{"id":10042559,"date":"2025-10-24T15:04:51","date_gmt":"2025-10-24T19:04:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/vanyaland.com\/?p=10042559"},"modified":"2025-10-24T15:04:52","modified_gmt":"2025-10-24T19:04:52","slug":"bugonia-review-the-feel-bad-delight-of-the-fall","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vanyaland.com\/2025\/10\/24\/bugonia-review-the-feel-bad-delight-of-the-fall\/","title":{"rendered":"‘Bugonia’ Review: The feel-bad delight of the fall"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

You have to love Yorgos Lanthimos\u2019 commitment to one-upping himself when it comes to alienating crowds. He sees that Poor Things <\/em>and Kinds of Kindness <\/em>weren\u2019t enough to scare off the audience he acquired following The Favourite<\/em> \u2014 he just couldn\u2019t stop winning Oscars for his actors! \u2014 so he goes out and makes his Only God Forgives <\/em>with his latest feature, Bugonia<\/em><\/strong>, which is as nightmarishly fucked-up as the carnival barkers at the boutique studios wish their summer horror movies actually were. This is Lanthimos strolling into S. Craig Zahler territory (albeit without the baggage that name brings with it in certain circles), the feel-bad movie of the fall, and I have absolutely no fucking clue how this will play should Focus push it as wide as possible. It was enough to elicit laughter both well-earned and tenuous from the crowds I saw it with \u2014 the latter being of the type where, should some moron choose this as a first date activity, side-eye glances will be thrown their way from the seat next to them, their jacket quickly moved from the back of the seat to their lap should they need to make a quick exit \u2014 as well as a certain amount of true shock value, which seemed to crackle in the theater air, everyone anticipating more thunder to come. That\u2019s an exciting feeling to have during a movie, and it\u2019s even crazier when it comes from a remake, where anyone (especially the nerds in the audience) could have found out what happened ahead of time and presumably been a little less astonished. No dice. Jaws will hit the floor, no matter what.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It all starts calmly enough, with Teddy Gatz (Jesse Plemons) and his cousin Don (Aidan Delbis) tending to the bees they keep on their family farm. Teddy loves these little animals, and he\u2019s horrified by what he\u2019s been hearing about colony collapse, communicating his fears to Don, who is somewhere on the autism spectrum and relies on Teddy for help and company. They haven\u2019t had the best time as of recently \u2014 or, well, they just haven\u2019t had the best times anytime, but things feel even more apocalyptic in their isolation out in the sticks. Sure, Teddy\u2019s got a warehouse job packing up goods for shipping at a local pharmaceutical company, but that\u2019s all a front. What he really wants to do is to save the planet, and not in the \u201cperformative\u201d way that he sees activists doing each day from his computer. No, he\u2019s got the true story: Earth is in danger of being annihilated by a race of aliens from the Andromeda galaxy, and he\u2019s got all the proof he needs to take some drastic direct action. He\u2019s marinated Don in the same conspiracy sauce, though he isn\u2019t as enraged and aggrieved by the idea that these aliens have taken everything from them as much as Terry is, and the two of them set out to kidnap the person that they think is responsible for all of this, who can grant them an audience with the Emperor.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It just so happens that this person is the CEO of Terry\u2019s company, Michelle Fuller (Emma Stone), a girlboss type who has pics of her posing with Michelle Obama on her desk, does krav maga training on the deck of her modernist compound, and goes off on her employees for including the word \u201cdiversity\u201d too much in their… diversity training packages. The snatch-and-grab operation run by the cousins goes about as poorly as you think it would, given that they\u2019re going up against a trained adversary, but they\u2019re somehow able to pull it off. The next thing she knows, she\u2019s chained to a small cot in Terry\u2019s basement, clad in a red overcoat, some cream that Teddy believes has anti-allergy properties smeared on her skin, head shaved totally bald because that\u2019s how the Andromedeans communicate with their mothership. She tries her hardest to intimidate Teddy at first, but he shrugs off the idea that he\u2019ll get caught in a flash of deluded heroism, and then she starts to plead with him. But she\u2019s up against a true believer, and nothing she\u2019ll say to him can change his mind. He knows the aliens are coming and that she\u2019ll have the chance to take them to the mothership during the coming lunar eclipse, only a few days away. So, she decides to play his game, and, boy, what a bad idea that turns out to be for all involved. After all, he might be on to something\u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Lanthimos and writer Will Tracy hew closely to the original tale told in Save the Green Planet!,<\/em> Jang Joon-hwan\u2019s 2003 cult classic that Uncs from the BBS age will remember as once being cited alongside Oldboy<\/em> as must-see Korean cinema. Joon-hwan wasn\u2019t as prolific as his contemporaries (his second feature came out a decade later) and never pursued crossover status, so his name isn\u2019t as well known as it should be on these shores. One might think they\u2019d have seized upon the opportunity more, given that they didn\u2019t have the same gigantic burden that Spike Lee took on when he tried to remake Park Chan-wook\u2019s classic, but they wisely understood that only a few cosmetic touches were needed here. The engine still ran and, weirdly enough, seemed to work better when brought out of storage. One could see how Joon-hwan\u2019s work might have taken on airs of prophecy in the twenty-two years since its release, and it feels almost as if we\u2019re living in the world he established in his film (well, barring the back half). What they do isn\u2019t so much an update as a localization job, preserving the meaning in translation to better suit the needs of the local audience and the authors’ style. In this case, it means that Lanthimos is able to paint a portrait of modern American life using the same paints, enhancing the work\u2019s meaning and its capacity to surprise so that it feels totally novel.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

His imagery is as mundane as it was in Killing of a Sacred Deer<\/em> \u2013 aside from the splashes of natural beauty and the richness of Robbie Ryan\u2019s cinematography, the surroundings are kept as mild as possible to contrast with the oddity of the behavior shown on screen \u2013 until it isn\u2019t, the weird bursting through with an astonishingly vivid yet visceral quality. This mirrors the story, in which the fa\u00e7ade breaks down over time, slowly revealing the raw otherworldly emotions contained within placid exteriors. What\u2019s remarkable about Tracy\u2019s script is that it isn\u2019t as didactic as I would have expected from the guy who wrote The Menu<\/em> and, before that, jokes for John Oliver. It\u2019s a remarkably empathetic film, especially given the brutal paces it puts its characters through, though it comes with caveats, ensuring that we never like anybody too <\/em>much. Each time Tracy notices us straying too close to full-on identification with a member of his ensemble, he pulls us back to baseline with a new and deliciously macabre detail that complicates our vision of them. Feel too bad for the circumstances that Plemons\u2019 character is in? Well, just wait until you see what\u2019s behind the false wall in his basement. Feel like Stone is getting treated too well as a power-hungry CEO? Well, what she\u2019s got in the closet of her office might make you think twice. The only character that remains innocent is Don, who grows increasingly more uncomfortable with what he\u2019s witnessing, and, as such, his arc is the truly tragic one. Delbis\u2019s work here is brilliant, squaring off with the likes of a fully-terrifying Jesse Plemons and a steely, otherworldly Emma Stone, and I can\u2019t wait to see what he does next.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There\u2019s so much juicy stuff I have to talk around in writing about Bugonia<\/em>, because if you\u2019re not one of the few who have seen Save the Green Planet! <\/em>or at least read a synopsis of it, I genuinely don\u2019t want you getting spoiled by some bullshit I wrote here. Part of the joys inherent in watching a Lanthimos feature is seeing how he escalates his plots, which slowly ramp up in surrealist intensity until you can barely believe you\u2019re watching the same picture you sat down for an hour ago. It\u2019s so well-crafted in how it escalates that it would be a goddamned crime to burst your bubble, but I will make one comparison. When Lars von Trier was doing some press for Melancholia<\/em> \u2013 well, before that Cannes, at least \u2013 he said that there would be \u201cno more happy endings\u201d in store for the crowd, an ironic joke in that his movies never<\/em> really ended happily, and that, given what happens there, everything<\/em> would come to an end. Lanthimos presents us with the converse, in which our leads get everything they want without really understanding the cost of or exactly where they\u2019ve been led on this journey. If you can withstand some of the harshest shit you\u2019ll see on screen this year, Bugonia<\/em> has plenty of rewards in store for you. Again, though: be warned. As someone should have said to Plemons\u2019 character, you might not like where this leads.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

You have to love Yorgos Lanthimos\u2019 commitment to one-upping himself when it comes to alienating crowds. He sees that Poor Things and Kinds of Kindness weren\u2019t enough to scare off the audience he acquired following The Favourite \u2014 he just couldn\u2019t stop winning Oscars for his actors! \u2014 so he goes out and makes his Only God Forgives with his latest feature, Bugonia, which is as nightmarishly fucked-up as the carnival barkers at the boutique studios wish their summer horror […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":48,"featured_media":10042269,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[19452],"tags":[35873,11758,20180,25331,26409,16676,23763],"class_list":["post-10042559","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-filmtv","tag-bugonia","tag-emma-stone","tag-film-review","tag-great-movies","tag-header","tag-jesse-plemons","tag-yorgos-lanthimos"],"yoast_head":"\n'Bugonia' Review: The feel-bad delight of the fall<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"You'll suffer during most of Yorgos Lanthimos' 'Bugonia,' but if you can make it through it, you'll have seen a fantastic movie.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, 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