Review: THE FAVOURITE

Films by Yorgos Lanthimos often sound like they're going to be comedies. But the weirdly cossetted kids in Dogtooth lived in an affluent nightmare. The Lobster's government-sponsored mating program (that results in surgical metamorphosis for the unsuccessful) was an absurdist horror. And here, Anne, last of the Stuarts, creator of the sovereign state of Great Britain, gout-stricken and quaveringly self-doubting is the goal in a fight between two manipulators. This film is frequently funny but it is not a comedy.

The opening scenes cut between a demonstration of how the Queen's favourite, Sarah Churchill/Lady Malborough, micromanages her monarch and the arrival of Abigail, fallen from high birth after her father lost her in a card game to a large German with a small penis. Sarah is staving off the parliamentary Whigs who want the current war to stop as it's bleeding the coffers despite British victories. Abigail is pranked into interrupting a meeting between Sarah and a politician and sent to work in the kitchen (where her pranker continues to prank 'er). All continues except that now Abagail has her eyes on the kitchen door and uses her expertise to find Sarah's favour. From that point the pair are in competition for the royal ear.

Lanthimos keeps the range of competition wide, from country dance moves that fall between mating rituals and partner-swinging jitterbugs, mating rituals that play like kickboxing bouts (with the female in the ascendant), afternoons of bird shooting which double as tutorials in manipulation and manipulation in itself, and so on unto direct physical harm. The surface might be powdered and tailored but the motivations are no different from the madames and ponces in the bawdy house we see at one point. But there is a difference between power attained and power applied skilfully.

Between scenes of opulence shot through a spherical lens that give a Vermeer's mirror look to wide, flat splendour to the details of faces known only to intimates we have a dark oak palette and a sense that, even within the appearance of gentility we might easily see brutality or gore. Though it's stylised to the last pixel of each frame this world looks lived in. And from the grandeur of Purcell and Handel to the unsettling monotonic scraping of the contemporary score we also know that we are in a film that can turn us.

There are major empathy shifts in the power play and for all the luxuriant space of the palace the squeeze of dominance can be stifling. The central trio of performances is thus crucial and we are served beautifully by Olvia Coleman's Queen Anne who can whimper like a lapdog or rage like a banshee, Rachel Weisz who brings a dark and fierce intelligence to Sarah, and the mercurial Emma Stone who, in an arc that takes her from a put-upon survivor to a character from The Harlot's Progress, can wait like a hunting hound and triumph like a shark. The charge the trio must create between them for this film to be more than a chess game is in every scene they share, as classically marbled as a John Dryden verse and as vulgar. I know I've tapped out some purple patches here but it's hard to describe this film justly without them: it's good, it's very good.