The director is horrible.

Rating: 1/10 (4 January 2019)

Oh what a horribly directed film. What a waste of 3 very talented actresses. How can this be? The scenery was good. The costumes were good. The sets / indoor locations were good. The acting was good.
I love historical films / costume dramas and the like and with Rachel Weisz and Emma Stone involved I was excited to see this. I did not know about Olivia Colman but now I am a fan. All three of these ladies were great in this. But they could not overcome the lousy and very gimmicky directing. And what is with the trailer advertising this as a comedy? This is not a comedy.
One of the great and fun experiences is to get lost in a film, to totally fall for the magic of film and almost not realize that you are in a theater watching a film. But this hack director Yorgos Lanthimos destroyed the magic from the very start of this film.
He constantly uses a fisheye / fishbowl lens that distorts every room and even a horse ride in a forest. Indoor shots make the walls bend and ceiling beams curve so much that it was impossible to get lost in the story, such as it was. It is like you normally wear eyeglasses to see and suddenly you have accidentally put on somebody else's glasses making your view distorted and now you are forced to wear them for the next two hours. And his other gimmick was to shoot most of the film with cameras at the height of a young, very short child. The camera is almost always looking up at the actors. And then it is always moving around. The camera would float in front of an actor who was walking toward the camera and then it would suddenly turn 180 degrees to look and move in the opposite direction - just like a small child running around and turning their head all of the time. But at random times the camera would be up above all of the actors and floating around the room like a balloon. I was made constantly aware of the fact that I was watching the work of a director who thinks that he is some kind of ground breaking genius. I could just see him chuckling to himself about how he is turning cinema on its head because of these cheap gimmicks.
And as somebody else already mentioned there are numerous shots of actors in a dark room with a brightly lit window behind them so that the shot is washed out with the bright light and you cannot see much of the actor. For what reason? What does this achieve?
Top all of this off with a jarring and often times ridiculous music score that also seems to think that it is clever (it is not) and the end result from my viewpoint is a disaster. There are so many other people, a woman director would be nice, who could have made a decent film out of this story. Save your money and don't bother with this. And Hollywood - please don't hire this lame director any more. Thanks.