Moving to England on the back of the success of “Dogtooth” gave Lanthimos access to bigger budgets and internationally known stars like Colin Farrell, Nicole Kidman, Emma Stone and Rachel Weisz — but in many ways, he has shaped his English-language productions to suit the spontaneous practices he developed in Greece, rather than remodeling himself to Hollywood’s specifications. He likes to shoot with natural light, inviting the contingency of unplanned weather to enter his scenes, and he rarely makes use of the expensive cinematic lighting that productions order by default. “I do walk outside and see the lighting people, the equipment just sitting around,” he says. “It’s such a waste of their time, of the film’s money.” He steers clear of movie makeup, preferring to let the “real face” of his actors show through, unadulterated, the hair unfussy and requiring little touch-up work. One consequence of these decisions is that his sets are unusually quiet and intimate, and without setting up lights or pausing to reapply makeup, he explains, they are able to get much more of the actual work done. “We can do the scene over and over again, immediately, nobody has to stand around waiting. And the actors love it.”

The atmosphere he creates has more in common with an experimental theater troupe than a typical multimillion-dollar movie set. Lanthimos works to bring an actor’s instincts to the surface — and he shrugs off questions about a character’s psychological motivation, back story and context as effortlessly as he does questions about himself. “If you want to [expletive] annoy him, ask him character back-story questions,” Colin Farrell told me, laughing, of his first experience working with Lanthimos on the set of “The Lobster,” where Lanthimos refused to tell him what happened in the scene before the one they were filming. “He doesn’t really feel the need, you know. For him a story is born and dies between the first and last page.” Lanthimos is “trying to give space to mystery,” Ariane Labed, his wife, told me. “Yorgos does not explain things, even to the actors really, and they’re not used to that. But then they go through this experience, and they discover that having gaps in their characters’ journeys, they actually have more room for their own imaginations, [their] own mistakes, [their] own doubts, and I think that’s why actors are amazing in Yorgos’s films. They’re on the line.”

For “The Favourite,” Lanthimos gathered the central cast together for three weeks of rehearsal, where they delivered their lines while trying to tie themselves in knots, jumping from carpet tile to carpet tile, or writhing around on the floor. “He had us do all sorts of things that keep you from thinking about what your lines mean,” Olivia Colman, who plays Queen Anne, told me. “It was completely unique.” These gamelike exercises were also ways of forcing an actor’s reflexes to the surface, submerging that part of the mind that analyzes and questions, or turns away from the moment and toward a script or director for answers. “The best way to describe it is, it becomes completely unconscious ... completely instinctual,” explains Rachel Weisz, who first worked with Lanthimos in “The Lobster” and appears in “The Favourite” as Sarah Churchill, the queen’s confidante and lover. “If you asked me afterward what had just happened, I wouldn’t be able to tell you. And in fact, the experience of watching the two films, the ones I’ve been in, are unlike other films in that I’m completely surprised by what I did. Usually when you film you have a sense of what you’ve done, but with Yorgos you have no sense. If that makes sense.”

Like the stories themselves, which thrust characters, existentially underprepared, into disorienting situations, Lanthimos’s direction forces actors to inhabit their roles with convincing immediacy, giving them an authentic vulnerability. It reflects the broader connection between his films and theater, a temporary structure assembled by bodies that are clumsily, complicatedly occupying space. In a scene from last year’s “The Killing of a Sacred Deer,” Lanthimos’s take on a horror film, the wife (played by Nicole Kidman) feigns unconsciousness in their bedroom at her surgeon husband’s request; she rolls over, limp and lifeless, her head hanging off the edge of the bed as he caresses her. As he pulls her body ungracefully toward him, her hair dragging across the comforter, her foot catches on a pillow and it falls over, a piece of reality quietly disheveling the fantasy. Auteurs like Luca Guadagnino or Paolo Sorrentino, with their swooping, reeling shots and kinetic dance sequences, may get more credit for capturing bodily experience on film, but Lanthimos arguably shows greater fidelity to our actual bodies, stubborn and awkwardly choreographed by fate, etiquette and overarching structures of power — not glamorous bodies but bodies of ungainly yearning.

Lanthimos’s latest project seems likely to win over even his most skeptical viewers: Brimming with an exhilarating sense of struggle, “The Favourite” ’s brash reimagining of Queen Anne’s court has a raw, magnetic likability to it. As Rachel Weisz and Emma Stone expressively vied for Olivia Colman’s affections, they evoked throaty, full-body laughs from the audience at the screening I attended, rather than the tight, pressurized laughter I heard while watching his earlier films. The Lanthimos aesthetic transposes seamlessly to a historical setting: the sense of remoteness, the intricate system of rules and manners, the powerful force that oppresses everyone, including the individual chosen to wield it. But if in previous films that looming force was inhuman (social, familial or supernatural), in “The Favourite” that power has its origins in human tendencies — loneliness, lustfulness and our susceptibility to manipulation. Power, of the state and of the individual, circulates in a wild and destabilizing way among the three women as they plot and beguile and wield themselves like weapons. Words are used as shoves or slaps; sex becomes a literal power grab, upsetting a fragile and transient order.

“The Favourite” is a first for Lanthimos — as a foray into period drama, as the director of a script that he did not originate himself — and it marks a true shift in his emotional palette. Rather than keep the viewer at arm’s length, this new film works to draw you into the palace intrigue. You root for Abigail, the newcomer and underdog, as she tries to secure her livelihood, and then you root for Sarah just as strongly as she struggles to maintain her position by banishing her competition from the court. But as the hierarchy churns, the effort to get on top and stay there starts feeling less like rowdy fun and more like a form of imprisonment, implicating the viewer as well in its casual cruelty: Why do we as observers choose favorites, when this partiality so clearly limits our ability to see the whole? The ending, when it arrives, is inevitable yet unexpected. It is quietly, inscrutably heartbreaking — one of the only moments in a Lanthimos film that is not funny, not at all. “They’re not so helpless in this film as in my others,” Lanthimos told me breezily as we left the restaurant. “But they’re still trapped.”

He was heading back home after our lunch, to work out issues with the version of “The Favourite” that will be shown on airplanes — they wanted to censor every other thing, even blurring the naked bodies of the cherubs in the palace art. But whether he felt that he owed me more time in lieu of self-explanation, or because he was in the mood to talk, he went out of his way to walk with me to my next appointment. He led us away from the high streets and down narrower residential rows where the hedges are a thick, towering green, trimmed into forcefully geometric shapes. He pointed out the bramble taking back the edge of an ad hoc park and the local town hall where he and Ariane were married. In these quiet slivers of street, London no longer feels modern: It’s a pileup of the old and the new and the very old, the ground beneath our feet named by Saxon villagers. I could tell that I was being led though a terrain that was deeply personal, emotional, meaningful, but without an explanation of what I was seeing, I had to reconstruct the links myself. It’s a kind of closeness at a distance, the same feeling I experience when I watch one of his films. When I mentioned that he seemed at home here, in his element among the mixture of old and new, the council flats facing meticulously preserved historical buildings, he seemed pleased, as if I’d noticed something so important to him that he didn’t mind allowing a stranger a glimpse. He thought for a moment, and then he replied with a slight smile: “At home, yes. But not so at home that it’s become boring.”