A blackly comic costume caper with a spiteful side

THE FAVOURITE Saturday, Channel 4, 9.15pm

FOR her portrayal of Queen Anne in this lavish 18th century drama, Olivia Colman won an Academy Award, a Golden Globe and a BAFTA in 2019, and co-stars Rachel Weisz and Emma Stone were both Oscar nominated.

But park any thought of The Favourite being a starry, straightup historical biopic of the monarch whose reign covered the period immediately before and after the

Act of Union: the director is Yorgos Lanthimos, one of the leading lights in a cinematic movement known as the Greek Weird Wave because of its emphasis on the surreal, the odd and the metaphor-laden.

In his 2005 debut Kinetta, for example, a group of strangers meet in an out-of-season hotel complex to recreate deaths and murders, while the Cannes award-winning Dogtooth from 2009 is about a rich Athens couple who keep their children entirely separate from the world with predictably unpredictable results.

The director’s move into English language films with The Lobster and The Killing Of A Sacred Deer dumped the Greek bit of that tag, introduced him to a host of new actors (Colman and Weisz were both in The Lobster) and eased off on the weird, if only a little. Black comedy is the best way to describe The Favourite, though it still has its more bonkers moments.

Co-scripted by historian and screenwriter Deborah Davis and Australian playwright Tony McNamara, it turns on the intimate friendship between Anne and whipsmart courtier Sarah Churchill, Duchess Of Malborough (Weisz). Sarah is the favourite of the title, a power behind the throne who steers the put-upon and impetuous Anne through affairs of state she really has no care or talent for. At least Sarah is the favourite until her distant cousin Abigail Hill (Stone) turns up at court looking for help and advancement – and willing to act in every bit as unscrupulous a fashion as Sarah does to achieve it.

And so the scene is set for a battle royale between the two women, with Anne’s affections up for grabs. And if that means sharing a bed with her, ministering to her gout and pretending to enjoy playing with her battalion of pet rabbits, so be it.

Colman is brilliant, as you would expect, while the uber-cool Weisz is the epitome of ruthless intent, particularly after she is poisoned by Abigail and winds up in a brothel for a spell. But it’s Stone’s sassy interloper who catches the eye in a film in which the women come out on top and the men are danced rings round and played almost entirely for fools. Great stuff.