Crisis Makes Weird

Harrison Blackman discusses the aesthetics and politics of Greek cinema’s Weird Wave.

By Harrison BlackmanOctober 10, 2025

• Film

• Art & Architecture

THIS PAST MARCH, a photography exhibition opened at Webber 939, a gallery and venue in the Arts District of Downtown Los Angeles. The showcase featured the photographs of Yorgos Lanthimos, a Greek film director whose ascent from Athens to the Hollywood acropolis has been built on strangeness. In the years before and after the 2008 financial crisis took a wrecking ball to Greece’s economy, a “Weird Wave” of films emerged from Lanthimos’s homeland; his early films, such as Dogtooth (2009) and Alps (2011), came to represent the movement’s vanguard, characterized by their alienating Kubrickian gaze, focus on subcultures with Kafkaesque rules, and absurd dialogue delivered with a deadpan inflection.

The photographs are a little weird too. Largely shot on the sets of Lanthimos’s recent films Poor Things (2023) and Kinds of Kindness (2024), the photos in the show included portraits of those films’ actors: Emma Stone, Margaret Qualley, Jerrod Carmichael, and Hunter Schafer. Other images were still life curiosities: a Jesus figurine on a desk, placed next to a ColorChecker rendition chart; a rope lying limp in a drained pool; and a woman, wearing only a slip, standing in a clearing, her downturned head the only departure from what we’d expect from classical art. Then there’s the invocation of the completely absurd—a close-up of the depression in the seat of a maroon leather couch, recently sat in.

If David Lynch, another filmmaker and artist compelled by strangeness, was first attracted to film because it offered the potential for a painting to “move” (according to Dennis Lim’s 2015 biography David Lynch: The Man from Another Place), perhaps the Webber exhibition argues the opposite about Lanthimos’s photography—here is a cinema in stills. In a press release, the gallery acknowledges that, though it “is born from the spaces of Lanthimos’ cinema, the exhibition presents a new world altogether, untethered from narrative, time, and place.”

Untethered from narrative, time, and place—if only it were that simple. The 2022 collection of academic essays on Lanthimos’s body of work, The Cinema of Yorgos Lanthimos: Films, Form, Philosophy (edited by Eddie Falvey), largely analyzes films from his catalog without much consideration of the artist’s background as a Greek auteur working in a challenging filmmaking landscape. The result reveals the limitations of film criticism when it is divorced from an understanding of how the international film industry operates, particularly in smaller countries like Greece that don’t have the same commercial capacities to fund film productions as the United States does. Instead, many would-be Greek filmmakers must “make do” with what they have.

One essay in the volume (“Art-House Thriller: Auteur Meets Genre in The Killing of a Sacred Deer” by Geoff King) offers the perfunctory insight that Lanthimos’s titular 2017 film, despite art-house trappings, is in fact a horror movie (congratulations). Another (“Rethinking the Heritage Film: Gothic Critique in The Favourite” by Alex Lykidis) suggests that because Emma Stone’s character has the most screen time in The Favourite (2018), she must be the main character (um, thanks). Though not all the pieces in the book suffer from such belabored insights (Angelos Koutsourakis’s essay on Kafkaesque influences on Lanthimos’s films and Afroditi Nikolaidou’s portrait of the 1990s Greek film scene are standouts), it does bring into question the purpose of the analyses that assert the painfully obvious.

Luckily for us, there is one book that truly reckons with Lanthimos and the Greek Weird Wave from which he sprang. Dimitris Papanikolaou’s Greek Weird Wave: A Cinema of Biopolitics (2021) is the most comprehensive and incisive exploration of the new film trend to date, charting the movement’s forerunners in Greece and untangling its many complexities and contradictions. To Papanikolaou’s mind, much of the Weird Wave was built on the opinions of Western critics seeking to connect the films coming out of Greece to the contemporary geopolitical failure of the Greek economy, a characterization that was seized upon and reiterated by a small group of Greek filmmakers eager to have their films noticed internationally.

The inflection point, Papanikolaou argues, came with a 2011 article in The Guardian by Steve Rose that largely formed the Greek Weird Wave taxonomy in the Anglophone world. In that piece, Rose explicitly linked Greece’s economic troubles to the unusual films by Lanthimos and his frequent collaborator and producing partner Athina Rachel Tsangari. “Is it just coincidence,” Rose asked, “that the world’s most messed-up country is making the world’s most messed-up cinema?”

According to Rose, the Greek Weird Wave could be encapsulated in Lanthimos’s international breakout movie Dogtooth. In the bruising dark comedy/thriller, a tyrannical father forbids his children from leaving the house and indoctrinates them into thinking the outside world is uninhabitable; he goes so far as to teach his children false meanings for seditious terms and warns them that they cannot leave the house until their titular canine teeth fall out (which of course doesn’t happen unless you’ve never brushed your teeth).

But, as Papanikolaou explains, many Greek movies have always been on the weirder side. In his eyes, Dogtooth feels like a successor to the Yannis Economides film Matchbox (2002), which depicted the patriarchal dysfunction within a family trapped in an Athens apartment during a heat wave. Moreover, Lanthimos’s breakout borrowed heavily from Mexican director Arturo Ripstein’s 1972 film The Castle of Purity, which also featured a father who imprisoned his children in their house—based on a real criminal case in Mexico City. Besides the premise, specific scenes from the Mexican classic, such as the children bathing together, are directly echoed in Dogtooth, which led Ripstein to argue that he and Lanthimos should split the accolades for the latter film.

The connections run deeper. In a 2021 Criterion Channel conversation between Richard Linklater and Tsangari, who worked together on Slacker (1990) and Before Midnight (2013), Tsangari reveals that she had a mentor in Greek avant-garde filmmaker Nikos Papatakis, whose 1967 masterpiece The Shepherds of Calamity (a.k.a. The Shepherds of Disaster or Thanos and Despina) shares a number of similarities with the modern Weird Wave. A film about two shepherds who are competing for the hand of the daughter of the wealthiest man in the village, Shepherds of Calamity functions as an allegory for a society coming apart at the seams, anticipating the dictatorship in Greece that would intensify such fractures from 1967 to 1974.

Of Shepherds of Calamity, Papanikolaou writes that “the relentless way in which the symbolic weight of the Greek Family is torn down can remind contemporary viewers of films of the contemporary Weird Wave.” Significantly, he adds that, in that film, “all the actors speak in a defamiliarising off-tone delivery, as if they are reading out a script for the first time.” As Tsangari tells Linklater in the Criterion conversation, Papatakis advised her that she should not “imitate life” in the service of realism in her own career: “You’re a descendant of Euripides and Aeschylus,” he told her. “Make the audience uncomfortable.”

The practice of making the audience uncomfortable may derive from the common denominator in Lanthimos’s and Tsangari’s films—their frequent screenwriter Efthymis Filippou, who co-wrote the screenplays for Tsangari’s Chevalier (2015) and Lanthimos’s Dogtooth, Alps, The Lobster (2015), The Killing of a Sacred Deer, and Kinds of Kindness, as well as Babis Makridis’s L (2012) and Pity (2018). All the Filippou-written films feature the deadpan, absurd dialogue associated with the Weird Wave.

And yet, this weird label, Papanikolaou explains, is not agreed upon by the chief progenitors of the movement. He quotes Lanthimos reflecting on his style in a 2012 interview for the French/German channel ARTE: “I don’t know how weird it is, actually. Of course, there are strange elements: in my films, in other people’s films. What we do […] flows naturally from the exploration of the issues we engage with.”

According to Papanikolaou, the chief issue that Lanthimos, Tsangari, and Filippou explore consists of Foucault’s concept of biopolitics, the power exercised by sovereign states and nonstate actors to control human life. “What I could see in all the films under study was their particularly persistent engagement with a certain type of governing life, of politics over life,” Papanikolaou writes. In that same ARTE interview, Lanthimos seemed to agree about the themes he and his producing partners were exploring when making Dogtooth. “What interested us,” Lanthimos said, “were the ways in which a family or a group […] is governed and what kind of impact this has on every member of the group.”

Papanikolaou traces this interest to the earthquakes shaking Greek society at the time—the debt crisis, which led to the country’s submission to the European Union’s “troika” of financial institutions for assistance, and the migration crisis in which more than a million migrants from the Middle East and North Africa arrived on islands such as Lesbos and Chios to pursue better economic conditions in Europe. “Greeks became accustomed to the idea of their country as ‘the big patient’ of Europe, of the austerity measures as ‘a necessary and powerful medicine,’” Papanikolaou argues. “They faced stereotyping as an everyday reality.”

In 2010, Greek prime minister George Papandreou delivered an address from the idyllic island of Kastellorizo, trying to reassure Greeks that they would survive the financial crisis, an episode that was widely compared to the father character’s absurd lectures in Dogtooth, a film that came out the year before. As Papanikolaou recounts,

watching him give his speech that day, it was not difficult to think that he was assuming the posture of a caring father; that the small port of Kastelorizo where he was filmed delivering his address looked like an enclosure, a desperately narrow strait, symbolising the idea that no escape was available […] [M]any people did, in fact, think of images of the father in Dogtooth gazing straight at the camera while preparing to address the members of his family.

If life imitated art in this case, more arresting was the way other films interrogated the lived Greek experience during the respective crises. In Yorgos Zois’s short film Casus Belli (2010), a bread line in front of the Panathenaic Stadium (built in antiquity, refurbished for the first modern Olympic Games in 1896, and featured in the ill-fated 2004 Athens Games, which greatly contributed to the country’s financial issues) wraps around to show simultaneous queues across Greek life, including at a supermarket and a museum. When one person in the line topples, they knock over all the other characters like dominoes, showcasing the cascading catastrophe of the Greek economic order.

In Zois’s 2018 short film Third Kind, astronauts from a now-interstellar human civilization travel back to a postapocalyptic Earth to visit an abandoned airport, discovering the remains of a migrant encampment, as well as a mysterious five-toned audio motif, a direct homage to Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977). Zois’s film was shot at the abandoned Athens Ellinikon Airport, which, after the tarmac served as a space for many of the 2004 Olympics venues, formed a squatting ground for migrants trapped in Greece following their arrival. After the migrants were evicted to make way for new development, Zois’s film crew was granted access to the site, giving birth to Third Kind. Zois later reflected (quoted in Papanikolaou): “[T]he rhythm of the film […] is similar to what I had experienced the moment when I first experienced that site. We were walking slowly, we were taking photos, watching what was like the remnants of an almost gone civilisation.”

To Papanikolaou, the innovation of the film was the way it used the sci-fi genre to interrogate the migrant crisis from a thought-provoking vantage point—a tactic that helps critique the government’s failures to respond to the crisis, asking audiences to compare the real plight of refugees in the abandoned airport to that of a population completely left for dead on a ravaged Earth. “Third Kind presents its elaborate futuristic setting as a defamiliarising experience of the present,” Papanikolaou writes. “[I]t creates an allegory that is constantly haunted by reality and its forms of representation.”

If the Weird films use allegory to express reactions to the crises, Lanthimos himself seems uncomfortable with standing in for all of Greece. In the 2012 ARTE interview, he was seated in front of a stereotypically scenic view of the Parthenon, a staging he criticized: “I am trying not to be yet another part of the picture postcard.” But that postcard keeps coming up, and it may be by design. The Lanthimos exhibition at the Webber is drawn from two recent coffee-table books of Lanthimos’s photographs, associated with his time on set for Kinds of Kindness and Poor Things— i shall sing these songs beautifully (2024) and Dear God, the Parthenon is still broken (2024).

The latter title, though pulled from a deleted scene in Poor Things, feels like a wink. It’s true, the Parthenon has been under a nearly continuous restoration process in Athens since 1975. But the title also betrays the fact that, though some of them don’t want to represent all of Greece, the Weird filmmakers often depend on international recognition to raise money to make films, due to the economic limitations of the TV/film industry in their country. And to garner that support, they often resort to invoking and romanticizing their Greekness. As Papanikolaou notes, the streaming service MUBI has used stills from Dogtooth as part of its marketing campaigns, a Greek production company has dubbed itself “Weird Wave,” and a 2016 repertory screening series called “The Lost Highway of Greek Cinema” (signaling a kinship of weirdness with David Lynch) highlighted the trajectory of strangeness within Greek cinematic history.

This recursivity has culminated in short films like Konstantina Kotzamani’s Washingtonia (2014), which Papanikolaou characterizes as “an almost generic apology” for the Weird Wave, “as it very much looks like a pastiche of scenes” of the movement: “The direct references multiply. The blind lady acts and looks like the blind lady in Lanthimos’s Alps; the constant mention of dogs being trained brings to mind similar images in […] Dogtooth.”

By the time Makridis’s Pity rolled around, the Filippou-written film felt like a direct comment on the Weird Wave running aground and exhausting itself. The film concerns a man who grows accustomed to the compassion demonstrated by his neighbors while his wife is in a coma, but who finds this communal sympathy threatened when she makes an unexpected recovery. Seeking to incite more pity, he attempts to drown his dog, and when that fails to elicit the desired response, he murders his wife and child. “[L]ike Pity’s unnamed central character,” Papanikolaou writes, Greek cinema “is now overeager to meet specific frames of expectation in order to keep enjoying the positive international response to which it has become used.”

This subtext in Pity reflects what Papanikolaou identifies as a shared sentiment of Greek filmmakers, that the weird moment is now over: “[A] Greek film producer told me late in 2018 that ‘it is high time we now get serious and see how we can make Greek cinema survive; the Weird Wave was just a parenthesis.’” Indeed, Lanthimos’s Hollywood-produced, English-language Kinds of Kindness, which was co-written by Filippou in his classic deadpan style, felt like a last gasp. The director’s next film, this fall’s Bugonia, is a remake of a very weird Korean film, Save the Green Planet! (2003); Lanthimos’s adaptation represents an interesting confluence of director and weirdness-without-borders.

Perhaps the key to understanding how the weird Greek films were embodied by a shared art of “making do” in challenging circumstances is Tsangari’s Attenberg (2010), one of the first and most influential films in the trend. Set in Aspra Spitia, a planned community designed by architect Constantinos Doxiadis in the 1960s and where Tsangari spent her childhood, Attenberg tells the coming-of-age story of a young woman named Marina (Ariane Labed) living in this now-depopulated village as she waits for her sick father (Vangelis Mourikis)—an architect presumably part of the original design team—to die.

In one exchange between Marina and her father, he says:

It’s as if we were designing ruins. As if calculating their eventual collapse with mathematical precision. […] From shepherds to bulldozers, from bulldozers to mines, and from mines, straight to petit-bourgeois hysteria. We built an industrial colony on top of sheep pens and thought we were making a revolution.

Marina disagrees, characterizing the village’s modernist uniformity as “soothing,” but her father retorts that he will be leaving her in a “new century, without having taught [her] anything.”

Papanikolaou quotes Tsangari, in a 2016 TV interview:

[W]hen I shot Attenberg, it was the beginning of the crisis, [which was] in a way the crushing of all the dreams of modernity; and I liked the idea that where I grew up was a very beautiful place, very multicultural, which was rare of Greece then, and the children grew up in the street, and thirty years later it is almost like a ghost town.

In Attenberg’s final scene, Marina scatters her father’s ashes in the sea and departs the seaside through a field of bulldozers operating in the mud. “Are these the last signs of industrial activity, or a sign of its regeneration?” Papanikolaou asks. “[W]e viewers sit back and watch how economic realism has now slowly been mutating.” In effect, Tsangari’s reaction to the crisis culminated in the film movement that captivated the rest of the world for the better part of a decade.

Indeed, the pleasure of the Greek Weird Wave lies in observing filmmakers respond to their circumstances in strange ways. During the Lanthimos exhibition’s run, mere blocks from the Webber gallery, protests were waged against the ICE raids taking place in the city. How will Angelenos find inspiration in their own biopolitical circumstances? Maybe one day, as the American cinematic reaction to these crises draws to a close, some American filmmaker will have their strange photos of drained pools and depressed couches exhibited in an Athens gallery as well.

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Featured image: Cover of Greek Weird Wave: A Cinema of Biopolitics (2021) by Dimitris Papanikolaou.