Yorgos Lanthimos
La favorita

England, 18th century: Queen Anne (Olivia Colman) reigns with the help of her right-hand woman, an aristocrat named Sarah Churchill (Rachel Weisz), who influences her decisions and has an ambiguous and exclusive relationship with the queen, which however comes into question with the arrival of a cousin of Lady Churchill, Abigail (Emma Stone), whose family has fallen out of favor. She accepts a job as a servant and begins a social climb that brings her to interfere with the court's balance.

Yorgos Lanthimos stages an all-female triptych, where the historical drama merely serves as a backdrop: the protagonists are undoubtedly the relationships among the three women, the three different ways they try to assert their individuality. Abigail is perhaps the most predictable character: sweet and naive on the surface, but at the same time intelligent and cunning, she manages to navigate the court's intrigues, using her wit and beauty, combined with a sort of bluntness derived from her undefined social status, giving her a certain degree of freedom. In my opinion, she aligns with the roles Emma Stone has previously played as a charming and simultaneously friendly and approachable girl—here placed in a different context. The characters of Weisz and Colman are very well crafted, especially that of the queen: she may be the best-executed character of the three, with her moodiness and sometimes childish tendencies, psychologically and physically disturbed. The portrayal is not that of a Marie Antoinette; rather, it is more of a woman than a ruler, barely influenced by court life.

The aristocratic environment is a prominent element in the set designs, accentuated by wide-angle shots and 360-degree views that make us whirl through the palace's rooms and corridors and the green of the English gardens, and in the period costumes. The cinematography often lingers over the contrasts of light and shadow in the nighttime interiors (in some scenes, it feels like wandering under the invisibility cloak at Hogwarts); on an aesthetic level, the intertitles marking the chapters into which the film is divided are impactful, designed by Vasilis Marmatakis (known for designing graphics for other Lanthimos films), becoming one of the film's iconic elements.

At first glance, ''The Favourite'' has nothing of the Lanthimos from the Greek new wave. One might say there is Hollywood’s influence, but his previous film, ''The Killing of a Sacred Deer'', maintained the surreal and at times grotesque character that was the director's stylistic hallmark. Now, there is nothing surreal here, but the characters have their particular characterization, which inserts the comic and occasionally the grotesque into the drama, and therein lies their beauty.

Anna, Sarah, and Abigail are prisoners of the world they live in, like other characters of Lanthimos: and so, in the end, the only one who saves herself is the one who loses the game. Even if, as she herself states: ''Do you really think you’ve won?'' ... ''We’ve played two different games.''