Bugonia

After the deliriously brilliant Poor Things and the unnecessarily indulgent Kinds of Kindness, Yorgos Lanthimos is already back at it with Bugonia. A remake of the cult 2003 Korean oddity Save the Green Planet!, scripted here by Succession’s Will Tracy bringing his trademark “eat-the-rich satire”, it’s Lanthimos back in his natural habitat: a sandbox of paranoia and bodily fluids.

Lanthimos has reunited with his beloved stock thespians. Jesse Plemons stars as a tinfoil-hat conspiracy theorist who ropes in his confused, mentally impaired cousin to kidnap a Big Pharma CEO (Emma Stone, obviously- at this point she should probably just move to Athens). But there’s no ransom note: he’s convinced she’s an alien plotting to exterminate bees, and therefore humanity. His plan to save the world? Interrogation by way of torture, while Stone fires back in passive aggressive corporate HR jargon.

What follows is part chamber drama, part torture chamber, which, at two hours, does occasionally sag and feel long. Think of the suffocating tension of Dogtooth, that house as a prison of dread; Bugonia flirts with that claustrophobia but never quite bolts the doors shut. But surprisingly, the tighter scale works in Lanthimos’ favour. It’s claustrophobic, nasty, and mercifully less obsessed with fish-eye lenses and mannequin-style deadpan. He lets his actors snarl and chew, and the result is often electric.

And no, Lanthimos hasn’t gone soft. The man still marinates his stories in bleakness and cruelty like a chef who only owns one spice jar labelled “hopelessness.” The audience collectively hissed multiple times, proof that he can still make a room squirm with glee.

In short: Bugonia is what happens when you mash Succession, alien paranoia, and Lanthimos’ fuckdupness into a blender and pour it into your eyes. It’s messy and funny, and it absolutely has nothing to say- just how we like it.