The Favourite (2018) | Movie Guide

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What is The Favourite about?

The Favourite is an intricate exploration of power dynamics, manipulation, and the complexities of human nature. At its core, the film unravels a masterfully crafted narrative that transcends the ostentatious courts of early 18th-century England to expose the raw and often chaotic nature of human relationships. The story centers around the trilateral relationship between Queen Anne, Sarah Churchill, and Abigail Masham, which proves to be a perfect setting to observe the human quest for power and control.

The underlying theme of manipulation and power struggle manifests itself in various forms throughout the movie. It compels the audience to question the definition of loyalty, friendship, and ambition. Each character’s tactics for power acquisition underscores the fluidity of power and the lengths to which individuals may go to retain it. On a larger scale, The Favourite highlights how personal desires and ambitions can drastically influence political decisions and dynamics, thereby affecting society at large. It is not simply a period drama but a thought-provoking commentary on the age-old battle for power that continues to echo in modern society.

Movie Guide table of contents

Cast

• Olivia Colman – Queen Anne
• Emma Stone – Abigail Hill (later Abigail Masham, Baroness Masham)
• Rachel Weisz – Lady Sarah Churchill, Duchess of Marlborough
• Nicholas Hoult – Robert Harley, 1st Earl of Oxford and Earl Mortimer
• Joe Alwyn – Samuel Masham, 1st Baron Masham
• James Smith – Sidney Godolphin, 1st Earl of Godolphin
• Mark Gatiss – John Churchill, 1st Duke of Marlborough
• Jenny Rainsford – Mae
• Jennifer White – Mrs. Meg
• Lilly-Rose Stevens – Sally
• Deborah Davis – writer
• Tony McNamara – writer
• Yorgos Lanthimos – director

Why is the movie called The Favourite?

On the surface, the title The Favourite refers to the favorites of Queen Anne—Sarah Churchill and Abigail Masham—who are locked in a rivalry to be the monarch’s favorite. However, in a broader context, the title becomes a stark commentary on the volatile nature of favoritism and the power dynamics associated with it—both prominent components of the film’s major themes.

It is noteworthy that the title is not referring to a single individual, but rather it encompasses a role—one that is fluid and continually up for grabs. There is no definitive “favorite.” Instead, it is a position that is constantly shifting, dictated by whoever is able to sway Queen Anne’s moods or pander to her whims effectively. It emphasizes the instability of favoritism, reflecting the transient nature of power and the uncertainties surrounding it. The title, in its simplicity, hints at the psychological complexities of the characters who are engaged in a battle for this ephemeral status.

In a more profound sense, the title also stands as a metaphor for the larger social framework of the time. The favoritism depicted in the movie is not only limited to the personal relationships between the characters but also mirrors the widespread system of patronage in the 18th century. This system heavily influenced the political, social, and economic life, wherein the aristocracy held sway over the less privileged, favoring those who could provide them with certain benefits or pleasantries. In this light, the title The Favourite can be seen as a microcosm of a broader societal reality, and as an exploration of the intrinsic human desire for power and favor.

The title is also intriguing in its ironic undertones. The “favorite” is often not in an enviable position. Their status, while coveted for its power and influence, is fraught with constant tension and uncertainty. As seen in the movie, the favorite must maintain a precarious balance, constantly adapting and strategizing to retain their position. The favorite is expected to be everything the Queen wishes at any given moment, bearing the weight of the Queen’s emotional, physical, and political demands. This situates the favorite in a perilous state of constant vulnerability, where one misstep could lead to their downfall.

The themes and meaning of The Favourite

The consequences of manipulation

Power and manipulation form a complex and fascinating dichotomy in The Favourite. The power dynamics are primarily shaped by the manipulative tactics employed by the characters and the constant power struggle between them.

Sarah Churchill initially appears to have the upper hand in this game of manipulation. Using her close relationship with Queen Anne, she controls the monarch’s political decisions and personal life. Sarah capitalizes on the Queen’s emotional and physical weaknesses, often treating her harshly to assert her control. She uses manipulation not just to control the Queen, but also to maintain her social status and push her political agenda.

Sarah’s cousin Abigail, however, proves to be an adept player in this game. She uses her initial status as a victim, as she is initially forced to work as a scullery maid, and her subsequent bond with the Queen to slowly dismantle Sarah’s influence. Abigail’s manipulative tactics are varied: she uses her charm and feigned innocence, plays the victim card when needed, resorts to sexual manipulation, and even uses poison to incapacitate Sarah. Her rise from a servant to the Queen’s favorite is a testament to her cunning and ruthless manipulation.

Queen Anne, the object of their manipulation, is not a passive entity either. While she may appear feeble and easy to control, she too exercises her power in subtle ways. She allows herself to be manipulated, knowing it allows her to exert control over Sarah and Abigail. She uses her status as the Queen to demand emotional and physical attention and to pit Sarah and Abigail against each other.

The consequences of these manipulations are profound. They lead to a toxic cycle of deception, betrayal, and power struggle. The intense rivalry between Sarah and Abigail escalates to a point where they cause each other physical and emotional harm. Their obsession with power and control leaves them isolated and distrusted. Sarah, despite her initial hold on power, is banished from the court, while Abigail, even after securing her position, is reduced to a mere servant, attending to the whims of the Queen.

More broadly, the manipulations drastically affect political decisions and the governance of the country. Personal ambitions and rivalries are placed above national interests, resulting in a skewed decision-making process. The movie thus uses power and manipulation as a lens to critique the political and social structures of the time, underlining the potential dangers of unchecked ambition and manipulation.

As director Yorgos Lanthimos told IndieWire, he wanted to “pare down the politics so it’s easier to understand the repercussions that come from the decisions that these three, or the actions that these three women take.” Thus, by focusing on the micro actions of his characters, the macro repercussions of their selfishness and disloyalty are highlighted. A seemingly small, narcissistic moment can have major consequences.

The masks we wear to hide ourselves

In The Favourite, the theme of identity and performance plays out through the actions and motivations of the main characters, who hide their true selves behind carefully constructed façades. These performances, driven by ambition, survival, and a thirst for power, end up causing significant harm, demonstrating the destructive potential of deceit and pretence.

Abigail Masham’s performance is the most striking. Starting as a fallen aristocrat, she enters the court appearing innocent and vulnerable, her humility in stark contrast to the entitlement of the courtiers. However, behind this mask of innocence lies a cunning and ambitious woman. Abigail’s performance is for survival and restoration of her lost status. She manipulates her way up, resorting to poisoning Sarah and seducing the Queen, revealing her ruthlessness. While her deceit helps her rise from a servant to the Queen’s favourite, it also traps her in an endless performance. Her role as the favourite requires constant adaptation and manipulation, leaving her trapped in her own web of deceit.

Sarah Churchill, despite her outward toughness and assertiveness, also hides behind a performance. She uses her influence over the Queen to push her political agenda, masking her personal ambitions behind a façade of duty and concern for the country. However, her failure to maintain her performance—being unable to hide her disdain for the Queen’s increasing reliance on Abigail—ultimately leads to her downfall. She loses her position, her status, and even her close friendship with the Queen.

Queen Anne, too, puts on a performance, albeit in a different manner. Her inconsistent behavior—shifting between a helpless, sick woman in agony over a gout flare and a petulant, powerful monarch—keeps everyone off balance. She keeps her courtiers guessing, using her performance as a tool for maintaining control. However, her emotional instability, coupled with her reliance on others, exposes her to manipulation and leads to poor governance, demonstrating the destructive consequences of her performance.

Loyalty and betrayal: a comparison between The Favourite and The Departed

Both The Favourite and The Departed delve deeply into the complexities of loyalty and betrayal through their key characters, using these themes to not only shape their characters’ actions and decisions but also their worldview and understanding of their surroundings.

Warning: spoilers follow for The Departed.

In The Favourite, the complex triangle of Queen Anne, Sarah Churchill, and Abigail Masham sets the stage for loyalty and betrayal. Queen Anne, in the middle of this triangle, is both the benefactor and victim of loyalty and betrayal. She craves unwavering loyalty due to her insecurities and physical ailments but is frequently confronted with betrayals, impacting her trust and perception of relationships.

Sarah Churchill, Queen Anne’s initial favourite, exhibits loyalty towards the Queen but also betrays her trust by using her position for personal and political gain. Sarah’s outlook is cynical; she sees loyalty as a tool for manipulation, indicating her belief in the inseparability of power and betrayal. When faced with Abigail’s betrayal, her world comes crashing down, leading to her exile and reinforcing her cynical worldview.

Abigail’s journey is a mirror reflection of loyalty used for survival. She enters the scene as a victim, loyal to her cousin Sarah, but rapidly shifts her loyalty to Queen Anne when presented with the opportunity for advancement. For Abigail, loyalty is a means to an end, and betrayal is a strategy for social mobility. As she replaces Sarah as the favourite, she witnesses the fluidity of loyalty in the face of power, reinforcing her opportunistic outlook.

In The Departed, Billy Costigan and Colin Sullivan navigate a world where loyalty and betrayal are matters of life and death. Costigan, an undercover cop, must betray the criminals he has grown close to in order to remain loyal to his duty. This constant conflict shapes his world into one filled with paranoia and distrust, tainting his outlook on human connections.

Sullivan, conversely, lives a life of superficial loyalty to law enforcement while secretly betraying them for the mob boss who raised him. His betrayals are driven by his distorted sense of loyalty towards Frank Costello, the mob boss. As his dual life unravels, he experiences the damaging effects of living a lie, resulting in isolation and paranoia.

In both films, loyalty is shown to be volatile and easily swayed by power, survival, and personal gain. The characters’ betrayals lead to devastating outcomes—banishment in The Favourite and death in The Departed. These outcomes not only shape their actions and decisions but also affect their perspectives on life, relationships, and power. The interplay of loyalty and betrayal in both films ultimately paints a bleak picture of human relationships, highlighting the destructive potential of betrayal and the often-unattainable nature of true loyalty.

The ending of The Favourite explained

I think that when you watch a movie, you like to feel…comforted. I mean sure, you want a movie to challenge you, to invigorate you, to transport you to another world that’s exciting and fun to watch—but there are some places you don’t want a movie to go. You never want to suddenly feel out of step, like you’re playing catch up, like everything is out of sequence and that the story doesn’t line up. You want to feel in control, and never lost.

Unfortunately, when the credits roll for The Favourite, people seem to have experienced the latter. The ending of The Favourite is indeed a strange one: Queen Anne (Olivia Coleman) orders Abigail (Emma Stone) to “rub her legs”. Then Anne, during her lowest moment, grabs Abigail’s hair, holding her in place as Abigail winces.

The moment is made even more surreal as the images of Anne and Abigail are stacked on one another. Then their images fade out as footage of Anne’s 17 rabbits fade in.

However in control you felt throughout this movie, it’s totally reasonable to feel lost during these final moments. And that’s not because the movie is too smart for you—it’s because the movie changes stylistically to make its grand point. This ending could easily be shot in a regular, more straightforward way and make the exact same point. But because we have these weird shots of rabbits taking over the screen, we focus more on the style than the actual components of the scene.

So let’s move past the style and focus on those components. To get there, we’ll look at the different ways a movie can end, the motifs that indicate how to read an ending, and then finally why the ending of The Favourite makes sense when you recognize Queen Anne as the main character.

Philosophical endings vs. resolutions

As Chris talked about in his piece on The Lobster, a movie directed by Yorgos Lanthimos (also the director of The Killing of a Sacred Deer and Dogtooth), there’s a major difference between philosophical endings and resolutions. And part of what’s tripping people up is they think that The Favourite has a philosophical ending. But it doesn’t, and I’ll show why.

Resolutions are what we come to expect from movies. Both Hardball and Rookie of the Year feature baseball teams trying to win the championship, so naturally you’d expect the movie to end with them either winning or losing the championship. Easy said, easy done. Right?

But sometimes you have a movie like The Lobster that exists outside the normal world, that has a dystopian setting, that defamiliarizes the idea of love and solitude. The Lobster world is a strange one that forces philosophical introspection from the viewer, so it makes sense for its ending to be open-ended, ambiguous, and…well, philosophical. However peculiar the ending may be, it probably doesn’t completely ruin you—the style of the finale doesn’t really diverge from the style of the rest of the movie.

That’s the big difference with The Favourite. For the most part, it’s a pretty straightforward movie. Sure it’s basically Big Brother meets British royalty, and sure the characters all talk in this black-comedic way—but compared to other Lanthimos movies, The Favourite very much feels like it could have actually happened.

And it kind of did actually happen! In the early 1700s there was a Queen Anne in frail health, and she was heavily influenced by Lady Sarah Churchill (Rachel Weisz) during a time of war. Sure, plenty of the details are obscured, but the movie does have known figures doing sketchy stuff that doesn’t feel too far off from modern politics. It may be a bit satirical, but it’s a far, far cry from a movie where people turn into animals if they don’t find love (aka The Lobster).

So that’s one major reason The Favourite’s ending throws people off—much like The Lobster, it’s an ending that doesn’t feel like a real resolution. If a movie like Back to the Future ended with Marty driving his Delorean down the street, slowly inching more and more towards 88 miles per hour…and then the movie cut to black and the credits rolled? That would be insane. This blockbuster shouldn’t have this ending that makes you wonder if the movie was trying to make a philosophical point the entire time—it ends with Marty getting back home, as expected.

But The Favourite doesn’t have a philosophical ending either—it just has an abrupt switch in tone and style. This is a normal resolution filmed in an artsy way, and there are plenty of clues throughout the movie to understand it.

A different kind of resolution

Remember when I mentioned Hardball and Rookie of the Year? Two stories about baseball teams that obviously end with the teams either winning or losing the championship? Well…neither of those movies end that way. And that’s because their stories aren’t about baseball.

Really Hardball is about teamwork, camaraderie, proving your worth. And Rookie of the Year is about youth, friendship, believing in yourself. Baseball is the catalyst, but all those themes are the skeleton of the story, what drive the characters and provide catharsis.

In Hardball, when G-Baby gets shot, his brother motivates his team and coach to continue playing, to go out and fight in the name of G-Baby; in Rookie of the Year, when Henry loses his ability to pitch, he knows it’s time to enjoy his childhood and spend as much time as he can with his friends—those are endings. That is resolution. It may not be the obvious way to resolve the story, but it fits, right? You don’t really question it, even though those movies deviate from what is seemingly the driving force of both movies: baseball.

That’s how we should think of The Favourite. Other than how it’s filmed, the ending doesn’t really deviate at all from anything we’ve seen in the movie:

1. Anne has always had a right-hand woman tending to her sexual needs.
2. Abigail fought to become the woman that looks after Anne.
3. Anne’s 17 rabbits have been a prominent fixture throughout the movie.

All the elements are there—it’s just how it’s all presented that throws us off.

Let’s boil that down to the three main motifs we’ve seen during the movie: sex; power struggles; animals.

1. Both Sarah and Abigail used sex to get what they wanted from Anne.
2. Sarah used Anne’s trust in her to badmouth Abigail, while Abigail poisoned Sarah and cultivated a story about Sarah stealing from the monarch.
3. Each of the 17 rabbits symbolizes a child Anne lost.

Once again: apart from how it’s filmed, nothing in that final scene is out of the ordinary. All the clues are in place. So what does that final scene indicate?

What the ending of The Favourite means

When we use those three motifs to decipher the ending, an interesting conclusion emerges: this movie is about Queen Anne. The movie seems like it’s about the battle between Sarah and Abigail, but really it’s about what their fight does to the queen.

Let’s take a look:

Motif #1: Sex

When Anne grabs Abigail’s hair and forces her to “rub her legs”, for the first time in the movie, it feels like Anne is treating her personal adviser as a servant. Where the the sex once felt romantic with Sarah and impulsive with Abigail, it now feels sadistic, involuntary, passionless.

Motif #2: Power struggles

Whatever joy Anne once took with either Sarah or Abigail has been evaporated at the end of the movie. Because of Abigail and Sarah’s feud, they drove one another to despicable extents. Sarah turned Abigail into a power-hungry vixen; and Abigail caused Sarah to abuse her relationship with Anne. Because of the brawl, the love of Anne’s life had been arrested and all she’s left with is a woman she no longer recognizes.

Motif #3: Animals

And how does Anne know that Abigail has changed? Because she sees Abigail place her foot over one of Anne’s pet rabbits and press it into the ground.

When Abigail and Anne met for the first time earlier in the film, they bonded over Anne’s rabbits. Anne revealed that each of her rabbits symbolized a lost child, and she saw the hurt and empathy in Abigail’s eyes—that moment was their connection.

Anne even says to Abigail about her lost children:

“Each one that dies, a little bit of you goes with them.”

So when Anne sees Abigail press her shoe into that rabbit, Anne’s demeanor changes. She denies Abigail’s help getting out of bed. She has a look of disgust as she grabs Abigail’s hair and forces to Abigail to sexually please her. Anne has seemingly lost all love and compassion that was alive in her during that somber moment with Abigail earlier in the film.

It becomes clear that Anne, who is in dire health and has no family, needed the people in her life to keep her going. And now that she’s lost both Sarah and Abigail during her final years (in real life she would pass away just a few years later), her reaction is to go to a dark place and demean someone she once bonded with.

Thus, the final shot signifies how fragile and vulnerable Anne was throughout the movie. Little by little, a little bit of Anne passed away as the people in her life passed on. So as the images of Anne, her confidant, and her babies fade from the screen, we see Anne’s humanity fading with them.

In the end, the rabbits didn’t just represent her 17 children—they also symbolized the life Anne had left in her. And now that they’re gone, she’s crossed a critical threshold at the end of her life from which she cannot come back.