femininity and power in Queen Anne’s court, shot with fisheye and wide-angle lenses that turned palatial rooms into both playgrounds and prisons. His 2023 stunner Poor Things (JioHotstar) arrived like a revelation. The film is realised with such flair—steampunk aesthetics, retro-futuristic technology, lavish sets, and Emma Stone’s tour de force performance as Bella Baxter, a woman reanimated with an infant’s brain—that it makes standard Frankenstein adaptations seem tiring and timid by comparison. (I am, sadly, looking at you here, Guillermo Del Toro.)

There is an extraordinary beauty and melancholy threaded through Lanthimos’s work, often hiding in plain sight beneath the absurdity. In Poor Things, for instance, Bella’s journey from reanimated curiosity to self-actualised woman carries a bittersweet weight: she witnesses socioeconomic inequality, grapples with philosophical pessimism, and rejects the rules and the cynicism assigned to her. When she looks at the world’s troubles like a mirror and tries to create change, she doesn’t always succeed, and that failure—that beautiful, human failure—is where the melancholy lives. That’s why Lanthinos uses Marlene Dietrich’s Where Have All the Flowers Gone? at the end of Bugonia.

What sets Lanthimos apart is his varied style and fearlessness as a storyteller, building intricate plots around big, fantastical ideas. He’s made dystopian social satires, anti-authoritarian nightmares, period costume dramas and steampunk feminist fables, each wildly different yet unmistakably his. Where Dogtooth finds humour in the uncomfortable, Poor Things employs comedy to mock detestable characters, like Duncan, whose “furious jumping" with the mentally underaged Bella becomes a condemnation of patriarchal possession. Lanthimos is a director who refuses to repeat himself, who treats each film as an opportunity to reinvent not just his aesthetic but his entire approach to storytelling. That fearlessness extends to content: he doesn’t look away from sex, violence, cruelty, or the grotesque; he leans in, forcing us to confront what we’d rather ignore.

In Emma Stone, Lanthimos has found a collaborator as fearless as himself—someone beautiful who is unafraid to be messy, ugly, awful. Their partnership began with The Favourite, where Stone played the conniving Abigail, all ambition and sharp elbows. Then came surreal black-and-white short Bleat, then Poor Things, where Stone astonishingly depicted Bella’s psychological and psychosexual development from infant-brained creature to self-actualised woman with immense pathos and near-constant comedy. Their collaboration continued with Kinds of Kindness (JioHotstar) and now Bugonia, where Stone plays a steely Big Pharma CEO taking on impassioned adversaries. Stone’s willingness to surrender vanity, to be physically ungainly and morally compromised, makes her the ideal vessel for Lanthimos’s vision—a performer who treats transformation not as risk but as liberation.

Lanthimos is the sort of absurdist who refuses to look away from the mess we humans—a species who may well be a failed science experiment—have created. He revels in highlighting frailties and insecurities, our superhuman ability to cock everything up. His films are forensic examinations of our failures, and his conclusions are so horrifying that they feel, inevitably, hilarious. We are being entertained while reckoning with the realisation of being lab-rats—and not particularly good ones. Lanthimos uses cinema to highlight that tragedy isn’t always noble or redemptive; it’s simply what happens when flawed creatures refuse to learn. Everybody hurts.

Streaming tip of the week:

Martin Scorsese’s The King Of Comedy (JioHotstar) stars Robert De Niro as a self-proclaimed funnyman who kidnaps a legendary comedian and host, played by Jerry Lee Lewis. It is a magnificent, powerful satire—imitated feebly by Joker.

Raja Sen is a screenwriter and critic. He has co-written Chup, a film about killing critics, and is now creating an absurd comedy series. He posts @rajasen.