Many recent women-centered films overcompensate, succumbing to lukewarm tokenism, portentous plots, neutered sexuality, and pulled punches both literal (no catfights) and figurative (no misandry). They manage to skirt the usual stereotypes of cattiness, victimhood, hysteria, sluttiness, and so on, but they miss all the depth and contradiction of genuine vice. Yorgos Lanthimos’s The Favourite dispenses with this bind altogether. I have never seen a film like it: a story about three bad women—bad in very different, very interesting ways—whose badness both makes and breaks the relationships between them.
