Movie review<\/h2>\n
Yorgos Lanthimos\u2019 particular brand of dark comedy can be an acquired taste, and his latest, the gritty conspiracy thriller \u201cBugonia,\u201d pushes that taste to the limit. There\u2019s no quirky visual beauty to disappear into, as in his period pieces \u201cThe Favourite<\/a>\u201d and \u201cPoor Things<\/a>\u201d; instead, there are three grim characters and an unrelentingly depressing worldview. It\u2019s absolutely watchable, and at times mesmerizing \u2014 Lanthimos is, as always, brilliant with actors \u2014 but I left wanting to shake it off. \u00a0<\/p>\n Taking place at a time similar to the present day, \u201cBugonia\u201d has at its center two cousins, Teddy (Jesse Plemons) and Don (Aidan Delbis), obsessed with conspiracy theories. Inept but determined, the two kidnap Michelle (Emma Stone), the wealthy CEO of a pharmaceutical company, and imprison her in their basement, believing her to be an alien. (\u201cBugonia\u201d is based loosely on the 2003 Korean sci-fi comedy \u201cSave the Green Planet!\u201d) Much of the film is conversations between the three, as Michelle at first insists that she\u2019s not an alien and then plays along, hoping to trick them into releasing her. Gradually we learn why Teddy and Don are alone in that big house, and what happened to make these two young men susceptible to such darkness.<\/p>\n Stone, in her fifth collaboration with Lanthimos (her most recent Oscar was for his \u201cPoor Things\u201d), works miracles with Michelle, who\u2019s really quite awful: There\u2019s a funny early scene at her office in which Michelle explains that it\u2019s perfectly OK for employees to leave at 5:30, really it is, as long as their work is done. (\u201cNew era!\u201d she barks, in corporate staccato.) She\u2019s eerily calm about the kidnapping; this is a woman who knows how to talk her way out of things. When Teddy accuses her of having alien code all over her Instagram (not a sentence you hear every day), Michelle says smoothly, \u201cCould we have a dialogue about this,\u201d like she\u2019s in a boardroom rather than chained up in a basement. Plemons finds something heartbreakingly broken in Teddy, who has buried a lifetime of pain somewhere very deep, and Delbis, a nonprofessional actor, is earnest and lovely as sweet, troubled Don, whose cousin is his only friend and his lifeline.<\/p>\n But despite the fine performances and inventive camera work, \u201cBugonia\u201d lost me, somewhere around where Michelle was being tied up and tortured. Perhaps I\u2019ve just reached my lifetime limit of women-in-captivity movies; perhaps Lanthimos\u2019 particular brand of dark comedy feels too close to the bone right now. The final moments of \u201cBugonia\u201d paint as grim a picture of humanity as you\u2019ll see anywhere; it\u2019s superbly crafted, to be sure, but it\u2019s ice-cold at its core.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/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 www.yakimaherald.com \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Movie review Yorgos Lanthimos\u2019 particular brand of dark comedy can be an acquired taste, and his latest, the gritty conspiracy thriller \u201cBugonia,\u201d pushes that taste to the limit. There\u2019s no quirky visual beauty to disappear into, as in his period pieces \u201cThe Favourite\u201d and \u201cPoor Things\u201d; instead, there are three grim characters and an unrelentingly […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2126103,"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":[25172],"tags":[21741],"class_list":["post-2126102","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-entertainment","tag-entertainment"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/10\/\u2018Bugonia-review-Yorgos-Lanthimos-dark-comedy-paints-a-grim-picture.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2126102","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=2126102"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2126102\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2126104,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2126102\/revisions\/2126104"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2126103"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2126102"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2126102"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2126102"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}