Bugonia
First screened in August 2025
Director: Yorgos Lanthimos. Cast: Jesse Plemons, Emma Stone, Aidan Delbis, Stavros Halkias, Alicia Silverstone. Screenplay: Will Tracy (based on the original screenplay for Save the Green Planet! by Jang Joon-hwan). In Brief:
Aggressively timely themes, coarsened by misanthropic worldview and neutered by ugly, noncommittally outrageous aesthetic.
VOR:③
As with much of Lanthimos's work, we'll see how this ages. For now, I'll grant its influence and even some risk, even if it's surface-bound.
Bugonia's script wrestles and giggles and writhes with aggressively "timely" themes, further coarsened by Yorgos Lanthimos's more and more misanthropic worldview; even his camera placements and lens choices, seldom in service to dramatic payoff, feel ever more inhuman. Any potential for earnest social or political critique is repeatedly neutered by an ugly, noncommittally outrageous aesthetic—as in, just when the film seems to be edging toward an interesting conflict or an idea worth exploring, it farts out some gratuitously violent shock or some strenuously outré image, sound, or event to make sure we don't get too involved or take anything too seriously.
I can see that Plemons and Stone are doing some hard, well-considered work for a director they both adore (and to whom they each owe a lot). I also fully believe that Lanthimos's movies might exemplify the frequent refrain from actors that their most valuable experience transpires on the set, not in the finished product. Plemons and Stone are both assaying unusual challenges for them, with a director they trust to a nearly reckless degree, and I imagine they'll take lessons or revelations from this extravagant, exploratory project into other creative opportunities. Lanthimos himself isn't only repeating himself, though he often is: I'm sure it was daunting to feel out whether a Korean story with formidably Korean senses of comedy, horror, incident, and unstable tone could be pulled off in a non-Korean movie in a non-Korean language.
The verdict may even be "Sorta, sure!" Empowering for a director, I'd imagine, especially if dimensions of this experiment may be portable to other projects or expand Lanthimos's purviews of what's possible in his art. From an audience point of view, though, I'm not positive the risk was worth taking so vigorously if all it yielded was Bugonia, and at this second I'm not all that inclined to follow wherever Lanthimos goes next. What I see on screen in Bugonia, almost without exception, feels stilted, gross, and petulantly positive that it's "commenting" on culture in a way that's worth listening to. Whatever benefit of the doubt I was able to extend by the second half was roundly undone by a series of crass miscalculations near the end: (with apologies for semi-spoilers) antifreeze, shovel, shotgun, secret room, entire three-part finale. It's hard to cheer along with Bugonia's chippy attitude of "humanity deserves everything nasty that's coming to it" when the film itself, not unusually for Lanthimos, and in fact less and less unusually all the time, is exemplary of that nastiness. Grade:C–
