8. Bugonia, dir. Yorgos Lanthimos
There are a cadre of directors whose work I will always be there for, no matter what. These names show up on these lists almost automatically: Aster, Baker, Guadagnino, Gunn, Nolan, Villeneuve, Wes Anderson, Eggers, and of course, Lanthimos. All these guys are prolific, they're all doing their best work this decade, and many of them have made Movies of the Year for me. However, I really was not sure if just being a Lanthimos movie gave you a ticket on the Top 15. I want to be sure that your movie is still Top Tier. You're not just doing the same thing again and I'm not just an easy mark. I don't want to write the same reviews every twelve months, nor do you want to read that. So I debated a lot about Bugonia, whether is "hangs", and well... circumstances kept pushing it up. Now it's Number Eight, right in the middle.
Bugonia left me howling with laughter as I walked out of the theater. Nobody today is hitting the final punchlines the way Lanthimos does, not even full-blooded comedies - Friendship's ending wasn't very funny. Lanthimos' 2024 movies, Kinds of Kindness was three short stories all building up to a final pay-off of pure hysteria. You might not think that Margaret Qualley singing badly on a casio keyboard is the funniest thing in history, but it is. Bugonia is in theory one of Lanthimos' darkest movies. It is a grimy movie that ends really poorly for most characters involved, and maybe even more poorly for a lot of people who were not involved. The tragic instrument is pushed so far that your brain short-circuits, you give up trying to understand anything, and what else can you do but laugh?
This is a remake of a 2003 Korean film (which I haven't seen) called Save the Green Planet! directed by Jang Joon-hwan. Both films are about a filthy conspiracy nut kidnapping a smartly-dressed pharmaceutical executive, based on no evidence except elaborate mythologies of alien invasion. Bugonia two makes a significant changes 1) shifting the setting from Korea to 2020s America and 2) the executive was male in the original, now she's played by Emma Stone. Our protagonist, Teddy (an alarmingly-thin Jessie Plemons) gets to be a stand-in for the entire galaxy of inexplicable incel internet realities that are dangerous to all sides of the political spectrum. Trump got lucky in 2024, Charlie Kirk did not. Teddy's politics are a maelstrom of environmentalism, anti-woke language, and RFK Jr-style quackery. Ultimately his psychology is about anger. He hates Emma Stone's character of Michelle Fuller, a beautiful, ruthless CEO. There's a reason Teddy has to chemically castrate himself and his autistic sidekick, Don (Aidan Delbis) to pull off this crime, to tear out points of "weakness" that women might use to dominate his imagined masculinity. Michelle does not even need to push on that point when she's fighting back: its too easy.
Teddy destroys part of himself, and he destroys part of Michelle, by shaving her hair and caking her skin with sunscreen. Emma Stone is playing this movie one step ahead of Teddy at all times. Which is not that hard to do considering the difference between them. He's living in filth on the fringes of society with bad skin and ill-fitting clothes, pulling off some master crime in an old creaky house. She's an CEO in a glass castle with servants, a fitness routine, and a trendy giant water bottle in her hand while driving to work. You can constrict thousands of words of lore to explain your definition of human versus inhuman. The truth is that Teddy is here to hurt people, specifically women, and Michelle is a good target.
Of course, Yorgos Lanthimos will complicate this story. You tempt a director like this with the prospect of filming some aliens, he's probably gonna get some aliens and make them very wacky. It would be easy if Teddy were just an asshole who was wrong about everything pulling off a comedy of errors doomed to fail. Unfortunately, he actually has competencies and is smarter than he looks. He just missed the most important question. You can assume anything from people you decided don't count as people. As a Jewish Guy, I know to watch out from this talk of Aliens and Lizard People, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion are only a few threads away. Teddy decided that since he can do violence, he must be violent. Why should you hate Lizard People? I'd love to meet a Lizard Guy.
I don't see any reason to automatically hate somebody from Andromeda either, I bet they got good movies. Well, if this is who we are, we're gonna get what we deserve.
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