UNEASE

LIKE IN LANTHIMOS MOVIES

21 05 2026

Concept by Mara Cipriano Senior Art Curator

The great master of cinema, Lanthimos, shows us strangeness not as a path toward marginality but as a magnetic force, a mirror that reflects our curiosity and our desire to understand the unknown.

There is something profoundly captivating in one of his most accomplished characters, Bella Baxter from Poor Things. She places us before a truth we constantly try to avoid, yet one that ultimately hypnotises us. Bella is not strange because she comes from elsewhere, she is strange because she steps into the world without shame, without the frameworks that usually act as our safety harness. She learns by touching, by desiring, by hurling herself into life like an animal that has not yet learned fear.

In her lives the primordial spark of difference, that molecule of anarchy that wakes our sleeping brain. We watch her do what we no longer dare to do. She scandalises us and attracts us in the same instant, because she reveals what we have buried: the right to be other, to be messy, to be alive without permission.

On the other hand we look at the characters in The Lobster. They speak as if the system had chewed them up and spat them back out. They are not alien, they are all too human. So immersed in the social apparatus that they appear as caricatures of it. The absurd emerges precisely here, when what we call normality reveals itself as a fragile mechanism, a tool that works only as long as it is not observed too closely.

And this brings us to art, to the professional disturbers. Bosch opening portals where saints have fish eyes and sinners become living architectures. Goya painting Saturn devouring his son as if he were recounting an everyday detail. These artists do not want us to feel at home. When art is alive, this is what it does. It engineers disorientation. It brings questions, not answers.

The human being, beneath all its masks, is made to look for cracks. Where there is a crack there is a story, and the artist is the guardian of those cracks. They educate us in complexity, train us in doubt and force us to look where we do not want to look. If the world seeks order, the artist reminds us that within that order grows the paradox. If society wants reassurance, the artist returns to us a sense of disquiet. Not out of cruelty, but out of honesty. Because truth is not always comfortable, yet it is the only place where we can truly encounter what we are.