Writer: Debora Davis & Tony McNamara

Director: Yorgos Lanthimos

The Favourite has to be weirdest ‘hit’ in several years. Somehow, the re-telling of little-known Queen Anne’s life as a lesbian love-triangle, complete with experimental camera techniques sends people bounding like rabbits to the cinema. The film, by cinema’s new premier existentialist Yorgos Lanthimos, is a bizarre tale of power, both symbolic and real, and the way in which gender interacted within the hallowed halls of the pre-democracy Crown.

The story is ostensibly about the Privy Council members that advised Queen Anne Stewart (Olivia Coleman) during the war with France in the early 18^th Century. Sarah Churchwell (Rachel Weisz) is Queen Anne’s closest advisor and secret lover, who holds enormous sway over the Queen and is in some sense, the defacto Queen of England. The arrival of Sarah’s cousin Abigail (Emma Stone) as her maid is the narrative driver, as the two do battle using political subterfuge and sexual fluidity to become the Queen’s titular anointed one. The historical realism should be taken with the biggest pinch of salt you can find.

Coleman’s Queen Anne is a kindly, frail character, whose infinite grief at the loss of 17 children casts her in a perpetual shadow. She is confined by a string of endless physical ailments, most notably gout, to her palace and these illnesses are what allow Sarah to dictate her policies. Coleman is exquisite as Anne, managing to find joyous warmth among the loss central to her character. She’s rightly on course for an Oscar, and will no doubt offer thanks to her mentor Super Hans as she grasps the gold. The Favourite is crammed with great acting; from the brilliant dueling of Weisz and Stone, to the just-the-right-side of panto Nicholas Hoult as opposition leader Harley. Hoult is given perhaps the best line of dialogue you’ll hear this year, describing another character’s romantic attachment as ‘cunt struck.’

Debora Davis and Tony McNamara’s episodic script is frothing, its dialogue propelled by Iannucci -style inventive language and swearing. The world they have created feels both real and alien; the period setting clashing furiously with the upended gender norms and sexual rigidity associated with the time period. This feeling is intensified by the circular framing created by Lanthimos and cinematographer Robbie Ryan, our curved view of the world is just as bizarre as it feels. The film mostly takes place inside the same house, and this twisting visual style allows the same corridors and rooms to be re-invented with every scene.

The men of The Favourite hold much of the practical power; they command the Army and choose battle strategies, they fund the war itself. But they are reduced to desperate sideshows, trying and failing to genuinely affect the political maneuverings of the Sarah and Abigail. Queen Anne’s word may be final but the sentences are scripted by someone else, and those writing the sentences wield the largest axe. But they also have the furthest to fall, as Sarah grimly decrees; ‘there is always a price to pay and I am prepared to pay it.’

These shifting dynamics combine for an exhilarating film, one infused with a piercing subversion in both story and visual terms. Weisz and Stone’s characters never feel like forced creations or like the writers have created them to show how woman can occupy roles most commonly done so by men. They own their lives and the power that comes from them is a by-product.

This sense of anarchy does seem to slip in the last third of the film. As Queen Anne becomes sicker and loses much of her physical body to illness, and as one winner emerges from the political games of Abigail and Sarah, the film becomes more reserved and even mournful. The light drains from the screen and the camera reverts back to traditional framing, Queen Anne’s physical demise seems to straighten the world out. It makes for a weirdly jarring final twenty minutes, in which the more normal the film becomes, the stranger it feels.

The Favourite is a unique film and surreal story told boldly by Lanthimos. It features wonderful acting and fizzing dialogue, and captures the stakes that follow when personal lives and politics become enmeshed. The film’s final third is odd, and as the subversion dims so too does a certain spark. But the excitement that comes from watching such an oddly shaped but brilliantly realized world is rare.

9/10