The Favourite · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

The room curves. You notice it first in a long shot down one of the palace galleries: candlelight pooling on the floor, the panelling bowing outward at the edges of the frame as if the building were exhaling through a fish-eye lens. A small figure sits far away at the center, swallowed by her own grandeur. Robbie Ryan's wide and fish-eye glass does that bend everywhere in The Favourite, and the bend is the film's argument before a line of plot lands. These rooms have no straight walls and no exit. They close on whoever is inside them.

Deleuze had a name for an image like this. He called the enclosed, mirror-bright world with no graspable outside a crystal — and its most extreme form, where the totality saturates and seals, the perfect crystal. The palace at Hatfield is exactly that: a sealed glass globe in which three women circle one another, the War of the Spanish Succession reduced to a rumor carried in by a Tory in a wig. The camera's whip-pans and snap-zooms don't open the space; they ricochet inside it. There is a court, a queen, a country at war — and yet the film keeps proving there is nowhere to stand that isn't already part of the trap. That is what makes the famous final image so disquieting: Anne pressing Abigail's head down to rub her gouty leg while the seventeen rabbits dissolve over their faces. No comeuppance, no triumph. Just the crystal, closed.

What moves inside that sealed world is not strategy. It is appetite. Watch Anne gorge on cake until she vomits into a bowl and demands more, watch the gout and the grief, the seventeen rabbits standing in for seventeen dead children. Deleuze would call this naturalism in his precise sense — not grubby realism but a derived milieu (the court, with its protocols and curtsies) shown to be the thin surface of an originary world where only raw drives move: hunger, sickness, the need to be loved, the need to win. The court is the costume; the originary world is what wears it. And naturalism always runs downhill. Anne's body is a line of slope, sliding visibly toward ruin across the film, dragging the whole regime with it. Power here isn't held by the cunning. It's held by the most ravaged body in the building.

This is why the film's cruelest scenes are physical rituals, not speeches. Deleuze's gest — a posture or attitude that exposes a social relation by performing it — is the film's basic unit. The curtsy, the hand kissed, the leg rubbed: each is a small choreography of who kneels to whom. When Abigail learns to dress a wound to get close to the Queen, the gesture is the politics. The leg-rub is the gest of the entire court: sovereignty reduced to the question of whose fingers are permitted on the royal skin.

And Abigail herself is something Deleuze prized — the forger, the figure who shifts identity serially and forges truth as she climbs. Fallen gentlewoman, scullery maid, lady, wife, favourite: each is a costume she puts on and means completely while wearing it. Emma Stone plays "wounded sweetness" as a surface we are never allowed to settle behind. Is the kindness real? The film refuses to tell us, and that refusal is the point — the powers of the false, where true and false stop being decidable and become something a character actively makes. We never catch the "real" Abigail because there isn't one underneath. There's only the next forgery.

Set the lens down and the lineage clicks into focus. The candlelit, fast-lens, available-light interior is Kubrick's Barry Lyndon (1975), made strange. The architecturally framed Restoration cruelty, power as ritualized artifice, descends from Greenaway's The Draughtsman's Contract (1982) and The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover (1989). The deadpan delivery and the fish-eye distortion of formal rooms are Lanthimos's own grammar, carried in whole from Dogtooth (2009) and The Lobster (2015). And the anachronistic, female-centered costume revision — modern textures, compiled scoring, a contemporary intelligence smuggled inside a rigorously designed court — is the move Sofia Coppola made in Marie Antoinette (2006), which The Favourite radicalizes with profanity and warped glass. Lanthimos hands it forward to Poor Things (2023).

What it did to the costume drama is the real significance. The British heritage film is built on reverence: stately compositions, swelling strings, the past as something to admire. The Favourite keeps the grandeur and weaponizes it. The chapter cards bearing scraps of obscene dialogue, the baroque Handel laid over farce and poisoning, the panelling that cages rather than ennobles — all of it turns the genre's own decorum into an indictment. This is what Deleuze saw the modern image doing: the picture stops being a window you trust and becomes a surface you must read, the court as a crystal decomposing from within, an ordered aristocratic world rotting under its own gilt.

So watch it again, and watch the rooms. Watch where the walls bend, and who is small in them, and whose hand ends up on whose leg. The film never tells you who won. It shows you the shape of the cage and lets you notice that winning means staying inside it. That curve in the frame was the answer the whole time.