by Wilson Holzhaeuser

What makes a movie weird?

We attach that label to so many films so often that it can often mean anything - from disturbing to whimsical to challenging to off putting. Some use it as simply a synonym for “bad” when they aren’t quite sure how to articulate what they dislike while others embrace anything superficially strange, holding up that strangeness as an accomplishment. If the term is going to be useful all of these readings cannot be correct. The word must hold content. What we need to do is determine what that content may be.

We can point to the filmmakers who are called weird and make weird films – David Lynch, Leos Carax, David Cronenberg, Todd Solondz, Lars Von Trier. You can quibble about individual works but these filmmakers, I feel, can fairly be called pretty darn weird. [1] Note who isn’t on this list: James Cameron – who directed a movie about a time traveling killer robot; George Lucas – who directed several movies about space wizards; Peter Jackson – who directed a series of movies about little people destroying a magic ring. [2] None of these filmmakers and none of these films are commonly identified as weird despite the content being otherworldly or fantastical, the characters inhuman, the premises supernatural.

Why does Star Wars evoke a fundamentally different feeling than Blue Velvet? Why does Holy Motors feel strange and surreal but The Terminator doesn’t? What qualities does Lord of the Rings lack that Dogville embraces? What is weird?

Freud talked about the concept of the uncanny – that which is strangely familiar rather than merely strange or unfamiliar. Freud observes that the uncanny is not the concealed, those social taboos we consider impolite or grotesque, but rather the uncanny is the partially concealed, revealing just enough to remind of us of our own desires, assumptions and repressions. [3] The uncanny evokes our anxiety not because we do not understand it but because we do. We are met not with wonder but with unease and horror.

This is what we mean when we refer to the work of Lynch or von Trier as “weird” and is also what separates their work from conventional blockbuster films.

And right now, there is something weird going on in Greek cinema as evidenced by the work of directors Yorgos Lanthimos and Athina Rachel Tsangari. Last year, Tsangari released her film Chevalier and Lanthimos directed his first English language film The Lobster. Taken together these two films expand upon the perplexing and alienating cinematic language introduced in Lanthimos’s 2009 film, Dogtooth.

Dogtooth takes place almost entirely in a Greek family home totally and utterly dominated by the unnamed father. The three children (referred to only as Older Daughter, Son, and Younger Daughter) lead an unwittingly tortured existence confined to their home and fenced in yard. The parents have constructed a bizarre fantasy world which they use to control and ensnare their children. The children have no knowledge of anything outside the homestead and have been taught that leaving their gated yard will bring them great harm. The parents teach their children the wrong definitions of words (E.g. “’Sea’ is the leather chair with wooden armrests.”) Dogtooth is a film with lines like “Soon your mother will give birth to two children and a dog."

This is a fundamentally off-putting movie, at times, darkly comic, at others, profoundly disturbing but always disorienting. The film never explains why the father is doing this to his family and he is never overtly questioned. He simply keeps to his strange plan working toward some unknown goal. But what is most troubling is not any specific act or bizzaro ritual but rather the film’s detached, nearly scientific tone.

Essentially, no emotion is communicated cinematically. Events are merely and matter-of-factly depicted. Nothing in the film serves to admonish or punish the Father who is torturing his children. We are presented this reality as a simple statement of how the world is.

The implications are troubling, calling to mind exactly how much control parents exert on their kids’ lives, even unknowingly. How far does Dogtooth truly stray from the obsessive “helicopter” style parenting? Are our own unspoken assumptions regarding parental control truly that far afield from those underlying the parents’ actions in Dogtooth?

The film can also be read as an indictment of the surveillance state, drawing a parallel between parenting and governing. Lanthimos offers no answers and doesn’t even ask questions as precisely as I have here. What matters is that he calls these questions to mind, and draws out our unease, not because he is showing us something we cannot recognize but because he is showing us something that we, deep down, know we recognize. It’s disturbing because it isn’t alien.

Tsangari makes a similar – although certainly more comic – move in last year’s Chevalier. Set on a small vacation boat in the Aegean sea, the film centers around six men across all ages of adulthood on holiday. Nearing the end of their trip and bored with their typical divisions, one man (the best looking of the bunch) suggests playing a game which will determine who is “The Best in General."

Much like the arbitrary nonsense that governs what makes someone a Real Man, the rules of this game are both totally incoherent and rigidly enforced. The six participants are rated on literally everything – how they sleep, how they dress, how efficient they are when cleaning, their ringtones, personal hygiene, cholesterol. Everything. As these tasks are completed or the measurements taken each man gives the others points. The points are tallied at the end of the trip with the man with the highest point total winning a chevalier ring and the title of Best in General.

As with the Father’s motivations in Dogtooth, so much of this game is never explained. What is the point system? What scale do they use? Who tallies everything? Why are these particular activities so important? These questions are never even approached but they also aren’t the point. By taking advantage of the naturally heightening quality of cinema, Tsangari shows us how absurd stereotypical masculine competition and ranking is.

So, we’re going beyond an observation or critique of masculinity’s toxicity and performativity and getting at the true core of socialized western maleness – grotesque randomness. Tsangari isn’t crafting a bizarre game. She’s simply representing the actual reality of male gender roles. She explicitly states that there are rules but is then cagey about what they are. Despite this, her characters still care about the game. It’s all made up but they are so obsessed with ranking and quantifying that they drive themselves to shame and self-debasement because they think they have figured out what random assortment of requirements the world has selected one must achieve to be a Real Man.

Lanthimos’s most recent film, The Lobster, crystallizes the ideas offered in his earlier work, and the contributions Tsangari made with Chevalier, creating something beyond his typical sterile, scientific style. The Lobster offers an emotional resonance and thematic complexity that marks a director, matured. [4]

Rachel Weisz delivers The Lobster’s thesis statement while explaining the secret code she developed to communicate with her secret lover, Colin Ferrell: “We had to be careful in the beginning not to mix up ‘I love you more than anything in the world’ with ‘watch out, we’re in danger."'

Like the films mentioned above The Lobster is, too, often off-putting and occasionally distancing. The bizarre conceit – people who fail to find a mate are turned into the animal of their choice – is immediately perplexing, placing this film firmly in make-believe world.

Lanthimos exaggerates and makes painfully explicit the nonsensical binaries our socialization places on human connection and feeling. The Lobster takes places in a world where you can have size 44 or 45 shoes. There is no half option. No one is allowed to be bisexual. You’re straight or you’re gay. That’s it. There are also no crushes here. One must be completely and utterly devoted to their partner or a polite but detached stranger. These rules are offered with no explanation.

Then, of course, there is the final division between human and animal. The film’s world treats the transition to the animal kingdom as a punishment and it is exclusively delivered to those who fail to find a mate, indicating that social activity is fundamental to the human experience. But, we are then left with this impossible contradiction wherein we acknowledge human beings as social creatures who proceed to craft social mores and apparatuses that directly stymie this most fundamental of human needs – the need to connect.

Because human love, courtship and sexuality is rife with the undefined, the mis-defined, the mal-defined. We are messy and unclassifiable, fluid and broken and then repaired into something new. And yet, we exist in a world not many steps away from The Lobster’s fictionalized reality – bound by rules, traditions and mores that exist simply because they’ve “always” existed, pairing off based on superficial similarities, having children because it’s simply what comes next. These are ideas so fundamental that not only do we fail to discuss them we fail to realize that they can be discussed.

The Lobster ends on a brutally romantic and a needlessly cruel sacrifice necessitated by an impossible system while drawing together all that the film had to say. It is a marvelous achievement.

While The Lobster lightly touches on the supernatural (we can’t really turn people into animals {yet}), all three of these films are grounded in something that looks like reality. This grounding is what makes the departures from reality so unnerving, so uncanny, so weird. Like Freud said, we notice them and are troubled by them because they call to mind our unspoken and unspeakable assumptions, our life’s axioms. It is ideology in the technical sense of the word meaning those ideas and values that are so fundamentally accepted that we don’t even think about them.

This is the power of film. Cinema can be more than the spectacle. It can be fearsome and reality-altering. Our job is to understand it and examine our language and instincts to get at what truly motivates our reactions and preferences.

Check out more from Wilson on the podcast Movies Charles Hasn't Seen

[1] I mean, have you *seen* Happiness.

[2] Yes, I know all these directors are men. When you need examples of famous blockbusters unfortunately you end up with a list full of dudes. The industry is sexist.

[3] The essay in question is appropriately called “The Uncanny."

[4] To observe a similar maturation, watch Primer and then Upstream Color.