Table of Contents

List of Illustrations
Notes on Contributors
Acknowledgements
A Note on Titles

1. (A Late) Introduction: Framing Yorgos Lanthimos’s Weird Worlds
Eddie Falvey, Plymouth College of Art, UK

Part I: Origins and Identity
2. Greek Screen Cultures and the Scopic Regimes of the Long 1990s: Exploring Yorgos Lanthimos’s Early Works
Afroditi Nikolaidou, University of Athens, Greece
3. The Anti-Foundationalist Cinema of Yorgos Lanthimos: The Case of Kinetta
Vrasidas Karalis, University of Sydney, Australia

Part II: Experiencing Lanthimos
4. On Confinement, Sameness and Grieving: Yorgos Lanthimos’s Alps
Asbjørn Grønstad, University of Bergen, Norway
5. Bodies Out of Place: Ontological Adriftness in The Lobster
Ina Karkani, Freie University Berlin, Germany
6. Notes toward a Cinema of Apathy in the Films of Yorgos Lanthimos
Eddie Falvey, Plymouth College of Art, UK

Part III: Form and Authorship
7. Kafkaesque Themes in The Lobster
Angelos Koutsourakis, University of Leeds, UK
8. Animal Instincts: Fear, Power and Obedience in the Films of Yorgos Lanthimos and Stanley Kubrick
Michael Lipiner, University of Bangor, UK and Nathan Abrams, University of Bangor, UK
9. Consider the Absurd: Uneasy Proximity in Dogtooth, The Lobster, and The Killing of a Sacred Deer
Nepomuk Zettl, University of Zurich, Switzerland
10. Dog, Lobster, Deer, Rabbit: Yorgos Lanthimos’s Animal Metaphors
Savina Petkova, King’s College London, UK

Part IV: Genre and Variation
11. Arthouse Thriller: Auteur Meets Genre in The Killing of a Sacred Deer
Geoff King, Brunel University, UK
12. Myth and Mythopoeia in the Films of Yorgos Lanthimos
James J. Clauss, University of Washington, USA
13. Rethinking the Heritage Film: Gothic Critique in The Favourite
Alex Lykidis, Montclair State University, USA

Part V: Gender, Sex and Sexuality
14. Young Women’s Deadly Rebellions in the Early Films of Yorgos Lanthimos
Tonia Kazakopoulou, University of Reading, UK
15. The ‘Weird’ Sex Scenes of Yorgos Lanthimos
Alice Haylett Bryan, King’s College London, UK
16. The Queer Posthumanism of The Lobster
Marios Psaras, University of Cyprus, Cyprus

Yorgos Lanthimos Primary Feature Filmography
Index

Promotional Information

The first book dedicated to the cinema of Yorgos Lanthimos, offering a range of critical approaches to his work.

About the Author

Eddie Falvey completed his PhD in Film Studies at University of Exeter, UK and is now an academic researcher and educator. He has published widely on film and associated media and his most recent research focuses on spectatorship and ethics in relation to screen violence. He is author of Re-Animator (2021) and co-editor of New Blood: Critical Approaches to Contemporary Horror (with Joe Hickinbottom and Jonathan Wroot, 2020).

Reviews

Bringing together 15 new essays, this first ever book-length collection on the cinema Yorgos Lanthimos attests to the continuing fascination with his work by scholars, critics, and audiences alike. Spanning from his explorations in 1990s Greece to his recent star-studded films, the essays examine recurrent themes and motifs – confinement, animality, absurdism, apathy, adriftness -, position his work within cultural, literary, cinematic, and philosophical contexts, and open new pathways of understanding his enigmatic, weird, films. A significant and welcome contribution.
*Lydia Papadimitriou, Reader in Film Studies, Liverpool John Moores University, UK*

Yorgos Lanthimos is a slippery figure in contemporary cinema. Across his strikingly stylised films, he has been both Greek national and cosmopolitan flaneur, realist and surrealist, dark pessimist and utopian dreamer. This superb, in-depth book brings together all the director’s many facets.
*Adrian Martin, Adjunct Associate Professor, Monash University, Australia*

Lanthimos the weird; Lanthimos the formalist; Lanthimos the Greek—it is high time that a scholarly collection took aim at this most fascinating filmmaker, who attracts a variety of labels only to confound them all: an absurdist who grapples with relational ethics; an aesthete whose work is awash in critiques of rule, law, and history; a director apt to reimagine the Hellenic specificity of Euripides in the midst of wildly transnational co-productions. This excellent assemblage cuts across these contradictions, encountering Lanthimos over and over again in different guises by way of a final epithet: Lanthimos the philosopher, one whose thinking of affects, ethics, aesthetics, and politics will continue to reside at the heart of 21st-century cinema.
*Eugenie Brinkema, Associate Professor of Contemporary Literature and Media, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA*

In recent years, few filmmakers have caused more debate with their work than Yorgos Lanthimos. An exciting new collection of critical essays, edited by Eddie Falvey, brings this work into sharp focus as an outstanding group of scholars engage with the core questions that define Lanthimos’s filmmaking. Their original perspectives, insightful analyses and impeccable scholarship make The Cinema of Yorgos Lanthimos a must-read!
*Yannis Tzioumakis, Reader in Film and Media Industries, University of Liverpool, UK*