Yorgos Lanthimos y su ojo de pez

When the cinematic landscape is distorted and the image captured by a fisheye lens—a wide-angle lens that makes shapes appear reflected on a sphere—is presented on screen, viewers are disconcerted. What did the director intend to tell us with such an exaggerated and absurd premise? Yorgos Lanthimos’s filmography is uncomfortable but far from innocent: the image deformation is his trigger for a deep and raw critique of postmodernity. Yorgos and his fish-eye lens didn’t appear in contemporary filmmaking by spontaneous generation; they are part of the “Greek Weird Wave” an intriguing Greek movement that breaks with the canons imposed by the Hollywood machine. It places the incorrectness of the frame at the service of meaning, inaugurates a return to surrealism, and emphasizes the discursive capacity of the cinematic device, not only as spectacle but as a privileged analyst of its time. This text offers a brief exploration of three of Yorgos’s films: The Favourite (2018), Poor Things (2023), and Kinds of Kindness (2024).