History Film / TheFavourite

* ArtisticLicenseHistory:

* BuryYourGays: Subverted; despite Queen Anne's failing health and the violent rivalry between Sarah and Abigail, all three of the main gay characters survive to the end of the movie. [[spoiler:Although that doesn't necessarily mean they're ''happy''.]]

* LightFeminineAndDarkFeminine: Abigail, with her lighter hair and her airs of innocence, is the Light to the icy brunette Sarah's Dark. Especially noticeable that Abigail uses darker makeup and dresses after her HeelFaceTurn.

'''Abigail''': Rape it is, then. (''[[LieBackAndThinkOfEngland immediately lays on her back and goes as stiff as a board]]'')

* BewareTheNiceOnes: One of possible interpretation of Abigail is her turning the tables on everyone who bullied or mistreated her.

* LightFeminineAndDarkFeminine: Abigail, with her lighter hair and her airs of innocence, is the Light to the icy brunette Sarah's Dark.

* NaiveNewcomer: Abigail, upon first arriving at the palace. Of course, she's a very quick learner.

* ThrowTheBookAtThem: Sarah throws several books at Abigail during one of their confrontations.

* DoesThisRemindYouofAnything : [[spoiler:After being caught almost crushing one of her beloved rabbits, Queen Anne orders Abigail to massage her legs while standing up and Abigail is crouching in front of her, with her face just a few inches of Anna's crotch. Add the fact that Anna puts her hand over Abigail's head during the entire act and you have a quite disturbing scene]].
** However, Queen Anna didn't seem to have any sexual plesure out of it. She just wanted to [[spoiler:humiliate Abigail and remind her that, after all, nothing has really changed for her]].

* ATasteOfTheLash: Abigail is ordered to have six strokes of the lash for barging into the Queen's bedchamber, but Sarah changes her mind and interrupts when Abigail is midway through, leaving her with three.

* AmbiguouslyBi: Sarah is HappilyMarried to her husband and her relationship with Anne is clearly at least partially to control her and push her political agenda, but at the same time she does seem to have genuine affection for the monarch. Abigail meanwhile [[spoiler:seems to be ''just'' using Anne in her relationship with the Queen]] and has some interest in Masham, but [[spoiler:can only be bothered to give him a handjob after their marriage, more or less ignoring him subsequently and is at least implied to be using him to increase her station much as she is using Anne.]] Anne herself has been pregnant 17 times and her husband is presumably dead [[note]]He was Prince George of Denmark and he was still alive at the time part of this film was set, though he died of an illness before her[[/note]], and the film doesn't address her relationship with him. Of course, it was expected that monarchs marry and continue the royal line, so the fact that she took a husband doesn't preclude her from being a lesbian- it could have simply been her duty.
* AmbitionIsEvil: Played with. It's justified that Abigail has already suffered from her previous loss of privileges, and her determination to work her way back up by any means necessary is admirable; however, what starts out as her using goodhearted wiles to get ahead quickly turns into underhanded manipulation to grow her power.
* AnimalMotifs: There's rabbits everywhere in the movie, because Queen Anne is exceptionally fond of them and keeps several as pets. Rabbits are generally seen as unclean animals in Western religions, and at the time of the film, rabbits were seen either as food or pests, which makes Queen Anne very eccentric. Rabbits also represent fertility - which is rather ironic, because in real life, Queen Anne lost all of her children either to miscarriages or premature births (her son and heir to the throne of Stuart, Prince William, was her longest-living child and died from a devastating combination of strep throat and pneumonia). This resulted in Queen Anne becoming a BrokenBird who coddles her rabbits as if they're her biological children, because they're the only family she has left.

** The idea of a sexual relationship between Abigail and Queen Anne is generally accepted as slanderous rumours started by a bitter Sarah Churchill, and the idea that Sarah herself was in such a relationship with Queen Anne is something that comes from reading some of their letters to one another out of their historical context as well as something that Sarah herself took care to deny, and would have been difficult to have for various logistical reasons such as Anne rarely leaving the bedside of her sick and dying husband and she and Sarah fell out shortly after he died. Accusing monarchs of having same-sex relations with their closest confidantes was fairly common slander in courts of the day, so there is no special reason to think that this was any different.
** Related to the above, Prince George of Denmark, the husband of Queen Anne, is entirely absent from the movie, despite still being alive at the time the film is set and Anne spending years caring for him in his own ill health. One of the reasons Sarah and Annes' falling out in RealLife was Sarah not bothering to mourn for his death and generally acting like she didn't care that he was dead at all, so him not being in the movie at all changes the real life story quite a bit.
** As admitted by the film's historical adviser herself, rabbits at the time were either pest or food, never pets.
* BadPeopleAbuseAnimals: The extent of Abigail's transformation into a selfish and cruel person shows when she [[spoiler:abuses one of Queen Anne's precious bunnies while she thinks Anne isn't looking, pressing it under her foot almost to the point of crushing it. As it happens Anne does notice, and starts to treat Abigail a lot more coldly.]]

* BitchInSheepsClothing: ''Abigail''. While Sarah's certainly not a good person, Abigail is considerably more duplicitous. She leads Queen Anne to think of her as a kind and selfless companion, while actually exploiting her influence over the queen for personal gain and engaging in underhanded sabotage of her rival. It's something of a DownplayedTrope though if you think Abigail is sincere when she says she just learnt it from Sarah and was genuinely trying to be helpful and honest before Sarah vaguely threatens to ''kill'' her for knowing too much about her and the Queens' liaisons.

* DownerEnding: [[spoiler: Abigail burns Sarah's letter of apology to the queen, so they never reconcile and Anne is clearly heartbroken. Convinced by Abigail that Sarah stole from her (whether she actually did is ambiguous), Anne banishes Sarah from the kingdom. Abigail seems bored and frustrated with caring for an increasing cantankerous and senile queen. When she is caught crushing one of Queen Anne's beloved rabbits, Anne finally starts to realise how fake Abigail's affection for her is. The film ends with rabbits flooding the screen, a symbol of the endless madness and monotony of life at court, or perhaps Anne's declining mental state. Despite being a film premised around competing factions, it's clear by the end that no one has truly won.]]
* DressCodedForYourConvenience: Used to tell apart the two political parties. Members of the Tory party wear brown or black wigs with no make up, and are dressed in red coats. Whig party members wear powdered wigs and make up, and wear cream coats over colourful waistcoats and breeches.
* FaceHeelTurn: [[spoiler: Abigail gets progressively less sympathetic as the film goes on, resorting to becoming a poisoner in the film's final act. Her transformation could be this trope, or it's possible that she was always this nasty deep down, and was hiding it to get into royal favour.]]
* FallenPrincess: Abigail's backstory. Was born into the nobility, but forced to prostitute herself after her father gambled away the family fortune.

* GracefulLoser: Upon realising she and her husband are about to be banished, Sarah nonchalantly tells husband she has tired of England and continues sipping her tea.

** The charges of embezzlement against the Churchills' are generally agreed to have been trumped up accusations by the Whig party. In the film they are either trumped up by Abigail herself, or Sarah really ''did'' embezzle the money for her husband, which is this trope either way.

* HonestAdvisor: Sarah insists that she is this to Anne, and not without reason - she can always be relied upon to say precisely what she thinks, even to the Queen.
* HumiliationConga: Sarah [[spoiler:is poisoned and falls off her horse, which drags her into a forest where she wakes up in a bordello, with the owner initially intending for Sarah to pay them back for her medical treatment by whoring herself out and sells her horse. Correctly assuming that Abigail is behind this, she storms back to the palace and tries to blackmail the Queen into dismissing Abigail. This severs the relationship between the Queen and Sarah, who is stripped of her offices, sent away from the palace, and eventually exiled from England altogether.]]
* HuntingAccident: During a pigeon-shooting game, when Abigail indicates to Sarah that she knows about [[spoiler:Sarah's and Queen Anne's secret sexual relationship]], Sarah shoots a pistol charged only with powder at Abigail to scare her. It's a common prank to shoot someone with a blank pistol, says Sarah, but one day she might just "forget" there's a ball loaded and shoot Abigail so that it looks like an accident.

* IdiotBall: Sarah - you'd think she'd suspect Abigail of tampering with the Queen's letters and give it to Godolphin, who could hand it to the Queen in person or at least make sure it bypassed Abigail and actually did reach the Queen.

* LostHimInACardGame: Abigail's gambling-addicted father lost her this way.

* MundaneMadeAwesome: ''Duck racing''. It's a mock-thrilling spectacle with dynamic camera views following the waddling ducks and slow-motion shots of the spectators' excited reactions, making a gleeful parody of the classic high-stakes horserace scene.

* SingleTear: Abigail sheds one [[spoiler:as she burns the letter Sarah sent to the Queen to make amends.]]

* SweetTooth: Queen Anne loves cake, hot chocolate and other sweets, indulgences which have taken a physical toll on her.

** Queen Anne's collection of rabbits is this, through an in-universe example of ValuesDissonance. Though rabbits are quite ordinary for pets these days, back in the early 18th century they were seen as either a nuisance or a food source, making the Queen's pet collection even more eccentric than it already was. In RealLife she had no pet rabbits at all.

*** She's also very matter-of-fact about the other rapes she's experienced.

* AmbiguouslyBi: Sarah is HappilyMarried to her husband and her relationship with Anne is clearly at least partially to control her and push her political agenda, but at the same time she does seem to have genuine affection for the monarch. Abigail meanwhile [[spoiler: seems to be ''just'' using Anne in her relationship with the Queen]] and has some interest in Masham, but [[spoiler: can only be bothered to give him a handjob after their marriage, more or less ignoring him subsequently and is at least implied to be using him to increase her station much as she is using Anne.]] Anne herself has been pregnant 17 times and her husband is presumably dead [[note]]He was Prince George of Denmark and he was still alive at the time part of this film was set, though he died of an illness before her[[/note]], and the film doesn't address her relationship with him. Of course, it was expected that monarchs marry and continue the royal line, so the fact that she took a husband doesn't preclude her from being a lesbian- it could have simply been her duty.

** When Sarah orders Abigail be whipped for barging into Queen Anne's quarters, one of the stewards drag her down to the kitchens and bends her over a table, whereupon the head servant chides him and tells him to do that outside, not where they prepare food.

* BungledSuicide: Anne attempts to jump out a window but is stopped by Sarah, who seems disturbingly nonchalant about it. It's implied she's had to do this many times before.

* SophisticatedAsHell: The typically mannered, polished period-piece dialogue is paired alongside more contemporary profanities, such as "vajoojoo".

* BungledSuicide: Anne attempts to jump out a window but is stopped by Sarah, who seems disturbingly nonchalant about it.

* CountryMatters: With more frequency than you'd expect from a period piece set in a royal palace.

* DeadpanSnarker: Everyone, except maybe Queen Anne. Special mention goes to Lord Harley and Abigail.

* HumiliationConga: Sarah [[spoiler:is poisoned and falls off her horse, which drags her into a forest where she wakes up in a bordello. Correctly assuming that Abigail is behind this, she storms back to the palace and tries to blackmail the Queen into dismissing Abigail. This severs the relationship between the Queen and Sarah, who is stripped of her offices, sent away from the palace, and eventually exiled from England altogether.]]

* HistoricalVillainUpgrade: While it's impossible to know how much of the movie is accurate, being as so much took place behind closed doors, it's generally agreed upon that Abigail wasn't nearly as devious and scheming as Sarah (Lady Marlborough) would have you believe. She certainly never went so far as to ''poison'' Sarah, something even the historical Sarah Churchill never accused her of doing.

* InelegantBlubbering: Queen Anne cries often, and is rarely dignified when she does so.

* ToiletHumor: The mud that Abigail was pushed into upon arriving at the palace wasn't mud at all. Later, Sarah warns Abigail against giving Anne, who has a sensitive stomach, hot chocolate.

* UnusualPetsForUnusualPeople: Godolphin, the eccentric nobleman involved in various political intrigues, has a pet duck named Horatio that he takes with him everywhere he goes. Even to a bordello!

* ArtisticLicenseHistory: In real life, the relationship between Queen Anne and Sarah was already fraying before Abigail entered the picture (Sarah allegedly admitted to not even enjoying being around Anne and manipulated her for her own gain); though Sarah described Abigail as conniving and devious in her accounts of the events, it's seen as more likely that Queen Anne saw Abigail's sweet, even-tempered disposition as a welcome alternative to Sarah's forceful personality. Furthermore, Abigail never poisoned Sarah, and the rivalry between them had less to do with personal feelings about Anne (Anne and Sarah's relationship only ever being a RomanticTwoGirlFriendship) than about being on opposite sides of the political aisle.

* BitchInSheepsClothing: ''Abigail''. While Sarah's certainly not a good person, Abigail is considerably more duplicitous. She leads Queen Anne to think of her as a kind and selfless companion, while actually exploiting her influence over the queen for personal gain and engaging in underhanded sabotage of her rival. It's something of a {{Downplayed}} trope though if you think Abigail is sincere when she says she just learnt it from Sarah and was genuinely trying to be helpful and honest before Sarah vaguely threatens to ''kill'' her for knowing too much about her and the Queens' liaisons.

--> '''Abigail''': Have you come to seduce me, or rape me?
--> '''Masham''': I am a ''gentleman''.
--> '''Abigail''': Rape it is, then. (''[[LieBackAndThinkOfEngland immediately lays on her back and goes as stiff as a board]]'')

''The Favourite'' is a [[BasedOnATrueStory historically-inspired]] 2018 period drama film directed by Creator/YorgosLanthimos. Set in the royal court of Great Britain at the beginning of the 18th century, the film is about how Lady Sarah Churchill and her cousin, Abigail Masham, become bitter rivals with each other for the powerful position of Queen Anne's personal favourite.

* PunctuatedForEmphasis: ''FIIIIIIIIIND! HEEEEEEEEEER!''