Writing in the Style of Yorgos Lanthimos

The Principle

Yorgos Lanthimos builds worlds that operate by rules just slightly different from our own — and in that slight displacement, the true strangeness of our actual world becomes visible. The Lobster (2015) imagines a society where single people must find a romantic partner or be transformed into an animal. This premise is absurd, but the social pressure it literalizes — the terror of being alone, the performative nature of coupledom — is entirely real. Lanthimos uses the bizarre to illuminate the ordinary.

His films constitute a sustained investigation into power, obedience, and the systems that govern human behavior. In Dogtooth (2009), parents construct an entire false reality for their children, controlling language, knowledge, and desire through systematic deception. The film is simultaneously a horror story about abusive parenting and a parable about how all social reality is constructed, maintained, and enforced. Lanthimos asks: what is the difference between a family and a cult, between education and indoctrination, between social norms and arbitrary rules?

The emotional register of Lanthimos's work is deliberately flattened. His characters deliver the most extraordinary statements with the affect of people reading a bus schedule. This deadpan quality is not emotional absence but emotional compression — the horror and the humor emerge from the gap between what is being said and how it is being said. It is comedy and tragedy performed simultaneously in the same tone.

Screenplay Architecture and Structure

Lanthimos structures his screenplays around rule-systems. Each film establishes a set of arbitrary but internally consistent rules — the mating protocol of The Lobster (2015), the sacrificial logic of The Killing of a Sacred Deer (2017), the power games of The Favourite (2018) — and then dramatizes what happens when characters navigate, resist, or submit to those systems.

The narrative typically begins with the rule-system already in place, presented without explanation or justification. The audience must deduce the logic from observed behavior, creating an experience of defamiliarization that forces active engagement. Lanthimos does not ease the viewer into his worlds; he drops them inside and lets them orient themselves.

His plots progress through escalation of consequence. The rules become more constraining, the punishments more severe, the choices more impossible. The Killing of a Sacred Deer (2017) builds to a climax where a father must choose which family member to sacrifice — a scenario that is mythically resonant (echoing the story of Iphigenia) and grotesquely specific. The structure ensures that the absurd premise delivers real emotional devastation.

Dialogue

Lanthimos's dialogue is his most distinctive tool. Characters speak in flat, declarative sentences stripped of emotional inflection, social lubrication, and naturalistic rhythm. They say things like "If you encounter any problems, we will be assigned a child, which usually resolves all issues" with the same tone they might use to discuss the weather. This stilted quality is both deeply funny and deeply unsettling.

The dialogue avoids subtext in the conventional sense. Characters state their feelings, desires, and intentions with eerie directness — but the directness itself becomes a form of alienation, because human beings do not normally speak this way. The absence of social performance reveals the transactional nature of relationships that polite speech normally conceals.

In The Favourite (2018), Lanthimos modifies his approach, allowing characters to deploy wit and verbal aggression with greater fluidity. The dialogue here retains his signature precision but adds the pleasure of characters who are aware of their own performance, using language as a weapon in conscious power games.

Themes

Power as the organizing principle of all human relationships — romantic, familial, political. Obedience and disobedience as the fundamental human choices within systems of control. The body as the ultimate site of power — subjected to transformation, punishment, and sacrifice. Language as a tool of domination — whoever controls the vocabulary controls reality. The family as a totalitarian micro-state. Social norms revealed as arbitrary through displacement into unfamiliar contexts. The cruelty inherent in systems that appear benign. Freedom as both terrifying and essential — the moment when characters step outside the system is simultaneously liberation and catastrophe.

Writing Specifications

1. Establish an arbitrary but internally consistent rule-system at the screenplay's foundation — the rules should feel both absurd and weirdly logical, literalizing a social reality that normally operates invisibly.
2. Write dialogue in flat, declarative sentences stripped of emotional inflection and social nuance — characters should state feelings, intentions, and facts with unsettling directness.
3. Present the rule-system without explanation or justification — drop the audience into the world and let them deduce the logic from observed behavior and consequence.
4. Escalate consequences systematically — each act of the screenplay should raise the stakes of noncompliance, making the absurd premise deliver increasingly real emotional and physical costs.
5. Write violence and cruelty with the same affectless tone as ordinary activity, creating horror through the gap between the severity of the act and the flatness of its execution.
6. Construct power dynamics as the primary relationship between all characters — every interaction should reveal who holds power, who seeks it, and what it costs.
7. Use the body as a dramatic site — transformation, punishment, illness, and physical vulnerability should be rendered with clinical specificity.
8. Create characters who accept their world's rules with the same unquestioning compliance that real people accept social norms, making the audience question their own obedience.
9. Write humor that operates through deadpan juxtaposition — the comedy should emerge from the collision between extraordinary content and ordinary delivery.
10. Build toward climaxes that force impossible choices — the final decision should be one that no system of rules can resolve, exposing the inadequacy of the logic that has governed the entire narrative.