If we manage to make it through 2025, at least one thing is clear: repertory programmers of the future will be able to put together some killer “2025 In Film” retrospectives. Even as corporations and institutions rush to bend the knee to the current administration, we have seen in the past year films which (finally) capture the Bad Weirdness of our era. Ari Aster’s Eddington is perhaps the first film to successfully pick at the scab that the 2020 COVID lockdowns have left on our psyche, and Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another fully captures the cognitive dissonance of being mortally threatened by a party of absolute fucking buffoons. Even our blockbusters, after a long stretch of anemia, have finally grown some teeth: James Gunn’s Superman, of all films, is perhaps the first Hollywood product to take a stand against the Israeli occupation of Gaza, and the (surprisingly great) Naked Gun reboot paints its oafish Musk stand-in as an explicit white supremacist. The program notes practically write themselves.
Added to the mix now is Bugonia, the latest collaboration between Greek auteur Yorgos Lanthimos and leading lady Emma Stone. Bugonia is a remake— and a quite faithful one, I’m told— of Save the Green Planet!, the cultishly adored 2003 South Korean sci-fi comedy by Jang Joon-hwan. This is remarkable, because Bugonia feels like nothing so much as a film about what it’s like to live in America right fucking now. Just as much as the films listed above, Bugonia is about the information-addled powderkeg in which we presently find ourselves slouching toward insanity and armageddon. It’s among the bleakest of the developing 2025-on-2025 canon (perhaps even more so than Eddington), but it’s wired with such manic lunacy that I found myself grinning from beginning to end.
Jesse Plemons plays Teddy, a low-level drone for clearly-not-Amazon company Auxolith, who, for reasons which might seem more far-fetched a decade or so ago, has come to believe that the company’s CEO, Michelle Fuller (Stone), is an alien from outer space bent on extinguishing life on earth. Enlisting his socially awkward cousin Donnie (newcomer Aidan Delbis), Teddy converts his rural home into an interrogation chamber; he kidnaps Michelle, shaves her head (Andromedons use their hair as radio antennae, you see), and presses her to grant him audience with her emperor. Michelle, for her part, grapples to wrap her head around what, exactly, is happening to her— and how to escape.
Bugonia is perhaps the first horror movie about what listening to podcasts does to the human brain. Teddy is insane, but he speaks with the absolute confidence of someone who listens to hour upon hour of faux-intellectual “content.” “We have to clear our psychic cache,” he explains to Donnie as if it’s the most obvious concept in the world, “No gaming, no vape, no whackin’ it.” (To ensure the “purity” of this last point he and Donnie chemically castrate themselves, something that’s likely no more than months away from hitting the “manosphere” in earnest). He presents himself to Michelle as an incel’s idea of a “gentleman”— generic, ill-fitting suit, greasy hair pulled back into a failed-job-interview ponytail— with no mind paid toward any other matter of hygiene. Yet he’s convinced he’s the Main Character, that he alone can stop the alien invasion and singlehandedly save the world as we know it. You know this guy, and have probably scrolled past at least a dozen examples of him today.
None of this is subtext; Michelle recognizes Teddy’s profile instantly, and tries to explain it to him in words gentle enough to get him to untie her. The problem is that she’s too ensconced in a podcast-speak bubble of her own: that of the well-meaning, well-heeled liberal. “I hear where you’re coming from,” she says with a broad, Hillary grin when Teddy tells her she needs to contact her mothership. “Can we have a dialogue?” she entreaties as he leaves her alone in the basement with a bucket. This is how all of their conversations go, he a janky approximation of manhood, she a smooth simulacrum of authority, as the subject spirals further into delirium. This is America, c. 2025.
The two leads, of course, are more than up to the task. The Stone-Lanthimos partnership is one of the most exciting things happening in movies right now, and this might be the actress’s most physically committed performance yet. Shaved bald (on camera) and slathered in pasty lotion, she looks like an alien; as her physical and emotional limits are tested, she begins lurching around like King Lear, or at least Gollum. Plemons is at his most blankly terrifying, rangy like a coyote, but with enough wells of sorrow that he never feels like a cartoon character (he won Best Actor at Cannes for his last Lanthimos role, and this one would be an appropriately bonkers Oscar-winner for a notably bonkers year). But the heart of the film may lie in Delbis, a first-time actor who delivers a disarmingly real performance in the midst of all the madness. Even more than Stone, you wish you could reach into the screen and pull him out of that basement.
Like most of Lanthimos’s work, Bugonia is far from an easy watch, but it is also hysterically funny. The corporate satire in the opening scenes, and the glee with which the movie tears down Michelle’s posh world, is something like what I hoped Babygirl would turn out to be (the image of Stone behind the wheel of her Escalade, sucking down pills with her Stanley cup and mechanically singing along to Chappell Roan, is an instant classic). The business in the basement, meanwhile, builds with glorious insanity, as the characters talk each other in circles and one-up each other with increasingly grisly stakes— think Sleuth by way of Saw. It all builds to a punchline so sudden and bleakly absurd that the film almost feels in retrospect like an extended fourth segment to Kinds of Kindness. In another movie, in another year, the ending of Bugonia might be a bridge too crazy; here and now, it’s just about right.
Bugonia is one of those films I sense will be tricky when it comes to recommendations. It is absolutely not a movie for everyone, and those with an even slightly weak stomach for gruesome violence, extreme situations, and jet-black nihilism will probably have a very, very bad time with it. It is, however, so much up my particular alley that I’m not sure I can resist talking it up; I was cackling in the theater, and in the week since I’ve found myself smiling at the memory of some of its most maniacal moments. For those on its wavelength, Bugonia is one of the best and funniest movies of the year, nimbly written and effortlessly suspenseful. It will, by turns, make you laugh, gasp, and stare in stunned silence. It is, in short, the quintessential film for this deeply fucked-up moment.
Bugonia
2025
dir. Yorgos Lanthimos
120 min.
Opens Friday, 10/24 @ Coolidge Corner Theatre (on 35mm) and AMC Boston Common. Expands 10/31 to Somerville Theatre, Kendall Square Cinema, Alamo Drafthouse Boston Seaport, and all other local AMCs.
