Lanthimos in
Top-20 directors to watch for NYTimes
20 Directors to Watch
This is a list of 20 filmmakers to watch. Other than their relative
youth — one turned 40 a few months ago, and several more will join him soon —
they share little besides passion and promise. But bringing them together, and
shining a light on their accomplishments and their potential, seems especially
urgent as another new season of serious moviegoing gets under way. Here’s why:
We are living in a time of cinematic bounty. In multiplexes and beyond, movie
lovers have a greater, more dizzying variety of choices — and of screens, large
and small — than at any time in history.
Yorgos Lanthimos
A group of four people — a cult, a start-up company or something else
entirely — provides grieving families with the peculiar but surprisingly
popular service of impersonating dead loved ones. A mother and father live with
their adult children, who they have raised in isolation from society and
educated in a belief system built around bizarre superstitions and an esoteric
vocabulary. These are the premises of “Alps” and “Dogtooth,” the most recent
features by the Greek filmmaker Yorgos Lanthimos. The world of his films is
very strange but also uncannily recognizable. It is not a place of fantasy or
allegory but a zone of possibility protruding at an odd angle from what we
might understand as reality. He does not explain his surreal conceits but
rather presents them with naturalistic rigor, as if he were shooting
documentaries of his own dreams. Or perhaps of a culture’s nightmares.
While the political and economic unraveling of his homeland do not
figure directly in “Alps” or “Dogtooth,” Mr. Lanthimos is part of a generation
of Greek filmmakers who have come into their own in a period of profound and
terrifying crisis. And the feeling of malaise, of living in a condition of
hollowed-out meanings and foreclosed possibilities, haunts his characters, in
particular the young ones. The adult children in “Dogtooth” inhabit a doomed
wonderland, while the ghoulish entrepreneurs of “Alps” fall prey to the
emotional chaos their project is designed to hold at bay.
Official web page: http://www.lanthimos.com
