Movie Review: The Favourite

Michael's Movie Grade: A+

Review: This dark disturbing comedy is easily one of the year's best movies.

This film is about as dark as movies can get, but underneath all the darkness the moving is really entertaining. Much of this is due to the fact that as much as we hate to admit it, these mean-spirited characters are more like us than we want to admit. Every character in this movie is only looking out for themselves and will do any violent or sexual act to achieve the power they want. This leads to a delightful battle of wits between Lady Sarah (Rachel Weisz) and Abigail (Emma Stone), both of whom fight for the favor of an emotionally unstable Queen (Olivia Colman). What starts out as a simple battle of wits turns into something darker and more cruel at each turn. These characters can easily be seen as unlikable and cruel, but the truth is we have all thought about doing the things these women do to someone who gets in our way. What holds us back is our conscience and our sense of decency. This movie though lets us enjoy this cruelty in a way we would never allow ourselves to in real life. Seeing these women go to such lengths to make the other lose everything is delightful in the darkest way possible and I and I'm sure many other relished in it. All of this is enhanced and made more enjoyable by the incredible performances by our three leads.

This movie engages in two types of comedy. One is very board. This comedy is very funny and often made me laugh out loud. The other type of comedy is more subtle. This humor may not make one laugh out loud as much but is unbelievably clever. We will remember these scenes and think of them when we get home. When we are watching the scenes they keep us just as entertained and glued to the film as any of the more broad scenes. The amount of clever dialogue is incredible. If you were to take out pencil and paper to write down all the clever lines, you would fill many pages easily. Some of the lines I thought were clever in the trailer were even more clever when viewed in the context of the film.


This is not to say that the greatness of this movie completely rests on dialogue. In fact this is a visually incredible film. It uses the 18th Century setting to its full advantage creating a very uniquely beautiful looking movie. Praise must be given to director Yorgos Lanthimos, cinematographer Robbie Ryan and production designer Fiona Crombie for how incredible they made this film look.

With hw dark this movie is and how cruel the characters are it is true this is not a movie that will appeal to everybody. However if you are in the category of people who love pitch black comedy, this movie is one of the must see films of the year.

-Michael J. Ruhland