What Do Yorgos Lanthimos’s Still Worlds Tell Us?

The exhibition of filmmaker Yorgos Lanthimos at Onassis Stegi has become one of the most significant artistic events of the season in Athens, Greece. Lanthimos is one of the most internationally acclaimed contemporary Greek filmmakers, the recipient of numerous awards, and the director behind films such as The Lobster, The Favourite, Poor Things, and Kinds of Kindness, Bugonia. Today, he lives and works between Athens and London and remains one of the key figures representing contemporary Greek culture on the global stage.

Lanthimos is also one of the central figures of the so-called Greek Weird Wave, a movement in Greek cinema that emerged in the late 2000s and early 2010s against the backdrop of Greece’s economic and social crisis. The movement is characterized by absurdity, emotional detachment, disrupted social structures, and a pervasive sense of alienation and artificiality in human relationships. Through strange, controlled, and psychologically disorienting worlds, those filmmakers explored themes of identity, authority, and family in contemporary Europe.

It is precisely through this lens that Lanthimos’ photography becomes especially compelling. The exhibition is not simply a side project by a filmmaker experimenting with another medium, but an extension of the same artistic language. His photographs function almost as “slowed-down cinema” or video art without movement – those images preserve tension, anticipation, and psychological unease within a still frame.

Yorgos Lanthimos, 2024

The series created during the filming of Poor Things, Kinds of Kindness, and Bugonia is not simply backstage documentation, as it may first appear. Lanthimos transforms cinematic sets into autonomous artistic environments where architecture, bodies, light, and emptiness become carriers of emotional and existential tension. As in his films, traditional narrative and emotional resolution are absent. What remains is a fragile atmosphere of estrangement and uncertainty.

Particularly powerful are the new black-and-white photographs made in Athens and on the islands of the Aegean Sea. Here, the sensibility of the Greek Weird Wave returns to its origin, Greece itself. Yet Lanthimos avoids any romanticized or touristic vision of the Mediterranean. His Greece is a landscape of silence, pauses, traces of human presence, and quiet existential isolation. Everyday scenes, fragments of urban environments, and seemingly insignificant objects acquire an almost post-apocalyptic stillness. These works exist somewhere between cinematic perception and contemporary photographic practice, where the image no longer tells a story but constructs a psychological state.

The exhibition design, conceived as a classical Greek temple with a central altar-like space dedicated to the new works, underscores the shift from Lanthimos’ recognizable cinematic universe toward a more intimate and contemplative visual language. Ultimately, the exhibition suggests that photography has become an independent medium for Lanthimos, through which he continues to explore his recurring themes of alienation, control, memory, and human vulnerability.