The air one breathes at Queen Anne’s court is not the wholesome, rarefied air of power, but the dense, sickly-sweet miasma of a decomposing body. Yorgos Lanthimos, that Greek entomologist of the existential absurd, abandons the aseptic geometries of his modern nightmares to don wig and corset, but his scalpel has lost none of its sharpness. On the contrary, sinking it into the soft matter of the costume drama, he discovers its pulsating, purulent heart. "The Favourite" is not a historical film; it is an autopsy. An autopsy conducted with the precision of a watchmaker and the cruelty of a child pulling the wings off a fly, all under the flickering candlelight that evokes Stanley Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon. But if Kubrick was a hieratic painter who froze history into tableaus of funereal beauty, Lanthimos is a Hogarthian cartoonist on acid, one who deforms reality to reveal its grotesque truth.

The film’s visual grammar is its first, fundamental declaration of intent. The obsessive use of wide-angle and fisheye lenses, entrusted to the genius of Robbie Ryan, is no mere stylistic flourish. It is a thesis. Hallways curve like the ribs of a dying whale; opulent rooms become goldfish bowls, spherical prisons where the characters swim in ever-tighter circles. This optical distortion is a reflection of the moral and psychological distortion that dominates the court. We are trapped with the characters, forced to see the world through a lens that exacerbates their paranoia, isolation, and deformity. Every frame suggests that the luxury and splendor are nothing more than a gilded cage, a terrarium for which we, like the director, are the sadistic observers. The camera moves with a predatory fluidity—gliding, spying, pursuing—transforming the viewer into an invisible, complicit courtier.

At the center of this distorting panopticon lies a non-Euclidean triangle of love, power, and desperation. Olivia Colman, in a performance that transcends acting to become a kind of painful incarnation, gives us a Queen Anne who is a masterpiece of contradictions. She is at once a grotesque monster and a wounded child, a capricious tyrant and a woman devastated by grief (the seventeen rabbits, a macabre and pathetic surrogate for as many lost children, are an invention as brilliant as it is heartbreaking). Her bouts of gout are the physical manifestation of a sick soul, and Colman navigates this sea of pain and absurdity with a mastery that is breathtaking.

Vying for her favor, and thus the power that comes with it, are two sides of the same ruthless coin. On one side, Rachel Weisz’s Lady Sarah Churchill, as sharp as a sliver of obsidian, pragmatic to the point of brutality, whose love for the queen is an indivisible compound of sincere affection and political calculation. Weisz gives her an armor of sarcasm and intelligence that barely conceals a vulnerability that will be her undoing. On the other, Emma Stone’s Abigail Hill, who arrives with the mud of the world on her clothes and the determination of a parasite that has found its host. Stone's transformation from naive girl to consummate manipulator is an essay in subtle and lethal acting, recalling cinema's great social climbers, from All About Eve's Eva Harrington to the Marquise de Merteuil of Dangerous Liaisons. But unlike them, Abigail’s victory is imbued from the very start with the bitter taste of ashes.

What elevates "The Favourite" above a simple court drama is its spiritual kinship not so much with historiography as with English Restoration Comedy. The script by Deborah Davis and Tony McNamara has the same caustic verve, the same epigrammatic wit, and the same obsession with sex as a weapon and a commodity as a work by William Wycherley or William Congreve. The quips are bullets, the dialogues duels with blades. Politics, the fate of the war with France—it’s all background noise, an insignificant pretext for the only true game that matters: that of survival and supremacy within the palace walls. Lanthimos brings this literary sensibility into the 21st century, stripping it of all dusty academicism and infusing it with a punk energy. The anachronistic dance scene—an explosion of mechanical gestures and robotic contortions—is the perfect synthesis of this approach: a middle finger raised to the genre’s conventions, a moment of kinetic liberation that reveals the characters' emotional prison.

In this world, love is not a feeling but a transaction. Affection is a currency. The body—sick, desired, abused, violated—is the primary battlefield. Lanthimos explores this carnality of power with a clinical, almost autoptic eye that makes no concessions to romanticism. The sexual encounters are clumsy, desperate, mechanical. They are exercises in dominance, not acts of love. It is a desolate worldview that finds an echo in the absurdist theater of Beckett, where characters are condemned to repeat their meaningless rituals ad infinitum, awaiting an end that never comes.

And the end, in fact, is no liberation. The film's final, chilling shot is a masterstroke, one of the most powerful and desolate endings in recent cinema. The superimposition of the rabbits on Abigail’s face, as the queen presses her hand onto the back of her neck, is not just a visual flourish, but the crystallization of the film’s every theme. Abigail has won. She has scaled the pyramid, secured the favor, eliminated her rival. But her victory is a prison. She has become just another rabbit, another surrogate, an object in the hands of a capricious and diseased power. There is no triumph in her gaze, only the vacant awareness of being trapped forever. The room dissolves into a multiple, distorted image, as if reality itself were collapsing into the infinite loop of this sadistic power game.

"The Favourite" is a perfect, poisonous bonbon. It is a work that uses the past to speak with ruthless urgency about the present, about the immutable nature of human ambition and the ruinous price paid for a place in the sun—even when that sun is sick and its light no longer warms. It is a tragedy masked as a black comedy, an essay on loneliness disguised as a courtly intrigue. It is the cinema of Yorgos Lanthimos at its peak: a diabolical and perfect clockwork mechanism, ticking inexorably toward an abyss of wonderful, intelligent despair.