The Favourite · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

The Favourite stakes its argument most fundamentally on mise-en-scène: Robbie Ryan's fish-eye and ultra-wide lenses do conceptual work that exceeds decoration, warping the palace into a fishbowl so that grandeur curdles into a trap. When the distorted frame catches Abigail's calculating upward glance or tilts Sarah's imperious stride into something grotesque, the visual distortion becomes the film's thesis — power deforms the bodies that compete over it. The candlelit chiaroscuro, staging interiors as living paintings, descends directly from Barry Lyndon (1975), where Kubrick's team first proved that available-light period cinematography could look simultaneously ravishing and airless; Ryan literalizes that debt while giving it the fish-eye's predatory curve. This surveillance aesthetic also reshapes the gaze: the restless mechanical pans and sudden whip-snaps to catch a rival's reaction reproduce the court's own logic of watching, positioning the viewer not as an empathetic witness but as one more participant in the game of looking. We observe these women the way they observe each other — hungry, comparative, assessing. What saves the film from cold aestheticism is that it finally anchors in affection-image: Olivia Colman's Queen Anne, grief-swollen and gout-ridden, becomes the face on which the entire structure hangs. Her close-ups carry feeling as pure demand — a face that needs to be loved and dimly suspects it isn't — and every stratagem Sarah and Abigail devise is ultimately a response to what that face, in the next moment, might require.