Yorgos Lanthimos directed the 2018 film from a screenplay by Deborah Davis and Tony McNamara, with Olivia Colman as Anne, Rachel Weisz as Sarah, and Emma Stone as Abigail. Colman won the Academy Award for Best Actress for the role. What follows explains the plot in order, then unpacks the final shot, the rabbits, and how far the film departs from the historical record.
Table of Contents
- What happens in the plot, in order
- The final scene explained
- What the ending means
- The rabbits, the gout, and the 17 children
- How much of it is history?
- What to watch for on a second viewing
- Frequently Asked Questions
What happens in the plot, in order
England is at war with France in the early 1700s. Queen Anne is in poor health — gout, swollen legs, grief — and governs mostly through Sarah Churchill, Duchess of Marlborough, her childhood friend and lover. Sarah backs the Whigs, her husband commands the army, and she pushes Anne to continue the war and to double the land tax that funds it. Abigail Hill arrives at court filthy and penniless. She is Sarah's cousin, ruined after her father gambled her away to a German, and she is put to work as a scullery maid. She notices Anne's agony, gathers herbs from the woods, and makes a poultice for the Queen's legs. Sarah is impressed rather than suspicious, and promotes Abigail to her own bedchamber. From there Abigail climbs deliberately.
She discovers Sarah and Anne are lovers, uses that knowledge, and begins offering Anne the one thing Sarah withholds — flattery and unconditional comfort. Robert Harley, the Tory leader who wants the war ended, spots her usefulness and recruits her as an informant. Abigail also engineers a marriage to Samuel Masham, a baron, which converts her from servant to Lady and makes her position legally hard to undo. The rivalry turns violent. Abigail doses Sarah's tea with the herbs she once used as medicine; Sarah collapses on horseback, is dragged, and wakes in a brothel, her face scarred. By the time she returns, Abigail has taken her place. Sarah threatens to publish Anne's intimate letters, then burns them instead to prove her love — but Anne has already heard the threat. Anne strips the Marlboroughs of their offices and banishes them, and makes Abigail Keeper of the Privy Purse.
The final scene explained
The last sequence is short and deliberately airless. Abigail, now secure, lies on the floor and presses her heel down on one of Anne's pet rabbits, slowly, while the animal squeals. Anne sees it. She says nothing about the rabbit and instead orders Abigail to rub her legs. Abigail obeys.
She kneels at the Queen's feet in exactly the posture of the servant she arrived as, and Anne grips her hair and holds her head in place. The Queen is frail and dying, but the gesture is unmistakably a reminder of who owns whom. Abigail's face empties out. The image then dissolves into superimposed layers — Abigail's face, Anne's face, and the rabbits multiplying across the frame until they fill it, accompanied by rising noise rather than music. The film does not cut to a resolution. It simply drowns the two women in the animals.
What the ending means
The ending argues that Abigail has won nothing she wanted. She sought security, and what she gets is permanent proximity to a volatile, dying woman who can withdraw everything on a mood. Sarah had real political power because she told Anne the truth and risked the relationship; Abigail, having built her position on flattery, cannot afford honesty and therefore cannot steer anything. The crushed rabbit is the clearest signal.
Abigail is cruel to the one thing Anne genuinely loves, and she does it where Anne can see — a small, pointless act of dominance by someone who has just realised she has no large ones available. Anne's response is to reassert the only hierarchy that still works: not love, but rank. The superimposition reads as the two of them being absorbed into Anne's grief. Abigail is not Anne's partner at the end; she has become another creature in the room, kept and handled. That is the film's answer to the question the title poses — being the favourite is a position, not a relationship, and positions are held at someone else's pleasure.
The rabbits, the gout, and the 17 children
The rabbits are the film's central device. Anne keeps seventeen of them in her bedchamber and tells Abigail that each one stands for a child she lost — through miscarriage, stillbirth, or death in infancy. This is the hinge for understanding Anne's behaviour throughout: the tantrums, the sudden tenderness, the need to be told she is loved. The historical Anne did endure a devastating series of pregnancies with no surviving children, which is why the detail lands rather than feels invented.
The rabbits themselves are the filmmakers' invention, a visual way to put seventeen absences in one room. Anne's physical condition does the same work. The gout, the wheelchair, the sores on her legs, the fainting — all of it keeps the audience aware that the throne is occupied by someone in constant pain. The leg-rubbing that bookends Abigail's rise is therefore both intimate and medical, which is precisely why it is such an effective final humiliation.
How much of it is history?
The skeleton is real. Anne reigned from 1702 to 1714, the War of the Spanish Succession was the dominant political question, and Sarah Churchill, Duchess of Marlborough, was Anne's closest companion and lost that place to her poor cousin Abigail Hill, who married Samuel Masham and allied with the Tory politician Robert Harley. Sarah's fall and the Marlboroughs' loss of favour are matters of record.
The specifics are dramatised. The poisoning, the brothel, the scarring, and the crushed rabbit are the film's inventions. Sarah did publish an account of her side of the story years later, and accusations about the nature of Anne's attachments circulated in her own time, but the explicit sexual relationship the film depicts is an interpretation rather than a documented fact. Three things worth keeping separate when you discuss the film:.
- Documented: the war, the land tax fight, the Harley–Marlborough rivalry, Abigail's rise, Sarah's dismissal.
- Contemporary rumour used as material: the intimacy between Anne and Sarah, and the letters as political leverage.
- Pure invention: the seventeen rabbits, the drugged tea, the duck races, and most of the dialogue's modern profanity.
What to watch for on a second viewing
Lanthimos shoots much of the palace on wide-angle and fisheye lenses, which bend the walls outward and make the rooms look like enclosures. The corridors are lit by candle and the exteriors are overcast; the visual language is a trap closing, not a period romance. Notice how often a character is filmed walking a long corridor alone — the film's recurring image for a person who has lost their footing. Track who touches whom, and who initiates it.
The film measures status almost entirely through physical contact: who rubs legs, who is carried, who is allowed in the bed, who grips whose hair. The final shot is the payoff of a pattern laid down from the first scene. Finally, watch Sarah rather than Abigail. Weisz plays her as the only character who ever tells Anne an unwelcome truth, and the film quietly treats that as both the source of her power and the cause of her ruin — Anne banishes her not for the poisoning she never committed, but for the threat to expose love she actually felt.
Frequently Asked Questions
Who actually wins at the end of *The Favourite*?
Nobody. Abigail holds the title and the purse, Sarah is banished but free, and Anne is dying with neither friend intact.
Why does Abigail step on the rabbit?
It is a show of power aimed at the only things Anne truly loves, made by a woman who has just realised she has no real power at all.
Did Queen Anne really have 17 rabbits?
No. She suffered roughly seventeen failed pregnancies and infant deaths; the rabbits are the film's way of putting that loss on screen.
Do I need to know British history to follow it?
No. The war and the land tax are explained as they come up, and the political plot exists mainly to give the three women something to fight with.