Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos has made a handful of very different movies over the past decade and a half, but his pet themes have a way of recurring in every one. To take a just a few examples: His breakthrough movie, 2009's Dogtooth, was a hermetic fable about a tyrannical couple who keep their three grown children trapped in a locked compound, feeding them lies about the world beyond their gates. The Lobster, from 2015, took place in an allegorical alternate reality where single adults who fail to find a romantic partner are legally compelled to be transformed into animals. The Favourite, Lanthimos' biggest international hit and the movie that won Olivia Colman a Best Actress Oscar in 2019, was a hyperstylized historical drama that played 18th-century court intrigue for the blackest of comedy. Poor Things, Lanthimos' adaptation of a 1992 novel by the Scottish writer Alasdair Gray (the screenplay is by Tony McNamara, who also co-wrote The Favourite), can be seen as the culminating expression of the filmmaker's longtime obsessions: the horror of being trapped in a closed system, the individual's often self-destructive quest to break free from said bondage, the warping effects of intergenerational trauma, and the capacity of the human body for transformation. Poor Things is a feminist recasting of the Frankenstein myth, a gorgeously designed setting for the jewel that is Emma Stone's lead performance, and not just my favorite Lanthimos movie I've seen yet but maybe the only one of his I've really liked.

This doesn't always necessarily mean grand shots of spaceships or far-flung planets. For every lavish spectacle like Dune, there are many more smaller-scale sci-fi movies with modest or nonexistent special effects budgets. These movies must use other methods to flesh out their futuristic visions. An atmospheric soundtrack can go far to create a thrilling mood. Clever set design, like the homebrewed time machine in Primer or the quantum-computer cables strung through the woods in Lapsis, can immerse audiences in a new world without cutting-edge CGI.

Yorgos Lanthimos makes enigmatic films that exist in universes all their own. His latest, "The Lobster," is at once cerebral and emotional, an abstracted allegory on power, love and the power of love. His films can also be so cryptic and inscrutable that they remain mysterious even to their maker. Few filmmakers are as reticent to give definitive answers, open to outside interpretations or willing to simply respond to questions with an "I don't know." "Well, what am I going to do, fake it?"