<\/p>\n
The twisted filmography of Yorgos Lanthimos<\/a> has by now trained us to expect darkly comic visions of contemporary life, both savage and mundane. His movies have perhaps inspired the most \u201cWhat?!\u201d reactions of the last decade, partly because they\u2019ve tried so hard to do so.<\/p>\n His movies \u2014 farces, fables, experiments \u2014 reside in surreal worlds of their own. But his latest, \u201cBugonia,\u201d<\/a> is thrillingly, if tragically, tied to our reality. It might even be his best film. Though I\u2019ve been apprehensive about the flamboyant severity of Lanthimos\u2019 movies, I found \u201cBugonia,\u201d a chamber-piece gut punch, hard to shake. For starters, it\u2019s difficult to resist any movie with a line in it like: \u201cThere\u2019s Andromedan code all over your Instagram.\u201d<\/p>\n That\u2019s one of the things that Teddy (Jesse Plemons),<\/a> an incel eco-terrorist, says to Michelle (Emma Stone)<\/a> after kidnapping her with his neurodivergent cousin Donny (newcomer Aidan Delbis) and tying her up in their basement. Teddy and Donny live together in fairly remote, rundown old house. There, Teddy tends to both his bees and to unhinged conspiracy theories.<\/p>\n But as Plemons so deftly plays him, Teddy doesn\u2019t seem like a lunatic. He might reach wildly insane conclusions, such as that Michelle, a pharmaceutical company chief executive, is an alien. But he\u2019s thoughtful in nature and sweetly cares for his cousin. It\u2019s a feat of Plemons\u2019 innate good nature that we kind of like Teddy, even as he shaves Michelle\u2019s head, to prevent \u201cit,\u201d as he calls her, from contacting the mothership.<\/p>\n The opening moments of the script by Will Tracy (\u201cThe Menu,\u201d episodes of \u201cSuccession\u201d) cast these demented shenanigans in an apocalyptic light. The fate of bees is much on Teddy\u2019s mind; colony collapse disorder, often caused by pesticides, is one of his talking points. It\u2019s a phenomenon that, in \u201cBugonia\u201d \u2014 a movie reckoning with, or maybe just lamenting, humanity\u2019s fate \u2014 isn\u2019t just for the bees.<\/p>\n While Stone\u2019s abilities alone might legitimize extraterrestrial suspicions, there\u2019s more to why Teddy has pinpointed Michelle. She\u2019s a lauded corporate leader; her office includes a framed Time magazine with her on the cover and a photograph with Michelle Obama. Her company, Auxolith, operates out of a sleek office building where Michelle presides over her workforce like a queen bee. She has the corporate lingo of \u201ctransparency\u201d and \u201cdiversity\u201d down pat, but whether she actually adheres to any of those ideals is dubious, at best. Before Teddy and Donny jump her, she announces a \u201cnew era\u201d at Auxolith where employees leave at 5:30 p.m. But not if they haven\u2019t met their quota, she adds. And not if they\u2019re, you know, busy.<\/p>\n In that way, Michelle is a camera-ready cover for whatever Auxolith is up to, which, as the movie goes along, teases out a poisonous history, including opioid manufacturing that affected Teddy\u2019s mother (Alicia Silverstone).<\/p>\n The bulk of \u201cBugonia\u201d is the ideological dialogue between her and Teddy back in the basement. It\u2019s a conversation, laced with contemporary divides, that is comical for its impossibility. One is addled by paranoia and extremism, the other knows only heartless corporate speak. Understanding each other is futile. Watching Stone, as Michelle, attempt to reason with Teddy is part of the movie\u2019s dark fun, just as is seeing Plemons\u2019 Teddy resolutely stick to his certainty that Michelle is part of an alien infiltration of Earth that he wants gone by the next lunar eclipse.<\/p>\n The source of such a wild narrative can only come, of course, from South Korea. \u201cBugonia\u201d is loosely based on the 2003 Korean film \u201cSave the Green Planet!\u201d All of Lanthimos\u2019 most notable films before have been written with either Efthimis Filippou (\u201cDogtooth,\u201d \u201cThe Lobster\u201d) or Tony McNamara (\u201cPoor Things,\u201d \u201cThe Favourite\u201d). But, otherwise, \u201cBugonia\u201d has the feel of a quick follow-up to last year\u2019s \u201cKinds of Kindness,\u201d<\/a> a black-comedy triptych also led by Stone and Plemons.<\/p>\n Yet what could easily be mistaken for a tossed-off, in-between movie \u2014 there are only a handful of characters and a few scene locations \u2014 ends up feeling like a culmination-slash-nadir for Lanthimos. Having made a dozen films darkly satirizing the sad, primal folly of humankind, it\u2019s comeuppance time in \u201cBugonia.\u201d<\/p>\n The movie drags in the middle, when it\u2019s locked in a prisoner drama that grows a little tiresome and predictable. But the payoff is immense. Teddy calls his torture chamber \u201cthe headquarters of the human resistance.\u201d By the time \u201cBugonia\u201d reaches its unforgettable finale, it’s made chillingly clear just how feeble any such movement might be, and the movie’s apocalyptic air of resignation, of fait accompli, sounds a chastening death knell.<\/p>\n \u201cBugonia,\u201d a Focus Features release, is rated R by the Motion Picture Association for bloody violent content including a suicide, grisly images and language. Running time: 118 minutes. Three and a half stars out of four.<\/p>\n Jake Coyle, The Associated Press<\/p>\n<\/div>\n \u2018 The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n \u2018 Some details of this article were extracted from the following source ca.news.yahoo.com \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The twisted filmography of Yorgos Lanthimos has by now trained us to expect darkly comic visions of contemporary life, both savage and mundane. His movies have perhaps inspired the most \u201cWhat?!\u201d reactions of the last decade, partly because they\u2019ve tried so hard to do so. His movies \u2014 farces, fables, experiments \u2014 reside in surreal […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2114328,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[25173],"tags":[345735,310048,350537,27653,400656,345734],"class_list":["post-2114327","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-artists","tag-bugonia","tag-emma-stone","tag-jesse-plemons","tag-michelle-obama","tag-watching-stone","tag-yorgos-lanthimos"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/10\/Bugonia-is-a-darkly-comic-gut-punch.jpeg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2114327","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2114327"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2114327\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2114329,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2114327\/revisions\/2114329"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2114328"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2114327"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2114327"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2114327"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}