Yorgos Lanthimos Focus

Watch The Killing of a Sacred Deer, the new film by Yorgos Lanthimos, at the ICA Cinemas beginning 31 October

Alongside Argyris Papadimitropoulos, Athina Rachel Tsangari, Yorgos Zois and Panos Koutras, Yorgos Lanthimos is currently one of most distinctive voices of European auteur cinema and part of a new generation of talented Greek filmmakers, the so-called 'Greek Wave'.

Although his works are often described as surreal or absurd, Lanthimos’s interpretation of contemporary society also reflects on a certain kind of social realism where moral codes and bureaucracy clash, making for increasingly confounding and bizarre portraits.

Revisiting his rigorously composed and socially aware films, the Yorgos Lanthimos Focus begins with his first film feature released in 2005, Kinetta. Set in a desolate Greek resort town, a group of wildly different people ritualistically re-enact crime scenes of local women victimised by a serial killer.

Through his second feature Dogtooth (2009), Lanthimos introduced his skewed cinematic vision to a wider world. Dogtooth offers a disturbing exploration of a family that keeps its children secluded from society, teaching them false beliefs about the outside world. Alps (2011) turns to codenames to frame a quartet of strangers who specialise in providing comfort for the bereaved, with the roleplaying leads engaging in recreations of moments from the lives of the recently deceased.

Written together with Efthymis Filippou—the same writer with whom Lanthimos had worked on Dogtooth and Alps—his fourth work, The Lobster (2015), explores typical Lanthimos tropes by landing its characters in a full-fledged absurdist dystopia. The Lobster is a brutal view of how society influences or constrains love and provides the structure within which one has to operate in order to be happy or successful – themes that are further addressed in Lanthimos’s latest work The Killing of a Sacred Deer (2017), presented at the ICA from 31 October.