The subversive animal : a critical examination of Yorgos Lanthimos’s films The Lobster, and The Favourite

Abstract

This dissertation examines the destabilization of boundaries between humans and non-human animals in Yorgos Lanthimos’s films, focusing on The Lobster and The Favourite. It argues that these works challenge societal structures through open-ended, ambiguous narratives that resist clear resolution. My study focuses on the porous boundaries between human and animal identity, where non-human animals reflect the grotesque, vicious, and depraved behaviour of human characters. I introduce the term “animalhuman” to describe the reversal of the human–animal hierarchy and the therianthropic portrayal of humans whose cruelty makes them animalistic, showing these boundaries as socially constructed. Drawing on Mikhail Bakhtin’s concepts of the grotesque and carnivalesque, Julia Kristeva’s theory of abjection, and Jeffrey Jerome Cohen’s ideas on monstrosity, I analyse the hybrid, excessive bodies that cross borders and resist containment, arguing that these unstable figures subvert anthropocentrism and expose the myth of human civility.