“As it turns out, I’m capable of much unpleasantness.”

Directed by Yorgos Lanthimos, The Favourite is a darkly comic, camp and cynical historical drama. Set in 1708, Britain is at war with France (again). Olivia Colman plays Queen Anne, a remote, childlike monarch who relies on her close advisers. The closest is Sarah Churchill, played by Rachel Weisz, a powerfully formidable and straight-talking power broker who works to further the careers and interests of her Whig allies. Churchill controls Anne through a mixture of mothering attention, wily advice and sex. Into this steps Abigail Hill, played by Emma Stone. Hill is a cousin of Churchill who has fallen on hard times, but manages to wheedle her way first into employment and then into the affections of Anne. The film is then concerned with the power struggle between Hill and Churchill, and through them the conflict between the opposing Whig and Tory policies.

Lanthimos’ world is a curious mixture of the accurate and the outrageously fabricated. On the surface, the film has all the texture and painterly authenticity of Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon (1975) or Peter Greenaway’s The Draughtsman’s Contract (1982), but within this authenticity slips a subversive and more satirical edge. Formal dances turn into peacock-ing displays of sex; formal balls become frat-house fights. The screen is filled with richly wood panelled rooms and tapestries, but within them take place duck races, slapstick fights, profane speeches, debauchery and gluttony.

At the centre of the film are the three leads – their performances speak of childish play rather than historical representation, which adds to the feeling of dislocation. It’s almost is if Rainer Werner Fassbinder had directed a film photographed by Peter Greenaway with a script by Woody Allen. A heady combination that makes it one of the more distinctive movies of recent times.