This study presents a comprehensive comparative analysis of sacrifice, violence, and myth in the cinema of Yorgos Lanthimos, interpreted through the theoretical lens of Georges Bataille. It explores how Lanthimos redefines sacrifice as a ritualistic, transgressive, and subversive act that confronts dominant systems of morality, power, and gender. Unlike traditional depictions where sacrifice reinforces social or religious unity, Lanthimos transforms it into a complex phenomenon that exposes the tensions between desire and prohibition, law and transgression, and freedom and control. The central research question examines how Lanthimos, through his mythological narratives, visual austerity, and ritualized cinematic form, reconfigures violence and sacrifice as reflections of contemporary ethical and existential dilemmas. Employing a descriptive–analytical and comparative methodology, the study focuses on three major films—Dogtooth (2009), The Lobster (2015), and The Killing of a Sacred Deer (2017)—situating them within philosophical, psychoanalytic, and mythological frameworks. Drawing on Bataille’s key concepts of desire, death, the sacred, and transgression, the analysis highlights how sacrifice functions as a liminal event, a threshold where human society confronts its own violence and moral contradictions. For Bataille, sacrifice destabilizes the boundary between the sacred and the profane, enabling an experience of excess and liberation that reveals the fragility of social order. Within this paradigm, Lanthimos’s cinema is not merely a representation of violence but a philosophical meditation on the limits of order, the dynamics of control, and the ambiguity of ethics in modern life. In Dogtooth, Lanthimos constructs a domestic microcosm governed by authoritarian parental control. The family unit becomes both the perpetrator and the victim of ritualized regulation, as the parents impose fabricated rules that sacrifice their children’s freedom and desire in exchange for the illusion of purity and order. This ritualized confinement mirrors Bataille’s notion that societies maintain their moral and social structures through controlled violence. The film’s austere visual language—flat lighting, symmetrical compositions, and minimalist design—heightens its ritualistic tone, while the monotone dialogue transforms speech into a tool of domination. Through this microcosm, Lanthimos exposes how obedience, prohibition, and desire coexist in a cycle of repression, illustrating Bataille’s view that transgression is inseparable from social control. The Lobster expands this logic from the domestic to the social sphere, portraying a dystopian world where individuality is sacrificed to preserve collective order. In a society that demands everyone be part of a couple or face transformation into an animal, Lanthimos critiques how institutions impose moral coherence through regulated violence and coerced conformity. This totalitarian structure sacrifices intimacy and authenticity to sustain an illusion of stability. Through deadpan performances, ritualized social codes, and meticulous framing, Lanthimos reveals the absurdity of modern sacrificial systems that transform personal relationships into mechanisms of control. Interpreted through Bataille, the film demonstrates how social order depends on exclusion, coercion, and the suppression of desire, echoing the paradox that every act of purification conceals an act of violence. The Lobster thus stages sacrifice as an ethical and existential negotiation between freedom and obligation, individual will and collective demand. In The Killing of a Sacred Deer, Lanthimos elevates sacrifice to a metaphysical level, merging ethical decision-making with ritualized destruction. Here, the protagonist faces a moral crisis that can only be resolved through an act of ritual killing, echoing the ancient logic of atonement through death. This film explicitly recalls Bataille’s notion that the sacred is both forbidden and irresistible, and that sacrifice reveals humanity’s confrontation with its own moral and cosmic boundaries. Lanthimos’s cold, clinical cinematography and symphonic precision of movement and dialogue transform violence into a metaphysical ritual, evoking the inevitability of guilt, retribution, and redemption. The act of killing, stripped of emotional justification, becomes a philosophical gesture, a moment in which ethical calculation meets the incomprehensible excess of the sacred. In this way, The Killing of a Sacred Deer embodies Bataille’s conviction that sacrifice is both destruction and revelation, allowing the subject to confront the sacred through transgression and loss. Across these three films, Lanthimos constructs a continuum of sacrificial logic operating on familial, social, and metaphysical levels. Each work explores how systems of control—whether domestic authority, institutional governance, or divine justice—sustain themselves through acts of violence disguised as moral necessity. Lanthimos’s cinema transforms violence into a structured, ritualized experience, inviting viewers to witness the sacred dimension within the profane and to question the moral foundations of modern life. His use of ritual repetition, symmetrical framing, and emotional detachment renders cinematic form itself an enactment of sacrificial logic, one where the viewer becomes implicated in the spectacle of control and transgression. Through Bataille’s framework, Lanthimos’s films are revealed as meditations on the paradox of civilization: that the maintenance of order requires periodic eruptions of disorder. Sacrifice, in this sense, becomes both a tool of power and an act of liberation, simultaneously enforcing boundaries and exposing their instability. The films thereby blur the distinction between victim and perpetrator, between ethical duty and primal desire. By aestheticizing violence through ritual form, Lanthimos uncovers the latent sacredness of human cruelty—not to justify it, but to reveal its existential and cultural inevitability. Ultimately, this study argues that Lanthimos’s cinema functions as a philosophical space of encounter between the sacred and the forbidden, where moral ambiguity and transgression coexist as essential conditions of human experience. Through Bataille’s theory, sacrifice emerges not as a relic of primitive ritual but as a persistent mechanism through which modern society negotiates its anxieties about order, purity, and freedom. Lanthimos transforms cinematic violence into an ethical inquiry, asking how contemporary subjects confront desire, guilt, and mortality in a world that seeks to regulate them. By merging mythological motifs, ritual form, and philosophical inquiry, Lanthimos reimagines the sacred within the everyday, demonstrating that even in secular modernity, the logic of sacrifice endures, shaping human relationships, moral decisions, and social systems. His films reveal that the sacred survives not in temples or altars, but in domestic spaces, bureaucratic institutions, and intimate relationships where control and transgression coexist. In this sense, Lanthimos’s cinema aligns closely with Bataille’s insight that only through confronting the forbidden can humanity glimpse the sacred, and that the experience of transgression, far from destroying meaning, constitutes its deepest expression. This research thus contributes to both film theory and philosophical aesthetics, offering a reading of Lanthimos’s work as an artistic exploration of the mechanisms of sacrifice in late modernity. It demonstrates that his cinema operates simultaneously as narrative, ritual, and critique, transforming acts of violence into opportunities for reflection on power, morality, and desire. The findings underscore the continuing relevance of Bataille’s theories for understanding how contemporary cinema mediates the relationship between the sacred and the profane, the human and the inhuman, and the ethical and the ecstatic. Through this synthesis, Lanthimos’s films emerge not as mere spectacles of cruelty or absurdity, but as modern rituals of philosophical inquiry, inviting viewers to witness the fragile balance between control and chaos that defines human existence.