The Favourite

Yorgos Lanthimos is a director of studied incongruencies, overlapping genres, styles and tones to suit his particular vision. In this way, his jet-black comic overtones are often overrun by his macabre sense of violence -- as visceral and affecting as any director working today. It's a decidedly odd balance, though hardly unprecedented: Kafka was said to have considered The Metamorphosis a comedy.

The question of how Lanthimos' style would play with the specifics of a costume drama set in the royal court in 18th-century England gets answered in spades. After the misstep of his previous film, The Killing of the Sacred Deer, which overplayed its hand with respect to tone and balance, this film seems to hit all the proper notes, even if they're played out on razor wire.

Queen Anne (Olivia Colman) is a frail sort, given to bouts of consternation and childlike rage when she feels disobeyed. She is, however, more often than not, obsequious to her best friend and primary adviser, Lady Sarah (Rachel Weisz), ostensibly married to the commander of the British Forces, but, in reality, in fidelity only to the queen, keeping her under control by a combination of praise, sexual fulfillment, and, when called for it, blunt honesty. It's a mixed up, somewhat chaotic method of ruling the kingdom, but one that has worked for years, even as England is once again pulled into war against France. As the queen tasks the rich landowners to front the cost, Harley (Nicholas Hault), the flamboyant head of the loyal opposition, spars with Sarah, and tries to influence the scatter-minded queen as best he can at distance.

Enter into this fray, Sarah's distant cousin Abigail (Emma Stone), once a lady herself, but reduced in circumstances by her father's inveterate gambling habit to scrounge for a job in the servants' quarters. Cunning as she proves to be, however, it's not long before she has gained entrance into the queen's chambers (and royal bed), and proves a worthy adversary to the deeply rooted Sarah. Thus ensues an ongoing war of escalation between the two women, attempting to gain -- or regain -- favor from the queen.

Lanthimos makes grand use of wide-angle and low-light lenses, along with the kinds of long-form tracking shots that come directly out of the Kubrickian palette -- his control over image, composition, light and sound has a similarly captivating swell of monomania as the great master. The notably high-tech bent of many of these shots plays neatly off of the meticulously detailed period element, creating yet another tiny point of frisson for which the director has become so celebrated.

His potent violence is also at hand, but only in small dabbles -- one scene, in which a character has to emulate a severe beat down by smacking themselves in the face with a heavy book is enough to remind us how much ground Lanthimos can cover with a single trickle of blood -- because the real damage here is done verbally. Like Les Liaisons Dangerous, the ruling class brutalizes itself by comportment and social denigration.

As sharp-tongued and merciless as the film can be, there are more overt moments of comedy. One scene at a formal ball at the castle, in which Sarah and a young courtier take center floor and proceed to add contemporary choreography to their dance together is oddball and bracingly funny, but done just quickly and subtly enough that the joke barely takes place before blowing away, like a puff of smoke in a hurricane.

There's also the game the film likes to play with its audience's sympathies: The title could refer to the queen herself, and the rivalry between the younger women, but it also suggests the difficulty the audience has in pulling for one woman over the other. On one hand, Sarah seems to deeply care for the queen, whom she has known most of her life, even if she uses that connection to essentially de facto run the court; on the other, Abigail, for all her wily cons, comes from a background so bleak and miserable, it's difficult to hold it against her when she proves so vexingly duplicitous.

If Lanthimos is a visual stylist of consummate skill, he's also well aware of the human condition, the film is studded with nuances and variables that feel emotionally believable, no matter the liberties the filmmakers have taken with Queen Anne's tortured history. By the end, with Anne bloated and besot by illness, no matter which woman wins, no one will actually be able to claim victory. The last shot, a slow fade between first two, then three, then multiple shots convalescing into a shimmering horde like the rippling surface of a pond during a hail storm, might be the best cinematic manipulation of the year.

MovieStyle on 01/18/2019