Bugonia

Of the four films directed by Yorgos Lanthimos and starring Emma Stone, this is the first one I haven't responded well to. While I would personally rank their four collaborations in the same order as their release dates (The Favourite (2018), Poor Things (2023), Kinds of Kindness (2024), and now Bugonia, this latest is the only Lanthimos movie I have actively disliked. The newly svelte and impossibly young-looking Jesse Plemons plays Teddy Gatz, an obsessive conspiracy theorist who kidnaps the CEO of the pharmaceutical company, Michelle Fuller (Stone). Teddy believes Michelle is part of an alien race bent on destroying Earth, so, with the help of his mentally challenged cousin, Don (Aidan Delbis), he holds Michelle hostage, demanding she take him to her mothership where he can negotiate with the galactic emperor he believes she serves.

The majority of this film is a three-hander that could easily have played out on stage, but is shot in the suddenly trendy VistaVision process. Cinematographer Robbie Ryan (who has shot multiple films for Lanthimos as well as Andrea Arnold, Ken Loach, Sally Potter, and Noah Baumbach) uses the format far better than Michael Bauman and PT Anderson in One Battle After Another. However, the studio has released the 35mm prints of Bugonia in 3-perf reductions, with the 1.50:1 image shrunk to fit the 1.85:1 aspect ratio, essentially letterboxing and pillarboxing rather than using the full size of the projectable frame (what is the point?). The three leads are all perfectly fine, but there isn't much for them to play. Plemons has the only role that isn't essentially one-note, and he doesn't inject a whole lot of nuance into it. Stavros Halkias has the most entertaining role as a local cop who shares some kind of past with Teddy and occasionally interrupts the proceedings. Still, he starts to wear thin by his second scene.

Bugonia is based on the Korean sci-fi black comedy Save the Green Planet!, written and directed by Jang Joon-hwan. I have not seen the original film, but I have little doubt that I would like it a whole lot more, because being trapped in a basement with these one-dimensional American stereotypes is tedious, but might be less so if they were from another culture. The screenplay adaptation comes courtesy of Will Tracy, a writer on the acclaimed TV series Succession, whose first feature was the amusing, though shallow, The Menu. The level of storytelling craft on display here is much more akin to The Menu than the prior Lanthimos pictures, even Kinds of Kindness, which is the most insignificant of the bunch.