A heavy crown. A royal robe. A queen paralyzed by grief while everyone around her fights for control. On Netflix, Olivia Colman delivers an Oscar-winning, critically acclaimed performance as a frail monarch caught between two calculating women vying for her favor. In The Favourite (2018), her exhausted gaze is the still point of a court that never stops moving. Behind it lies betrayal, manipulation, secret affairs, and a war being run from drawing rooms where love is just another form of leverage. The tense atmosphere of that moment is the film’s true battlefield. The army is elsewhere. The throne is here, in a sickroom that happens to rule a country.

Directed by Yorgos Lanthimos and written by Deborah Davis and Tony McNamara, the film takes the early-eighteenth-century court of Queen Anne and strips it of heritage-cinema politeness. England is at war with France. The treasury is a weapon. Parliament is a pack of powdered men who think history belongs to them. Inside the palace, the real contest is intimate. Rachel Weisz plays Sarah Churchill, Duchess of Marlborough: brilliant, coarse, indispensable, the queen’s old friend and political brain. Emma Stone plays Abigail Hill, a fallen gentlewoman who arrives as a servant and studies power the way other people study scripture. Between them sits Anne, swollen with pain, haunted by dead children, hungry for affection she can no longer trust.

Colman won the Academy Award for Best Actress because she refuses the easy version of a weak queen. Her Anne is childish, vicious, needy, funny, and devastating, often in the same scene. She screams at ducks. She demands cake. She cannot walk without agony. She can still end a career with a sentence. Grief has not made her saintly. It has made her dangerous in the way a wounded animal is dangerous. Courtiers mistake her frailty for vacancy. The Favourite (2018) never does. The exhausted gaze in the caption is not emptiness. It is a woman counting who still loves her and who only loves the seal on her hand.

Lanthimos shoots the palace like a beautiful trap. Fish-eye lenses warp corridors into aquariums. Candlelight turns faces into conspiracies. A dance becomes a duel. A shot of birds, rabbits, or a racing wheelchair can feel more violent than a battlefield dispatch. The style announces that this is not a respectful recreation. It is a grotesque comedy of manners in which manners are camouflage. Servants hear everything. Politicians bet on the queen’s mood. Sex is policy. Kindness is an opening bid.

Weisz’s Sarah is the film’s first idea of strength. She manages Anne, the war, and her own legend with the same unsentimental competence. She can be brutal to the woman she loves and loyal in the same breath. Stone’s Abigail begins in mud and calculation. She is not a modern girlboss dropped into costume. She is a person with no safety net who has learned that proximity to pain is a career. The triangle they form with Anne is erotic, political, and grimly funny. Each woman offers a different anesthetic: Sarah offers partnership and command; Abigail offers softness and obedience; Anne offers the crown, which is to say she offers the only prize that matters and the prison that comes with it.

The Favourite (2018) is ruthless about what favor means. To be the favourite is to sleep closer to the body that signs the orders. It is also to become the thing everyone else wants to poison. Whispers travel faster than letters to the front. A recipe, a bandage, a late-night conversation, a public humiliation in front of Parliament: the weapons are domestic and therefore hard to name as violence. McNamara’s dialogue is a masterclass in elegant cruelty. People insult one another with the courtesy of a minuet. Then someone bleeds.

Nicholas Hoult, as Robert Harley, leads the parliamentary opposition with a fop’s smile and a knife collector’s patience. The male court is loud and secondary, which is the joke and the point. They believe they are the story. The movie knows the story is happening in the queen’s bedchamber, where two women negotiate the country through an invalid’s loneliness. War casualties arrive as numbers. Anne’s lost children arrive as seventeen rabbits, a private menagerie of grief that Colman handles with a tenderness more shocking than any outburst. When she looks at those animals, the power struggle briefly stops being sport. It becomes what it always was: a fight over who gets to hold a person who cannot hold herself.

The film’s comedy is not relief. It is the sound a system makes when it is rotting. A shooting party, a nude dance, a vomiting beauty ritual, a servant climbing a ladder into history: Lanthimos keeps puncturing pomp so the audience cannot hide inside admiration for the furniture. Costume designer Sandy Powell’s fabrics are sumptuous and slightly unwell, like the court itself. The palace looks rich enough to smother anyone who stays too long.

Comparisons to other royal dramas miss the tone. This is closer to a poisonous farce than to a patriotic biopic. It does not care whether Anne was a good queen in the textbook sense. It cares how absolute power behaves when the body that holds it is ill, lonely, and surrounded by people who need her to live just long enough to be useful. The Favourite (2018) is a period film about the oldest modern subject: the market for intimacy around a damaged leader.

Colman, Weisz, and Stone play that market without winking too hard at the present, which is why the present keeps recognizing itself anyway. Alliances are personal until they are not. Loyalty is real until a better room appears. A woman can love another woman and still ruin her. A monarch can be pathetic and still be the most dangerous person in England. The chilling atmosphere of the still image—the robe, the crown, the spent face—is the pause before the next petition. Someone is always about to enter with comfort that has a price.

Streaming on Netflix, the film remains one of the essential court dramas of the century because it refuses to separate the bedroom from the state. There is no clean public Anne and private Anne. There is only the body in the robe, and the two women who know that whoever owns that body’s trust owns the war, the treasury, and the story the nation will tell about itself. Watch Colman listen. Watch Weisz calculate. Watch Stone smile as if smiling were a form of marksmanship.

That is the struggle behind the throne. Not a single coup, but a thousand small captures of a lonely woman’s attention. The Favourite (2018) makes those captures glamorous, filthy, and unforgettable. By the time the court stops moving, the crown has not gotten lighter. It has only changed which pair of hands is allowed to adjust it on a head too tired to feel the difference.