GREEK director Yorgos Lanthimos has made a career out of changing course, from Dogtooth to The Lobster and last year’s haunting The Killing Of A Sacred Deer, while still maintaining a very particular brand of skin-crawling oddness.

His latest film is his most accessible to date, though no less perversely fascinating: a historical story of how two women scheme and plot and outwit one another to win the affections of a third.

Set in the 1700s, it centres on Queen Anne (Olivia Colman) who is too frail to properly rule, spending much of her time in bed or cooped up in secluded rooms barking orders at her close friend and personal aide Lady Sarah (Rachel Weisz), who pretty much runs the country in her stead.

Routines change drastically upon the arrival of Abigail (Emma Stone, sporting an impressive British accent), a much younger woman who arrives on the scene to work as a servant only to use her considerable charm and wit to worm her way into the affections of the Queen, much to Lady Sarah’s annoyance.

It’s a commanding film in its atmosphere, quick wit and sly turns designed to wrong-foot expectations. Lanthimos’s trademark eccentric direction marries well with a scabrous, often laugh-out-loud funny script by Deborah Davis and Tony McNamara. Once you settle into the tone of the piece, it’s one of the finest recent examples of directorial mannerisms propping up the strengths of words and vice versa.

Wholly self-aware staginess sets up things for a trio of sensational performances from some of the finest acting talents working today.

Weisz and Stone are electrifying as they trade deadpan lines that make up their long game of vying for affections. Colman excels as the self-pitying, petulant, childish monarch with too much power she doesn’t care about or know what to do with – Lanthimos often lingers solely on her face, empathising how much her presence looms even when she’s not on screen.

The film is at once farcical and grounded, cutting but with bouts of surprising empathy. It is loaded with subtext about power dynamics and gender and sexual politics (the men all feel purposefully incidental or side-lined), and is poetically profane with a deranged undercurrent boiling behind the prim attire.

Despite its appearance, with exquisitely realised production design and costume work, a normal period drama this is not. It’s a joy to spend a couple of hours in its macabre, off-kilter world.