Men Writing Women: Yorgos Lanthimos

Added: 2026-05-12

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[00:00:11]Yosanthamos is a filmmaker I've gone from loving to hating in a matter of just a few films. And there's one big reason for this. His women.

[00:00:27]Greek director Yorgoslanthamos splashed into many of our lives with his 2015 indie hit The Lobster. It was uniquely compelling with a dark sense of humor and rigid performance style, a wet dream for film students world over. For those in the know, of which I was not at the time, this was really his second notable flick. 2009's Dog Tooth was already recognized as a work of challenging, even disturbing cinema, and the lobster merely introduced Lanthamos and his cynical ethos to an English-speaking audience. 2015 onward, he remained a Hollywood mainstay. Killing of a Sacred Deer gave us the breakout performance of the guy from the Please, Please, please music video. The Favorite followed, bringing Lanthamos into the Oscars circuit and winning Emma Stone and Olivia Coleman prestigious awards. After a 5-year hiatus, we had consecutive yearly releases of Poor Things, Kinds of Kindness, and Beonia. Emma Stone's presence becoming a key factor in his films. I've heard people pronounce Beonia so many different ways that I'm not really sure what to land on here.

[00:01:34]Bonia, Beona, Bonia, Gabul.

[00:01:42]Lanthamos has 10 movies total. six which he has co-written and four for which he was only the director. I'll be specifying when I'm discussing another writer. But for the sake of simplicity, the characters discussed are those of his catalog, which is why the title of this video is men writing women, Yorgos Lanthamos. Men presenting women doesn't have quite the same ring, but for a visual director, presentation certainly comes into play. Before we go any further ahead, this video is in paid partnership with Movie. Movie is a curated streaming service dedicated to elevating great cinema from all around the globe. From iconic directors to emerging or movie is for lovers of extraordinary cinema. And for those who don't yet know they love extraordinary cinema. If you want to check out more of Lanthamos's films, The Killing of a Sacred Deer and Alps are available in the UK. But if you're more interested in women by women, Movie has a plethora of films available in its reframing women director's collection. Eva Victor's Sorry Baby, Lin Ramsey's Die My Love, Emma Seligman's Bottoms, or Cory Fett's Revenge. Take your pick. And you can try Movie free for 30 days at movieby.com/girl on film. That's mubi.com/girlonfilm for a whole month of great cinema for free.

[00:03:06]I feel there are three key types of women that have littered themselves across Lanthamos's filmography. I name them thus. The emotionless woman, the powerful woman, and the naive woman.

[00:03:18]Let's begin with our cold fish, Anna Murphy in Killing of a Sacred Deer, all the women in kinds of kindness and the lobster. These characters are stiff, awkward, barely behaving like humans at all. And for some reason my script says nearly behaving like Roman humans at all. Now this is the style that Lanthamos is typically known for. Born of his collaborations with Yorgos Kakanakis, Lacis Lzopoulos and most significantly Athemus Filipu. In these films, gender plays almost no role in characterization, even if it does play a role in plot. Men and women all act in the same stilted way. No group is more or less cruel, more or less emotional, more or less moral. In this sense, it's a little tricky to critique. I believe his choice to present people this way is so that we focus on the behavior, the definitive truths of their stories rather than the emotions that drive the characters. I don't find the women of these films relatable or interesting ultimately, but that isn't because they're poorly written women. It's simply because the flat unnatural performances Lanthamos favors don't tickle me personally. The second archetype visible in his films is far more gender specific. That being the powerful woman, the Lanthamos girl boss, if you will. You could argue that all the women in the favorite one of his most complex and rewarding films fit into this category. They're selfishly motivated, daring, demanding, and remain steadfast in the face of unpleasantries.

[00:04:59]Rachel Weiss's Sarah Churchill exemplifies this coolheaded bosswoman.

[00:05:05]Stone's Abigail is more cheeky and girish and initially naive, but calculated and driven nonetheless. It is no wonder to me that The Favorite is such a complex portrait of women, especially in comparison to his other works because it is based on real life historical characters. And the original screenplay was written by journalist Deborah Davies in the late '9s before it was picked up by producers who brought on Lanthamos and subsequently screenwriter Tony McNamara.

[00:05:37]It's pretty obvious looking at Lanthamos's catalog that his most whimsical and I suppose fun films are the product of McNamara's writing having also written the adapted screenplay of Poor Things. And you can see the specific brand of humor and unconventional dialogue he brought to the favorite screenplay. Davies is credited as co-writer of this script, but keep in mind she wrote this story prior to Lanthamos's involvement. And put a pin in that for now. The lone leader in The Lobster and Michelle Fuller in Beonia round out this group of powerful women exhibiting the same base characteristics. I hate the way I say Beonia. Why does that sound so wrong?

[00:06:21]Possibly little known fact, Bona is actually an adaptation of South Korea's Save the Green Planet. The American adaptation was written by Will Tracy, former editor and chief of The Onion, also known for Succession and The Menu, who is known for his clever, quippy, cynical writing, which fits seamlessly alongside Lanthamos's other frequent collaborators. In the original film, a male CEO is tortured by a man and a woman who believe him to be an alien.

[00:06:51]This was altered for the remake, instead giving us two men torturing a woman. In reading up on this video, I did find a few people criticize this choice. Some believing it highlights a desire in Lanthamos to punish powerful women. Not my opinion, by the way. Others found the female billionaire character insincere.

[00:07:13]It's a less common real life archetype in the same way that Zenaia's character in the drama is not the typical archetype of the person who does the thing she does. In both cases, this lesser established archetype adds complications that need to be dealt with well by the script, which for what it's worth, I don't think the drama does. But Michelle feels very real. And most of us recognize that the kind of woman she is totally does exist, even if it's more common for men to be these kinds of callous monopolizing CEOs. I see no inherent issue in Beonia not reflecting the reality that there are more male billionaires because it's just one character. He's not giving us a boardroom of women deciding to blow up children, which are boardrooms that women in real life are rarely in. Let's just say that. Onto our final archetype.

[00:08:08]Right from his early career, Lanthamos has loved a naive woman. Rather like the emotionless woman, this isn't necessarily only assigned to women in his movies. Colin Frell's David for one, but it does often lead to women in more vulnerable positions. The clearest example of this is Dog Tooth, in which a father and his submissive wife raise their three children in an isolated environment, purposefully distorting their perception of reality.

[00:08:39]A lot of this going on today. There are two daughters and one son, but it is the naive daughters who are bribed into favors by a woman the father introduces into the household to fulfill the son's needs.

[00:08:55]When the father realizes this is going on, he beats both women violently, may I say, and allows the son to choose one of his sisters to sleep with instead. The only autonomy women have in this story is assaulting and manipulating each other with. Needless to say, I don't love this. And it introduces us to a secondary element of the naive women in his films, something at the four in poor things. And I have a lot of thoughts on this movie. So let's treat this as its own section.

[00:09:36]On my first viewing without the male-made feminist critique original book context, I adored 2023's Poor Things. Directed by Lanthamos, written by Tony McNamara, and starring Emma Stone, the film follows Bella Baxter, a reanimated woman with a baby's brain, grow, learn, and navigate the world with a particular focus on how men perceive, interact with, and use her. To get personal for a moment, I was a late bloomer in every conceivable way, and I bloomed hard and fast when I did.

[00:10:14]Watching Poor Things, I found Bella and her naivity and curiosity extremely relatable and emotional. I also found the film depicted certain dynamics and scenarios really realistically.

[00:10:28]characters that a lesser film may have rounded out for comprehension's sake, like the brothel owner, who here is both kind and honest while being mildly manipulative and callous, or Ramy Yousef's Max, whose sweet yearnings for Bella are no less criticized than the cad Duncan Wedburn. I have no shame in saying that Mark Ruffalo once again ruffled more than my tail feathers in this role. Because of this, I was shocked to see when the film came out so many people lobbying willfully dense accusations of, let's say, child loving towards anyone that enjoyed this movie.

[00:11:06]This was such a baffling response to me given that there are plenty of power structures in real life that actually protect this behavior that we could be criticizing and instead people are going after Twinks on Twitter for calling Bella Baxter a diva. I'm not here to tell you you're not allowed to feel offended by this movie, but let's not die on hills made from the bodies of our own community. I'd be burying my head in the sand not to admit that there are nuanced reasons for which this film disturbed a lot of people. Reasons that have made me increasingly uncomfortable.

[00:11:43]the more I've considered Poor Things critically and consumed other feminist texts exploring it, I cannot recommend Final Girl Digital's video on poor things enough if you want a really thorough deep dive. And what are the big issues? The heavy hitter here is that for a long stretch of the film, Bella has a child's brain, but she is also discovering pleasure and she and Duncan have several intimate scenes throughout.

[00:12:11]The important thing to remember here is that she is not literally a baby. These are adult actors, which resolves much of the criticism I alluded to before, but the visual choices made by Lanthamos in casting, styling, and cinematography have a drastic effect on how we interpret these scenes. Lanthamos chose Emma Stone for the role. She's stripped of armpit and leg hair, although we do see Bush in a non scene later on. She has long girish locks. Her flattered chest, bambi-like limbs, and large eyes all contribute to visualizing her in a childlike way. And because of the mental age of the character, we have scenes of her blowing bubbles and being in succession. Lanthamos has retained the image of a child, and it makes all the intimate scenes much more insidious to watch. Credit to him though, the character is only supposed to be 25, a normal age for a once- married pregnant Victorian woman. But she didn't have to be 25. Nor did she have to look so gamine. Bella Baxter could have been an older, thicker-bodied, hairier woman, making the child's mind side of things exclusively thematic or I suppose psychological alone. I think one or the other, a less childlike but still 25-year-old actress or simply an older actress would reduce this uncomfortable dichotomy. But to look so young and thin and hairless wasn't necessary to explore the themes at hand. Every time I watch, I can't help but wonder how it may have differed in those moments if someone like Nicola Cochan or Euphoria era Barbie Ferrer were in the role. What we have instead is the epitome of born sexy yesterday. As I mentioned in my last video, a trope that allows for naive girlish qualities to be housed in the body of an adult woman that audiences are allowed to sexualize. Despite all of this, initially I was fine with the explicit scenes in Poor Things because I felt the film was about those scenes weren't just thrown in on top of a story about something else.

[00:14:33]They were crucial to it. A journey from naivity to obsession to acceptance. It reflected the reality of the way others view you when you're newly active and the way that you might view yourself as somewhat of an adventurer who's totally in charge even if you're not. I don't think explicitly showing this is inherently offensive in a movie where Bella wouldn't be Bella without.

[00:15:01]But that's where this becomes even more complicated because Poor Things is not an original story. It's adapted from Alistister Gay's 1992 novel of the same name, and the novel is largely about class inequality and exploitation.

[00:15:18]Gray's story still places an importance on intimacy and coming of age, to put it gently, but it's one of many topics. In Lanthamos's adaptation, it's undoubtedly the core. An even stranger change made in adapting poor things from book to movie was omitting the ending in the book which is narrated by Archold aka Max from the movie who falls for and eventually marries Bella. The final chapter reveals her wild life to be a fabrication. Bella herself, a doctor and feminist, explains that Archbold created this fanceful story as a way to make sense of her autonomy and deal with his own shortfalls. She explains she has always been a fully formed woman and was not the result of a science experiment and global adventure. In so many ways, this complicates the book and its purpose. It becomes a book about male fantasy, truth, and perception. An adaptation with a different approach may have layered together the parallel lives of Bella. How Archable believed she became who she is and how she actually did. And it could still tell the story of Bella'sual awakening. The issue is not in the nature of the story, but in decisions Lanthamos actively made when executing it. As Alex Burton excellently explains for the Cambridge student, this quasi Victorian woman who has never stepped foot in the outside world has inexplicably shaven legs and armpits, which aside from not making much sense, does also dampen the uninhibited liberated feminist interpretation of the film just a tad. Along with the lengthy, slightly careless treatment of Bella's experience working in a Parisian brothel that is almost entirely played for laughs, complaints arose that Poor Things is simply yet another manifestation of the dreaded male gaze.

[00:17:21]Now, none of this would be half as uneasy if it weren't for patterns emerging in his work, but many of his films feature intimate scenes of women on women and women on men, often the naive characters I was describing before, coming into play. Dog Tooth obviously has female characters bribed or forced into intimacy. Kinds of Kindness has an essay scene that seems to play no role in the story and scenes of Margaret Quley and Hunter Schaefer topless which also play no role in the story. Killing of a sacred deer has the famed anesthesia scene and is filled with promiscuous adulterous women women.

[00:18:01]Kineta involves a woman frequently posing as a victim of violent crimes and one of his earliest films Alps has multiple intimate scenes. None of them are offensive in isolation, but Lanthamos does seem to constantly inject female nudity and intimate scenes or assault scenes into his films. And he doesn't do this anywhere near as much with men. Of course, there is some male nudity in poor things and kinds of kindness, but the men have the power and autonomy in these scenes. The favorite also has intimate scenes, but it doesn't leave the same bad taste in my mouth.

[00:18:40]A good film can contain female nudity, explicit scenes, assault, unpleasant female characters. I have no qualms with any of those things. Film should not protect us from ugly topics. Fiction needn't be devoid of scandal. But it's so much more valuable as a viewer when it serves a purpose. When the women engaging in these acts have depth, when the aesthetic isn't prioritized, when it isn't only women on display over and over again, the favorite does all that.

[00:19:15]And I applaud Davies and McNamara for its brilliance. That is to say that ual content is no issue when done well, but it often falls apart in Lanthamos's movies when under scrutiny, mostly in its visual presentation or its purpose.

[00:19:38]A through line I'm finding in my own work here on YouTube is discussions of story ownership and gatekeeping. Who gets to write who? Where are the lines drawn in exploring things you haven't experienced? It's extremely nuanced and case by case. But what I see in Lanthamos's films is classic male or two mode. He feels the right as a filmmaker to include frequent and questionable depictions of women in his films. So he does just because he wants to. And good for him. But having the right to do so doesn't make it interesting or meaningful or clever. An excellent discussion on medium by Nico Riceborg addresses this. There has always been a lot of lenience for artouse/indie directors when it comes to misogyny and other forms of discrimination because their motivations behind including such content can be difficult to work out at times. people's search for deeper meanings when sometimes there probably isn't any. Landos's previous works have been accepted as genius because they're obviously very intentionally crafted and he demands that people don't overanalyze his work for risk of missing the point.

[00:21:01]His work is too smart to be explained.

[00:21:04]It's supposed to be felt subconsciously unlocking something. But without ever explaining himself, it comes across as if explicit scenes in films like Dog Tooth, Kinds of Kindness, and Poor Things are there simply because he enjoys the image itself, or perhaps because he delights in making viewers squirm. Elements of his depictions feel fetishistic for this reason. He won't provide a purpose. Now a Hollywood fixture with mainstream hits, he finds himself under a pressure to justify his decisions more publicly and he tends to lean hard on feminism when asked about this, making declarations about how empowered his characters are. On poor Things, screenwriter McNamara said that as a substitute for the book's plot of a man literally telling Bella's story, quote, "Yorgos and I decided Bella will be the center and driving force of the film, and the men instead of controlling the narrative will attempt to control her and fail dismally." I do see his point and I think the film does critique men, but I also see the glaring irony in not just leaving the book alone for a woman to adapt one day and in Yorgos seeking out a male screenwriter to tell this specific story. Perhaps with a woman's involvement, we would have had a story of female empowerment without the slapping and hairless school girls sexuality. We didn't need those elements in order to critique the men who vi to control Bella. In a similarly delusional quote, Lanthamos said this of the favorite. Most times women are seen through the male gaze. So they are often shown as housewives, girlfriends, or objects of desire. Our contribution is to show women as complex, wonderful human beings. As I've said, I do think they succeed in this in The Favorite, and I'm stoked that there are male directors out there who see the importance of creating such dynamic and intriguing characters, but in tandem with the poor things, quote, the paradox at play is unavoidable.

[00:23:23]As I mentioned before, The Favorite original draft was written solely by Deborah Davies, but I wonder if she remained involved only because she had the rights to her own screenplay.

[00:23:35]Magnamara's fingerprints are heavy. And it's obvious that Lanthamos didn't want to continue with Davey's vision alone.

[00:23:42]So he handed it over to a man, even though plenty of other women could have taken up Davey's mantle and created the off-kilter screenplay Lanthamos was after. There is a slight caveat here people may point to in that Lanthamos has consistently worked with the beloved Emma Stone and her production company Fruit Tree has production credits on Poor Things and Beonia, but it's unclear what her involvement is on a creative level beyond her performances.

[00:24:13]Ultimately, my gripe here comes down to Lanthamos pushing the narrative that he's making strides in feminism with his films while never choosing to work with female writers or collaborators. Like literally, just make one film with a woman. One film and you will be doing more for feminism by opening the industry door to someone not born with the key than by writing a woman that you, Mr. philanthamos ye who is not a woman has determined is interesting or empowered.

[00:24:52]So there we are. I like Yorgoslanthamos movies, but I don't love Yorgoslanthamos. Not because he's explicitly evil or inherently problematic, but outside of his collaborations with Tony McNamara, he doesn't present the kind of worlds that I find interesting. Looking at his catalog of women, there aren't particularly strong patterns outside of these stiff, powerful, and naive women I've presented to you. There are a few too many opportunities taken to get young, thin white women shirtless. And he veers away from highlighting any other kinds of women at all really, bar a few bit parts in his more recent films. But I will to his credit say Lanthamos women are not cut and paste characters or sidelined lovers and mothers. They're specific. They're messy, cruel, complex. And these are qualities I hope to see in women on screen above false empowerment narratives and cleancut Disney approved idols. So why is there still a sour taste in my mouth? Well, Lanthamos always works with other screenwriters, and in 10 films, if you have never hired a female screenwriter, keeping in mind that Lanthamos didn't hire Deborah Davies, it kind of feels like you don't think that real women in the real world, the ones you could be working with, have anything to offer you. Lanthamos women exist only on screen. Their stories told by men, bringing the meta narrative that poor Things sought to explore, ironically, to life.

[00:26:40]Thank you again to Movie for sponsoring this video. Thank you for watching. You can support me at patreon.com/girlonfilm.

[00:26:48]And also don't forget to subscribe. Very grateful for you all for being here.

[00:26:52]Love you lots. Goodbye. Greek director Yoslanthamos smell a little Greek director Yorgoslanoth. Yooanthamos.

[00:27:00]Oh my god. Yoslanthamos.

[00:27:03]Yorgoslanthamos.

[00:27:05]I have to say that about a hundred times in this script.