Few viewers would choose to live in a Yorgos Lanthimos film, but his work is so good it makes us feel that we do. Like Lynch or Von Trier, Herzog or Buñuel, he conjures a world with its own internal logic; that’s heightened and strange and semi-detached from our own. In his early years, the director was part of a trend that was known as the Greek Weird Wave, and painted warped portraits of a troubled country on the brink of meltdown. Then the rest of the planet caught up and sent his career fully global. Whatever our nationality, we’re all Greek Weird Wave now.
Early and latter-day Lanthimos are both on display this month with the re-release of his breakthrough film Dogtooth (2009) and the public unveiling at the Venice Film Festival of his latest work, Bugonia. It’s oddly touching to revisit Dogtooth after all these years and be reminded of a time when it looked as if it might be a fascinating one-off, a niche property, and as far removed from mainstream cinema as its luckless protagonists are from their immediate neighbours.
