It’s no surprise that Yorgos Lanthimos, when asked to create an advert for a handbag, would turn in a surrealist short film featuring witchcraft, shoplifting and a modern twist on Frankenstein. 

Prada’s new campaign for its signature handbag, Galleria, is directed by Lanthimos and stars Scarlett Johansson, who is appearing as the face of Galleria for a third time. Titled Ritual Identities, the film features the off-kilter humour, playful imagery and gothic flourishes which define Lanthimos’s style. In it, Johannson portrays three different characters. The first is a guru (or witch?) advising on the completion of a mysterious ritual, with ingredients including “morning breeze – not after 12 noon, not before five AM; rainwater that drips from a non-blooming cherry tree; the ashes of a song score – can be any song that talks about love or pain; a piece of porcelain from a rare, antique Chinese Vase” and “three drops of blood drawn at nighttime.”

Interspersed with these monologues, we see Johannson travelling around New York and capturing these items in a Galleria handbag: shaking a tree, holding her bag up to the wind and “accidentally” smashing a vase in an antique store before pocketing a fragment. Finally, after the contents of the bag are deposited into a mysterious black sphere, a third Johansson is born, like a more elegant, well-dressed Frankenstein’s monster who knew how to serve.

As Johannson told WWD, “the idea for this Prada campaign is a play on identity, the identities that live within all of us, the different masks we wear, the different characters we play, the different people we are with other people, in different relationships. The work becomes personally meaningful because you start to really feel it as you’re saying it, it starts to live more inside you – and then, you can really explore. This film is less about assuming a character, more about expressing different versions of myself.”

This is the first time Lanthimos has collaborated with Prada (and the first time he’s worked with Johansson), but the brand is no stranger to working with the greatest filmmakers of 21st-century cinema. Last year’s Galleria campaign – also starring Johnson – was helmed by Jonathan Glazer, the Oscar-winning director of The Zone of Interest, while the first campaign focused on the bag, launched in 2021 and starring Hunter Schafer, was directed by indie darling Xavier Dolan. 

Lanthimos has received multiple Academy Award nominations for his films, including The Favourite and Poor Things (for which Olivia Colman and Emma Stone won Best Actress, respectively.) At the Venice Film Festival, he recently premiered his latest film, Bugonia, a sci-fi black comedy about two young men who kidnap a powerful CEO (played by Stone) because they think she is an alien.

Prada’s SS26 women’s show will take place during Milan Fashion Week on September 25