The mad European auteur who conquered Hollywood

Against all odds, the Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos has brought his berserk eye to mainstream British and American cinema. Xan Brooks looks back on his extraordinary career

- Xan Brooks

Few viewers would choose to live in a Yorgos Lanthimos film, but his work is so good it makes us feel that we do. Like Lynch or Von Trier, Herzog or Buñuel, he conjures a world with its own internal logic; that's heightened and strange and semidetached from our own. In his early years, the director was part of a trend that was known as the Greek Weird Wave, and painted warped portraits of a troubled country on the brink of meltdown. Then the rest of the planet caught up and sent his career fully global. Whatever our nationality, we're all Greek Weird Wave now.

Early and latter-day Lanthimos are both on display this month with the re-release of his breakthrough film Dogtooth (2009) and the public unveiling at the Venice Film Festival of his latest work, Bugonia. It's oddly touching to revisit Dogtooth after all these years and be reminded of a time when it looked as if it might be a fascinating one-off, a niche property, and as far removed from mainstream cinema as its luckless protagonists are from their immediate neighbours.

Lanthimos's antic dark fable spins the tale of three kids holed up inside a handsome walled compound. The authoritarian father tells them they can't venture outside because the streets are prowled by ravening wolves. He arranges a visiting sex worker to dutifully service his son, and home-schools the trio in a lexicon of false nouns. “Sea” is the word for the leather armchair in the lounge, he explains, while those sweet yellow flowers in the garden are called “zombies”. Every evening the brood watch a diet of old home videos, gorging themselves on a feedback loop of oppressive family history. Dogtooth won't be for all tastes, but it's biting and brilliant and tells us that the gated community is a kind of hell. Even a nice-looking one, with zombies on the lawn.

Prisoners escape: that's the natural arc of a drama. And so it was with