Why is sex so unsettling in Yorgos Lanthimos films?

In his films, director Yorgos Lanthimos typically focuses on the dark undercurrents of everyday life and illuminates the absurdity of our own condition: our desires, repulsions and compulsions. It’s natural then that sex – given its capacity to encompass all these themes – features heavily as a surreal trope in his repertoire.

But why is sex so weird in Lanthimos’ films? Depicted as strange and mechanical, the Greek filmmaker’s sex scenes teach us more about our relationship with desire than other mainstream cinematic depictions of the erotic. Take Kinds of Kindness (2024), Lanthimos’ latest dark-comedy triptych. The film follows three separate stories of power, control and faith, presenting sex through a series of bizarre arrangements. Many scenes depict policed intimacy, with Raymond (William Dafoe) controlling Robert (Jesse Plemons) entire life – from meal times, his ability to have a child, and sex life. Sex is anything but romanticised: it is repetitive, ordered, surveilled – ultimately functioning as a means of domination.

Sex is treated similarly in black-comedy Dogtooth (2009), which follows a husband and wife who keep their children shielded from the outside world. Father (Christos Stergiouglou) hires security officer Christina (Anna Kalaitzidou) to teach his son how to have sex, presenting intimacy as a necessary rite of passage. The son’s methodical sessions remain devoid of erotic passion, proving unsatisfying for Christina, who later turns her attention towards the eldest daughter.

The Lobster (2015) equally features strange scenes of ‘prescribed’ sex. The film features a group of exiled singles tasked with finding a partner in 45 days, in a hotel where guests are banned from masturbation and limited to “sexual stimulation” exclusively from chambermaids. Interaction with the chambermaids is stiff and silent: a task executed as robotically as changing the sheets. When the maid leaves, protagonist David (Colin Farrell) is left to contemplate his own solace, and the existential come-down that comes after detached intimacy. “That’s just awful, really awful”, he remarks.

This robotic depiction of sex not only challenges aestheticised sex scenes we are used to seeing in film, but explores the relationship we have to sex. Though bizarre and comedic, sex as a monotonous exchange is far more interesting and evocative than synthetic, overproduced Hollywood sex scenes. Lanthimos shows that even the erotic can fall prey to capitalist culture becoming another task to fulfil, produce or consume. The collective alienation from our bodies and pleasure is in itself an epidemic that Lanthimos’ weird sex scenes capture.

As well as a jarring exchange, Lanthimos also depicts sex as a strange kind of solace. In Kinds of Kindness, sex is raised in instances of loss – Jesse Plemmons rewatches a sex tape of a foursome involving his missing wife and two friends. In moments of grief, carnal desire is conflated with comfort. Though hyperbolic through its surreal portrayal, Lanthimos explores how many of us turn to sex as a means of respite from solitude, even at improper times. Exploring the complexities of libidinal desire, Lanthimos is refreshingly unafraid to tackle the taboo.

Similarly, in Poor Things (2023), Lanthimos’ Victorian sci-fi romance, Bella Baxter (Emma Stone) receives a brain transplant from her surviving unborn child, embarking on a second sexual awakening in her adult body. While some reviews of Poor Things labelled it a “brazenly weird sex comedy”, and “the raunchiest film of the year”, these misunderstand Lanthimos’ depiction of sex as prurient and erotically charged, rather than de-eroticised whimsy.

Lanthimos has also spoken out against the increasingly puritanical attitude towards sex in the film industry (and society at large). “Sex in movies, or nudity — I just never understood the prudishness around it,” Lanthimos told The New York Times late last year. “It always drives me mad how liberal people are about violence and how they allow minors to experience it in any way, and then we’re so prudish about sexuality.” 

Poor Things’ intimacy coordinator Elle McAlpine notes that often sex scenes in Hollywood films misrepresent women, while in Poor Things, producers wanted to depict Bella as having full agency. “Her choice to work, and say, ‘I love having sex’ was so refreshing,” she told Vanity Fair. On Bella’s character, Lanthimos added: “It is very important that she has no shame about anything, not just sex, but the way she perceives the world.” Though subversive, unlike mainstream sex scenes, Lanthimos’ depictions of sex don’t pander to the male gaze. Playful and curious, Bella’s “furious jumping” embodies sexual hedonism that exists outside of puritanical models of women’s pleasure. Women, Lanthimos argues, should be allowed to enjoy sex without being sexualised or branded as nymphomaniacs.

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Lanthimos often focuses on women’s pleasure over more typical phallocentric depictions of desire. In Dogtooth, when the mother is asked by her child what a pussy is, she responds: “A pussy is a big light, when the pussy is switched off the room plunges into darkness”. Centering the vagina in an almost God-like position, to not being “switched” on (or turned on) results in “darkness”. Evocative of the creation story, Lanthimos reminds us that the womb is the beginning of the world and repositions women’s power and pleasure within heteronormative narratives.

But sexual acts are depicted as having the potential to be as brutal as they are playful – as Lanthimos doesn’t shy away from depicting the realities of contagion, shame and excommunication that come with sexual violence. For example, in Greek tragedy-esque Killing of a Sacred Deer (2017), Steven (Colin Farrell) is aroused only by his wife pretending to lie like a corpse, while Dogtooth (2009) features its own share of disturbing sex scenes. Though cinematic depictions of sexual violence made by male directors run the risk of fetishing trauma, Lanthimos emphasises their complexity. Within the bounds of his surreal style, he presents sexual violence as preposterous and incongruent with everyday life.

Lanthimos’ films feature sex in all of its multitudes, encapsulating a kind of sex that must exist outside flat and phallocentric pornographic depictions. Lanthimos depicts the consequences of sex that exists only for men, of sex that is robotic when it exists as a product of the system, while also showing the potential of sex to be playful when gratification exists for everyone. After all, sex can be as mischievous as it can be carnal, monotonous, or even dangerous, though in almost all instances it is absurd: forcing us to reimagine our own relationship to our own bodies, pleasure and the world of the surreal.