{"id":92496,"date":"2025-10-21T17:15:07","date_gmt":"2025-10-21T17:15:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/92496\/"},"modified":"2025-10-21T17:15:07","modified_gmt":"2025-10-21T17:15:07","slug":"bugonia-review-by-edward-douglas","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/92496\/","title":{"rendered":"BUGONIA REVIEW – by Edward Douglas"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Photo courtesy Focus Features<\/p>\n

As a film critic, I\u2019ve had such a mixed relationship with Greek filmmaker Yorgos Lanthimos since he first came onto the scene. Dogtooth probably was the first movie of his I ever saw, and I never really got its appeal as others have, and the same goes for his later English-language movies, such as The Lobster and Killing of a Sacred Deer. In recent years, he\u2019s made an interesting transition from quirky international auteur to bonafide Oscar regular with his 2018 film The Favourite (ironically still my favorite movie he\u2019s made). It\u2019s also led to his long collaboration with Emma Stone, who won her second Oscar for Lanthimos\u2019 Poor Things just three short years ago. Lanthimos seems to have found a happy place between the divergent paths his career has taken, while making films like last year\u2019s triptych, Kinds of Kindness, which really was not my thing.<\/p>\n

Lanthimos\u2019 latest, Bugonia, reteams him with Stone for a fourth time, as well as reuniting with Jesse Plemons, part of last year\u2019s triptych, and it\u2019s also the filmmaker\u2019s third movie in three years. Based only somewhat faithfully on Jang Joon-hwan\u2019s Korean sci-fi comedy Save the Green Planet! from 2003 (which I actually reviewed twenty years ago for <\/a>ComingSoon.net<\/a>), it\u2019s been adapted by Will Tracy (The Menu, \u201cSuccession\u201d), with a premise that falls into similar \u201ceat the rich\u201d territory as his other work.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Photo courtesy Focus Features<\/p>\n

We meet Jesse Plemons\u2019 Teddy as he\u2019s tending bees with his young and impressionable cousin Donny (Aidan Delbis). Teddy is a conspiracy theorist who has created all sorts of rules and guidelines for his cousin, which range from odd and mundane to absolutely ludicrous. They range from biking everywhere, not using \u201cscreens,\u201d to even more drastic demands. Indeed, Teddy has very set ideas about the world and how to improve it, just like everyone else on this planet. Simultaneously, we meet Emma Stone\u2019s Michelle Fuller, the rich, high-powered CEO of a mega-billion biochemical company, who we watch doing a more traditional workout, just as Teddy puts Donny through his paces. Soon, the three come together as Teddy and Donny kidnap Michelle and accuse of being an alien transplant from Andromeda. Michelle\u2019s head is shaved, and she is locked up in their basement, being constantly grilled and even tortured to admit her true extraterrestrial origins. Teddy demands to be taken to her \u201cmothership,\u201d in order to talk directly to the Andromedan Emperor about their plans for Earth.<\/p>\n

All things considered, it\u2019s a relatively simple story, and Bugonia is mostly about the interaction between these three disparate characters that mostly works due to Lanthimos\u2019 fantastic cast. That includes Delbis, who I had no previous knowledge of, but who plays Donny in a way that makes you wonder if he\u2019s neurodivergent or just a shy and impressionable young man. Stone continues to clearly be at the top of her game as an actor willing to go to great lengths for the characters she inhabits. I also greatly preferred Jesse Plemons\u2019 conspiracy theorist in this movie over Leonardo DiCaprio\u2019s character in Paul Thomas Anderson\u2019s One Battle After Another. The two movies do have some of the same DNA, in terms of their political commentary, even if the central stories are so different. At times, Lanthimos\u2019 film bears comparison to films, such as Misery, 8 Cloverfield Lane, and even the Coen Brothers\u2019 Fargo, three very different movies involving kidnappings.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Photo courtesy Focus Features<\/p>\n

Otherwise, there are a scant number of subsidiary characters. One actor I did enjoy seeing in a small role is Stavros Halkias (from Let\u2019s Start a Cult<\/a>) as officer Casey from the county sheriff\u2019s office, who has a past with Teddy. There\u2019s also the nearly unrecognizable Alicia Silverstone as Teddy\u2019s comatose mother, two pieces of the puzzle that is Teddy\u2019s past to help explain why he\u2019s so driven to uncover this \u201cAndromedan plot.\u201d At first, things unfold and reveal themselves quite slowly, but the film then builds towards the film\u2019s final act, which goes to even more unexpected and insane places.<\/p>\n

Lanthimos works with much of the same crafts team he\u2019s used on his past few films. This includes DP Robbie Ryan, who does so much with lighting in the limited settings that adds so much to the performance-driven scenes, particularly Stone sans her trademark long hair. Jerskin Fendrix\u2019s score is up there with one of the best of the year, just a really fantastic piece of film music that mixes the quirkiness from Poor Things with something more bombastic more apt for a much bigger movie. (The movie even uses the Green Day classic \u201cBasket Case\u201d in a similarly hilarious way as how Huey Lewis and the News was used in American Psycho.) Editor Yorgos Mavropsaridis is once again put through his paces, but in this case, he uses those skills to keep Bugonia moving briskly despite being so much about its dialogue.<\/p>\n

As dark and hard-to-watch as things sometimes get, Bugonia is still very much a comedy, with Lantimos blending complex political humor into a fairly simple kidnapping plot. And yet, it has such a clear message that it also makes Bugonia one of the filmmaker\u2019s most focused and concise films to date. Sure, it might not be for everyone, but it\u2019s still a masterpiece that most weirdos (like myself) should truly adore.<\/p>\n

Rating: 8\/10<\/p>\n

Bugonia opens in select cities on Friday, October 24, then goes nationwide on October 31.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Photo courtesy Focus Features As a film critic, I\u2019ve had such a mixed relationship with Greek filmmaker Yorgos…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":92497,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[29],"tags":[156,111,139,69,437],"class_list":{"0":"post-92496","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-tv","8":"tag-entertainment","9":"tag-new-zealand","10":"tag-newzealand","11":"tag-nz","12":"tag-tv"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/92496","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=92496"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/92496\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/92497"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=92496"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=92496"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=92496"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}