The Favourite (2018)

You can almost imagine the mischievous pleasure Yorgos Lanthimos, perhaps the most exciting auteur in film today, must get out of releasing The Favourite during awards season. Certainly, my heart goes out to anyone who mistakenly assume this period piece about English royalty to be just another safe morsel of Oscar-bait (I certainly heard some baffled reactions from disoriented audience members exiting my theater). Instead of a piece of stuffy chamber music, this flippant, aggressive film is a pissed-off punk anthem, all dirty sneers and violent threats. The end result is sort of like Barry Lyndon crossed with Dirty Rotten Scoundrels.

The three leads – Olivia Colman, Rachel Weisz, and Emma Stone – are spectacular and Deborah Davis and Tony McNamara’s terrific script is savagely hilarious and thematically rich . Lanthimos’ depiction of the ruling elite as being driven almost exclusively by desperate self-preservation and petty spite makes The Favourite an unexpectedly relevant film for the modern era. And while the insights are often as cynical and bleak as one might expect from Lanthimos, The Favourite is also a surprisingly (and movingly) compassionate film.