The Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos has long been thrilled by the awesome, hurtful power of human interaction. His fiendish breakout film, Dogtooth, followed two parents who never let their grown children leave the house, thus warping their kids’ understanding of the world.

The director’s English-language debut, The Lobster, envisioned the dating process as a Kafkaesque bureaucracy: The story takes place in a hotel filled with single people who have 45 days to fall in love before they’re turned into animals. In Lanthimos’s most recent effort, The Killing of a Sacred Deer, a doctor is forced by a patient’s vengeful son to kill one of his own family members as an act of cosmic rebalancing.

Given the director’s fascination with such baroque forms of cruelty, the British royal court at the dawn of the 18th century seems an appropriate playground for his next project. The Favourite is the first of Lanthimos’s films in years that he did not also write (the script comes from Deborah Davis and Tony McNamara), but it’s right in his wheelhouse.

The deliciously nasty and alienating comedy centers on  a pitched battle for the attention of Queen Anne (Olivia Colman) between her two most influential friends, Sarah Churchill (Rachel Weisz) and Abigail Masham (Emma Stone). Lanthimos always sets his movies in chilly pseudo-dystopias, which makes a palace full of mean aristocrats an ideal match for him.