Break Down Yorgos Lanthimos' ‘Nimic’ Before ‘Poor Things’ Comes Out

Poor Things(2023), starring Emma Stone, premiered at the Venice Film Festival to rave reviews, scoring a high 3.57 in the ICS panel. Adjectives such as "bizarre," "sharp," "imaginative," "playful," and "jaw-dropping" are frequently seen in the reviews of this film. It can be well inferred from the words that viewers familiar with Yorgos Lanthimos are likely to regard this work as his best so far. For average audiences, Poor Things may still be too weird and subversive to enjoy.

If you're impatient to watch Poor Things, you might want to first take a look at the director's previous work Nimic(2019), so as to prepare yourself or gain a better understanding of his style and taste.

In Nimic, a man(played by Matt Dillon) asks a stranger(played by Daphne Patakia) on the subway for the time, but did not expect to get the same question shot back at him. Later, she follows him home and hijacks the lives of him and his family, even usurping his identity. The film ends back on the subway, with the man being asked for the time by another stranger, hinting at a new cycle about to begin. This summarizes the entire plot of Nimic.

Compared to his commercial hit The Favourite(2018), this 12-minute short film seems very niche, with an almost pathetically low number of ratings. However, I think it's a concise and powerful work, a supplement to his signature style, or rather, a summary of it. We can see how Yorgos Lanthimos deftly plays with his strengths: theme-driven creation, heterotopian settings, amazing creativity, existential reflection on identity, and eerie effects established by visual and sound design as well as performance.

In fact, I can summarize Nimic in three key phrases as follows.

Daily Oddities

Anyone new to Yorgos Lanthimos' works will be greeted by the bizarreness as soon as they hit the play button. Always set in ordinary backdrops - scenes as normal as a home (Dogtooth,2009), a banquet (The Lobster,2015), or a subway (Nimic), they are soon revealed as oddities in daily life. Home turns out a prison separated from society; the banquet a court that judges male and female matching, and the subway just the beginning of a collapsing domino chain.

To present this kind of oddity in daily life, Lanthimos uses the following methods:

1) Eerie string music. Lanthimos has already shown a preference for orchestral music in his previous works. He tends to choose disharmonious melodies with large leaps in between notes, making the audience experience thrilling ups and downs as if on an emotion roller coaster, even though they are matched with scenes that can’t be more ordinary.

In the opening scene of Nimic, the surging and turbulent strings contrasts sharply with the protagonist's daily mundane behavior of cooking eggs.

What's even more special is that Lanthimos also links such string music with the protagonist's identity as a professional cellist. Delicate one moment and explosive the next, the string music is not only the movie's soundtrack but also a story element (the natural sound of the protagonist rehearsing the violin).

2) Distorted wide-angle lenses. Compared with the heavy use of photography, like the fisheye lens in The Favourite, the cinematography in Nimic is much gentler, but the relatively reserved use never fails to create a sense of tension in daily life.

The woman stranger stalks the man back to his home, imitating his every move, and even his wife cannot tell who her real husband is.

As you can see in the above illustration, the space abnormally expands, making daily living spaces look strange; the extreme psychological distance between characters in the foreground and background are portrayed explicitly through such distortion of the physical distance as well as the characters themselves.

3) Stylized performances. The essence of oddity in daily life lies in a subtle balance, so Lanthimos does not make actors perform in an exaggerated, frightening, or explicitly way.

Instead, the intense moments are shown more subtly. Matt Dillon demonstrates an effortlessly perfect performance in such a manner. When he asks the stranger with a watch for the time but the question is bounced back at him, his body remains very still, with only his eyes turning up, down, left, and right - restrained eye movements that displayed the amalgamation of feelings: bewildered, innocent, and confused, as if asking, "Do I have a problem, or does she have a problem?"

Through these oddities in daily life, a heterotopia (Foucault) unique to Lanthimos is constructed.

Heterotopia

You must have heard of Utopia - an imaginary ideal place that can never exist in reality. Heterotopia differs from Utopia in two ways. First, it is abnormal, and second, it actually exists in the world.

Take Dogtooth as an example. A father imprisons his three children in a house in the suburbs. Within the house, a set of alienated power system and survival mode runs amongst its inhabitants. However, this house is not completely isolated from the world. Every once in a while, the father drives out into the normal world to buy daily necessities. This house though is a Heterotopia.

So is the family space in Nimic. In this fundamental unit of the most intimate relationship possible, the wife and children absurdly cannot distinguish their husband/father's ontology. The children even respond with conviction: "How should we know? We are just kids." - a simple line with great power that challenges humanity's ability to reason and its self-confidence.

Is the abnormality present in this family a new development, or has it always existed within it? The answer is self-evident. In spaces that we consider to be normal, spaces which provide us with clothing, food, housing, and transportation, all that we can’t be more familiar with, there are so many visible or invisible abnormalities hidden beneath the surface of our daily routine.

At the end of the film, back in the subway, a new cycle of hijacking begins, implying that the rigidity and consubstantiality of life is constantly spreading like a virus. Modern society, represented by the subway, is a larger Heterotopia.

Heterotopia is everywhere. The spread of these heterotopias is nothing but asking a simple question: Do You Have the Time?

Existential Crisis

Why is this sentence so powerful and contagious? One possible explanation is that time is closely related to existence.

In the past, people did not need to ask for time. They worked at sunrise and rested at sunset, and time and their lifestyle matched each other. Ironically, with the advent of modern day clocks, we tend to cut time into fine, quantifiable slots, and lose our perception of time as well as our own existence.

Modern society values the idea of “being responsible to yourself,” and everyone should be responsible for their own time. However, with various devices such as smartphones, Apple Watches, electronic displays flooding the world, the gap between people grows bigger. It has become rare to see one asking another for the time, as it is now often considered an invasion of someone else's existence.

Identity is fragile, value is replaceable, life is encroached upon, and those around us find it hard to even confirm our ontology. This is the existential crisis in modern context.

Now, as we look forward to the release of Poor Things (said to be a female version of the Frankenstein story from the Victorian era), can the three key phrases above accurately capture the essence of this new work by the same creator? I can’t wait to find out!