If you’ve had enough of this goodwill lark for another 12 months and want to start the year in the snarkiest way possible, then this is the film to see. You’ll laugh, gloat and head into January with no tolerance for anyone’s guff – and in the mood to share a bit of your own.
Reuniting with his Lobster stars Olivia Colman and Rachel Weisz, and getting Emma Stone in on the act, director Yorgos Lanthimos runs riot in the 18th century with this period romp. It’s his most accessible film to date, but the acidity levels are off the charts.
In the court of the mad-as-a-ha’penny-watch Queen Anne (Colman), Lady Sarah (Weisz) is pulling all the strings – until her riches-to-rags cousin Abigail (Stone) arrives to teach her a thing or two. Wholesomeness proves to have a very short shelf-life above stairs as Abigail and those around her discover that she is “capable of much unpleasantness”. And then some.
But Lady Sarah hasn’t lasted this long without knowing how to wield a stiletto, and so the stage is set to see who will wear the crown, without actually wearing the crown.
Sitting in a cinema thinking, “I can’t believe someone just said that” is an all too rare pleasure these days, but there’s plenty of hand-to-mouth humour here as writers Deborah Davis and Tony McNamara pile on the twists, turns and barbs as we try to guess who will come out on top. The one certainty is that Davis and McNamara will need bigger mantelpieces after awards season.
The builders should also be in for Colman, Stone and Weisz, who put it up to the audience and each other to deliver take-home treasures about workplace politics, those well-dusted delusions concerning our own goodness and – for the times that’s in it – the EU. There’s Irish money involved in The Favourite, but its Troika is one you’ll be sorry to see the back of, even though the film is 15 minutes too long. Trying to find fault elsewhere proves as futile as choosing a side at the start.
“Favour is like the breeze; it shifts all the time,” muses one character before another bout of badness. It’ll take a hurricane of a movie to dethrone The Favourite on people’s 2019 lists.
