It’s been twenty years since Deborah Davis’s screenplay for the film that would become The Favourite first made the rounds. Of course, that was well before director Yorgos Lanthimos got his sharpened, toxin-tipped talons into it. The particulars of the script’s evolution are beyond the parameters of my personal research, but I’ve little doubt the original iteration was a close cousin to any number of upstanding period pieces of staid yet intricate palace intrigue. What’s most fascinating about The Favourite is the way it fully maintains that lineage and yet carries the inky shadows of Lanthimos’s trademark corrosive wit.

Early in the eighteenth century, Queen Anne (Olivia Colman) is presiding over the British Empire with a mildly addled indifference, the gaps in her leadership largely papered over by the stealth maneuvering of Sarah Churchill, the Duchess of Malborough (Rachel Weisz). Sarah attends to the Queen’s needs, providing counsel and yet more intimate support. Their delicate equilibrium is complicated by the arrival of Abigail Hill (Emma Stone), cousin to Sarah. Abigail is seeking employment as a means of escaping dire personal circumstances. Initially relegated to the harshest of household tasks, Abigail sees the Queen’s neediness as opportunity for elevation, and thus the pieces begin their strategic jaunts around the chessboard.

Lanthimos stages the film with a certain ribaldry of the spirit. He has a persistent interest in the way desperation wells up in the human soul and how its swampy influence leads to choices of rickety morality. He arguably couldn’t find a better setting to apply his thesis, and he films with ostentatious technique, often using fisheye lenses to warp images in accordance with psyches that are curling at the edges.

The director also employs marvelous partners in grimly funny playfulness across his entire cast. Colman is a cyclone of wounded personality as the Queen, pitching her performance to rafters and shaking loose plaster. Stone and Weisz are more controlled and therefore more cunning in their work, taking the most evident pleasure when the script (co-credited to Tony McNamara, enlisted by Lanthimos to tinker with its sensibilities) allows for the trading of remarks that cut past the quick to sever digits altogether. And though praise has largely been centered on the trio of actresses getting the sadly uncommon opportunity to tear into material fully worthy of their talents, there’s also a grand performance by Nicholas Hoult, playing a Parliament member who presses his political causes with sparking disdain.

It would have been so easy for The Favourite to get buffed and polished to a more refined finish, which only makes me more grateful for the joy of its thrilling, thrashing complications. It’s difficult nature is precisely what makes it utterly riveting. The road was laid a while ago, but it took until today — and until a filmmaker like Lanthimos — for it get all of its glorious ruts.