Bugonia (Yorgos Lanthimos, 2025)

[The Elegant Dandy Fop]

The following theaters will be screening 35mm prints of Bugonia: Enzian (Orlando), The Belcourt (35mm), Coolidge Corner Theater (Boston), Music Box (Chicago). Interestingly, the Coolidge will also be screenings prints of After the Hunt and Frankenstein

Weird that Los Angeles did not get Poor Things or this in 35

It's currently scheduled to play at the Downtown Drafthouse on 35mm. I didn't realize they still ran 35mm as I haven't seen anything on that format there since February 2020.

[yoloswegmaster]

The following theaters will be screening 35mm prints of Bugonia: Enzian (Orlando), The Belcourt (35mm), Coolidge Corner Theater (Boston), Music Box (Chicago). Interestingly, the Coolidge will also be screenings prints of After the Hunt and Frankenstein

Weird that Los Angeles did not get Poor Things or this in 35

It's currently scheduled to play at the Downtown Drafthouse on 35mm. I didn't realize they still ran 35mm as I haven't seen anything on that format there since February 2020.

Also playing at the TCL Chinese Theatres. You can actually enter your zipcode here and see where the film will be screening on 35mm in the States.

[therewillbeblus]

I loved this. Lanthimos has never been more in control of such a complicated mood, balancing the most diverse tones of deep sadness with silly humor in a really interesting yet unsettling way that I've never seen executed quite like this. I agree with DarkImbecile that this is going to alienate many, but it demands to be seen in a packed theatre to get the full juice squeezed from its pained and goofy context. Even the most repelling character can become devastatingly relatable at times. I don't know how he does it, but Lanthimos takes a decent script and makes lemonade with it. As for the ending,

Spoiler

Lanthimos has been damning humanity with love for a while and he just kinda made a masterful exit with that zenith! Makes sense why he’s taking a break to focus on other work after a mic drop like that

[Never Cursed]

Welp, it's impossible to talk about this one outside of a spoiler box. Special thanks to Village East Cinema for shoving the 35mm print onto its tiny upstairs screen!

Spoilers for this and also Save The Green Planet!

I almost wish I hadn't watched the film's basis, Save The Green Planet!, in preparation, as I found this to be a good film that was not quite up to par with its inspiration - though even that comparison feels less than fair, as they're each a separate proposition that happen to share the same apocalyptic ending. Bugonia, for one, is the nth Lanthimos movie in a row about being a woman in a world of men that hate you and treat you like the extraterrestrial that you might as well become. The film's metaphoric treatment of misogyny is neither ill-delivered nor untrue, but after the one-two punch of Poor Things' joyous coming-of-age fantasia (and I loved that film without giving a single shit about the essentially tacked-on gender politics that so many people made so much of) and Kinds of Kindness' deliberately off-putting repeated staging of female self-destruction, I wasn't sure if Lanthimos had much more to say about the topic and...I still don't really know if he does? In comparison to the central figure in Save The Green Planet!, who is located in specific and profoundly sad moments in his country's national history, I found Jesse Plemons' conspiracist pretty indifferently sketched out, unaware or uninterested in a political dimension of his relationship to an elite that few people in his position would be. Where Jang's film is ultimately a pretty substantial character study in spite of its wackiness of tone and general genre manipulations, Lanthimos keeps a distance from his character that reflects well-earned disgust and his usual stylistic choices but makes him into a more straightforwardly crazy kook. Emma Stone's manipulations, while delivered with incredible force by the actress herself, aren't as powerful as Baek Yoon-sik's, and her version of the climactic monologue pales in comparison to his, which weaves together religious, political, and even intertextual cinematic imagery together into a more forceful genre melange. While watching her big speech, I kind of got the sinking feeling in my stomach that it ultimately only made sense for her to assemble all those pieces if the filmmakers were working from the perspective of the adaptation, with moments from that speech in the original to pick and choose from.

And those kinds of choices naturally lead to a discussion of the film's ending. Both films end with the same hit-and-run proposition: what if the crazy guy was right and humanity is doomed? What that means is completely different for each one, thought. In Save The Green Planet!, the entire coda is easily read as the protagonist's dying dream in the vein of stuff like Taxi Driver et al., a concoction of the climactic story, bits of allegorical imagery scattered through the movie, and the general alien concept running through his brain. I took the point to be an affirmation of Byeong-gu's humanity in spite of all that he had done during the film: even a crazy person who commits crimes out of delusion has fears that we can relate to and experience (and ultimately will experience in our last moments). It's a hit-and-run not just because of the upending of the concept, but also because it makes the viewer contend with the question of mortality and final thoughts in a manner cohesive with the rest of the film. Bugonia, on the other hand, cannot be read in this way at all. Emma Stone is in fact an Andromedan who kills all of mankind. While I am impressed that a major studio let its awards contender out the gate with an ending so full of contempt for the viewer (and I expect the users on this forum like domino harvey who don't respond to those appeals to walk out fuming), it didn't mean much to me one way or the other. Sure, I would die in this hypothetical case where a vengeful woman/alien pulls the trigger on creation, but so what? Unlike his previous couple films, I don't think you can pull this kind of ending off without taking a normative stance, which Lanthimos is as ever allergic to doing.

[mfunk9786]

I feel pretty confident saying this is the best movie of 2025, even (and perhaps especially) when compared to the heartwarming blockbuster befuddlement of One Battle After Another and knotty but similarly baffled exploration of these sorts of themes in Eddington. Lanthimos, to give a filmmaker credit for whom I often don't have much to spare, has a laser-focused idea of what he wants to explore in this film, and he does so without ever flinching or taking his eye away from it. It's a difficult story as more context is heaped onto it, but one that even metatextually addresses how much further it's going in exploring those themes within the screenplay (an early spat between Plemons and Stone on how stiffly she is phrasing her psychoanalysis of him). It's immensely confident in what it is doing and never let me off the hook for a moment, even when it's having its fun going whole hog on the finale. I loved this film. Would say it's easily Lanthimos' best film since Dogtooth, but Bugonia is a lot better than Dogtooth.

[Cde.]

Agree that this is Lanthimos' best film.

Spoilers for this and also Save The Green Planet!

Bugonia, for one, is the nth Lanthimos movie in a row about being a woman in a world of men that hate you and treat you like the extraterrestrial that you might as well become.

I don't think that's the totality of what Lanthimos is doing and saying here, because she is not just a woman being mistreated.

Spoiler

She is also the embodiment of clinical corporate evil. She is also an alien in the sense that she is removed from humanity, and she is in a powerful position because that's what is rewarded in the world that we have built.

I thought this was a vast improvement on Save the Green Planet!, from a much more experienced director better able to juggle the wild tonal shifts throughout.

[Mr Sausage]

The film's certainly a pointed rebuttal of in-group/out-group tribalism. Jesse Plemons blames outsiders for the loss of everything he loves, and believes he can save everyone by forcefully ejecting them. Naturally it's he himself and everyone he loved who were the problem, diseased in their very DNA, and the whole project was doomed by the compounding errors introduced by that fundamental flaw. I appreciate Lanthimos didn't make the movie political by keeping Plemons' ideological alignment hidden. The movie is political in the wider sense, getting at the root of what drives us towards political affiliation, and the root of much of our cruelty and stupidity (how awful we behave when we stop viewing our outgroup as human). The bees are a funny metaphor: everyone in the movie admires them, no one learns anything from them, or cares to. They're an unheeded symbol for the movie's own characters.

This year there have been three big, messy films about our current political and social climate: Eddington, One Battle After Another, and this one. This one is easily the best. Eddington didn't know what to do with its material; One Battle After Another's politics are a bit milquetoast; neither hits its targets cleanly. Bugongia's blunt, caustic satire hits each target square every time, and I appreciate that. It's my least favourite of the five Lanthimos' I've seen (The Lobster + The Favourite and everything after), but it's growing in my estimation the more I think about it (I ceased to think about the other two movies from this year the moment I left the theatre).

[Farley Flavors]

My best guesses are that if the film isn't cropped for a wider ratio on 35mm, it'll either be projected in 1.37:1 with letterboxing or 1.66:1 with pillarboxing. Or the cinema could be supplied with/invest in lenses and aperture plates for 1.50:1, which is unlikely, but that's what has clearly happened for the VistaVision showings of One Battle... at the Odeon Leicester Square. No doubt we'll see in due course.

It looked like 1.85:1 with the 1.5:1 image pillarboxed. Irritatingly, at the Picturehouse they didn't mask the 'scope screen at all, so there were two distinct stripes on either side of the image.

[GaryC]

My best guesses are that if the film isn't cropped for a wider ratio on 35mm, it'll either be projected in 1.37:1 with letterboxing or 1.66:1 with pillarboxing. Or the cinema could be supplied with/invest in lenses and aperture plates for 1.50:1, which is unlikely, but that's what has clearly happened for the VistaVision showings of One Battle... at the Odeon Leicester Square. No doubt we'll see in due course.

It looked like 1.85:1 with the 1.5:1 image pillarboxed. Irritatingly, at the Picturehouse they didn't mask the 'scope screen at all, so there were two distinct stripes on either side of the image.

Thanks. All going well, I'll be seeing it in 35mm at the Curzon Soho tomorrow.

[bearcuborg]

My first Lanthimos film since I saw Dogtooth at SXSW in 2008?

The lead performances helped see me through to the end, but by the time I got there, I felt nothing. I'd like to think I can still enjoy something so misanthropic when its dressed up with glib sardonic humor, but little of it landed. Perhaps it didn't help that I saw the end coming as soon as I saw the first chapter title screen. At least Latnthimos spared the dogs...which I can't say the same for Jafar Panahi's latest - and very similar It Was Just an Accident, which I found far more interesting and funny.

[MichaelB]

I'm pretty sure the Worthing Dome showed it in 1.5:1 - I can't remember if they masked it off.

At least Latnthimos spared the dogs...

He's still sparing the dogs, as those who've also seen Bugonia will be able to confirm!

My wife isn't a cinephile in any way, shape or form, but she's inadvertently become something of a Lanthimos fan after going to see The Favourite purely because she loves both Olivia Colman and a good 18th-century costume drama. She immediately latched onto what Lanthimos was doing with the material, absolutely adored it, Poor Things even more so (that ranks with The Duke of Burgundy as one of her favourite films of the last 10-15 years; the fact that both have intelligent, complex takes on female sexuality is not a coincidence), and while I suspect she'd rank Bugonia third behind those two she's still talking about it a couple of days later.

Although I'm not sure I'll try Dogtooth on her - I suspect she'd be just fine with the premise, but subtitles are usually a deal-breaker. Even if she's Greek by ancestry.

[TheTreeSong]

Color me highly underwhelmed by all three of this year's supposedly "political" satires: Eddington, One Battle After Another, and now this. All three felt utterly hollow in similar and different ways. Also not convinced that this is better than Save the Green Planet!. If anything, it smooths out and sanitizes quite a bit from that film. I hate to sound cliched but three white, privileged, male filmmakers failing to capture anything meaningful about the current state of the world is sadly not surprising.

Maybe the new Boots Riley film can deliver something fresh. Sorry to Bother You wasn't perfect by any means but at least it

[tehthomas]

After digesting this, I've been thinking about Polanski's 'Death and The Maiden' which has some parallels, and two great actors sparring in Weaver and Kingsley.

[Murdoch]

I agree that this is the best of the three prominent films ostensibly about the state of the United States in 2025 (this, One Battle, Eddington). Major spoilers below!

Spoiler

I'm not sure how I feel about Michelle as a character. On one hand, I find her to be quite empathetic. She's likely only been exposed to the most affluent aspects of humanity and seemingly lived her time on earth in complete privilege, but then is thrust into an environment of abuse, manipulation, suicide, torture and murder. She uses her knowledge of corporate synergy lingo and language avoiding accountability to attempt to find compromise with Teddy, but there are clear moments where her "humanity" emerges, such as her reaction to learning of the chemical castration, the suicide, the reveal of Teddy's prior victims, even seeing Teddy's blood before she departs.

On the other hand she tricks Teddy into poisoning his mom, which, before the reveal, I thought was a clear indicator of her humanity - getting rid of the mother who fell into a coma from her company's pharmaceuticals, and having her captor commit the murder. She taunts Teddy as she chokes him, she essentially re-adopts her company's culture of work until there's no work left

If anything, she's clearly molded by having spent so much time with humanity that she matches their beats, but still finds their behavior foreign. She was sure Teddy would be captured trying to poison his mom, but perhaps that's another course correction for her - never place your faith in humanity to respond reasonably.

And I think that's the brilliance of the film. Michelle's background and motivations are blurry and left to speculation, but it's far easier to identify with her actions than it is Teddy's. Teddy, as humanity's self-assured savior, is a monster whose sole achievement is stumbling upon an alien race. Michelle was leaving regardless at the eclipse, and through Teddy's actions he convinced Michelle that his species wasn't worth saving.

[spectre]

That’s a bizarre take.

Spoiler

Michelle voluntarily elects to commit a genocide of the entire human species at the end – I’m not sure what’s particularly identifiable about that, unless one is already inclined to be a Von Trier-style misanthrope I guess.

In the film’s narrative context, tricking Teddy into killing his mother – or merely buying herself time under the assumption that he’d be accosted in the process – is an infinitesimally negligible crime given his mother was about to be killed with 8 billion others anyway if he had done the “reasonable” thing. Likewise, Teddy’s “monstrosity” in correctly recognising her as a threat to the planet and using brutal methods to save humanity from her is of a far lesser degree. (Indeed, if he had killed her, there’s at least a chance that the alien committee would have come to a different decision at the end – I think it’s far from clear that his actions were what pushed her over the edge given her own speech towards the end about how she regards humanity.)

I didn’t particularly love this film, but I think it’s pretty clear about how it plays with identification: we feel shifting allegiance towards Teddy and Michelle at various times when we think she is merely a human CEO and that he’s crazy but nonetheless a victim of the capitalist exploitation she both represents and enacts. But I assume – at least, this was my read – that once the rug-pull occurs, all possibility of identification with her vanishes (i.e. she’s like God, or a futuristic sentient AI deciding the fate of the world), and we’re left to ponder whether Teddy was, in fact, in the right all along.

That question is merely put up against the well-worn “maybe the humans were the real virus all along” sci-fi trope; yes, he was trying to save humankind, but was humankind worth saving? I don’t think Lanthimos is capable of offering deeper or more interesting questions than that, and I think if he really wanted to explore alien-Michelle’s character and motivations he’d have to drop the edgelord pose for once and make a completely different film.

[therewillbeblus]

Spoiler

I thought it was interesting how Teddy was 'right' about a lot of information (even 'discovering' the shape of the spacecraft) but he and Lanthimos never express how that came to be, making it irrelevant (while, ironically, spending a lot of time with Teddy explaining much more radical and backwards beliefs). It's like a metaphor for if people found the 'correct' God or religion, but still engage in poor behavior and harmful thinking separating them from their fellows, and banishing them to hell anyways.

I took Michelle's explanation at face value - that she was trying to help Earthlings, but adopted some of our more selfish qualities while spending time with us. I think Teddy's character is not too dissimilar from Phoenix's Joe Cross in Eddington - they're both barely sympathetic in the sense that we can identify with the pain of feeling so isolated and lost and starved for meaning in an alienating world, but don't condone their beliefs or actions. Michelle's alien group -who ostensibly have spent a lot of energy and resources trying to save humanity- determine that there's two people left who might be able to help save us, but they're lost causes, and decide that our time is up. I took that at face value as well - not as similar to Teddy's limited perspective skewing information, but as something more comprehensive and true: That we've reached a point where we're collectively not worth the energy to save anymore; like a God determining that his creation is beyond help and setting fire to it.

Michelle makes a point about their species and humans sharing qualities, or at least indicating that they might share the 'good' ones. So I think that Michelle is genuinely feeling some emotion and responding with reason when captured. She's horrified that Teddy has killed not only two of her species in his experimentation, but that he's killed a bunch of innocent humans as well. She says she assumed he'd be caught, but she knew there was a chance he wouldn't - she sticks around the cellar rather than escaping and is waiting at the bottom of the stairs for him when he gets home, just to confront him from a moral place. I agree there's ambiguity here, and Stone plays it well, but that's how I read it. She's a complex creature like us, has a mixture of internal drives (emotion, rationality, morals, selfishness, a capacity to hide and lie) and shows a range throughout the film, not just as a chameleon but genuinely. I think it would be a mistake to think she's all one thing just because she's an alien. Regardless of her stone-faced appearance, I see genuine sorrow in Michelle's eyes when she kills us all. Which is more than Teddy, someone with actual "humanity," had for anyone except his inner circle ('me and mine') while harping on caring about the wider world.

[Murdoch]

That’s a bizarre take.

Spoiler

Michelle voluntarily elects to commit a genocide of the entire human species at the end – I’m not sure what’s particularly identifiable about that, unless one is already inclined to be a Von Trier-style misanthrope I guess.

In the film’s narrative context, tricking Teddy into killing his mother – or merely buying herself time under the assumption that he’d be accosted in the process – is an infinitesimally negligible crime given his mother was about to be killed with 8 billion others anyway if he had done the “reasonable” thing. Likewise, Teddy’s “monstrosity” in correctly recognising her as a threat to the planet and using brutal methods to save humanity from her is of a far lesser degree. (Indeed, if he had killed her, there’s at least a chance that the alien committee would have come to a different decision at the end – I think it’s far from clear that his actions were what pushed her over the edge given her own speech towards the end about how she regards humanity.)

I didn’t particularly love this film, but I think it’s pretty clear about how it plays with identification: we feel shifting allegiance towards Teddy and Michelle at various times when we think she is merely a human CEO and that he’s crazy but nonetheless a victim of the capitalist exploitation she both represents and enacts. But I assume – at least, this was my read – that once the rug-pull occurs, all possibility of identification with her vanishes (i.e. she’s like God, or a futuristic sentient AI deciding the fate of the world), and we’re left to ponder whether Teddy was, in fact, in the right all along.

That question is merely put up against the well-worn “maybe the humans were the real virus all along” sci-fi trope; yes, he was trying to save humankind, but was humankind worth saving? I don’t think Lanthimos is capable of offering deeper or more interesting questions than that, and I think if he really wanted to explore alien-Michelle’s character and motivations he’d have to drop the edgelord pose for once and make a completely different film.

Spoiler

It says a lot about me that my reaction to a movie in which an alien destroys humanity in 2025 is "of course! Who wouldn't?"

Although a bizarre take deserves a bizarre response, I suppose. I don't think Michelle's decision renders Teddy's actions justified, especially where those actions involved him pretty blindly kidnapping, torturing and mutilating people, hoping to find aliens. The entire trajectory of Teddy's story in the film - from the unfortunate son of a woman rendered comatose by Michelle's pharmaceutical company to the reveal of a man who's been torturing and killing for some period of time before the film began - is certainly a damning portrayal. To argue against Teddy as a monster in the film is to put blinders on or engage in the lazy ends justify the means analysis prevalent throughout your post.

Teddy is for all intents and purposes the self-appointed spokesperson for humanity, and he is responsible for every death in the film until the end, even Don's suicide, which arguably was caused by Teddy convincing his friend to assist with a kidnapping that Don felt was wrong and never spoke up about, then having him keep Michelle quiet at gunpoint while he distracts the police. Sure, it can be argued that Michelle is just as responsible for telling Don that the walls are closing in on him but she's not the one that put Don in that position.

In terms of Michelle, certainly living through the hostage experience, and Michelle's reactions to Don's suicide - in which she is the only person in the room, so who would she be acting horrified for? - are telling. I think there's enough there that her experience sways her decision. After all, the bulk of the film has her captive and abused just before she makes a decision about humanity's fate. You mention Von Trier and I think this film works as a companion piece to Dogville, an indictment of humanity's ability to abuse, which results in its destruction.

[mfunk9786]

This thread sure is hiding a lot of good discussion.

[spectre]

Spoiler

You mention Von Trier and I think this film works as a companion piece to Dogville, an indictment of humanity's ability to abuse, which results in its destruction.

It's a good analogy – and I guess explains why I hated Dogville's ending too! I just find this "one death is a tragedy; a million is a statistic" vibe a bit off-putting, but then I guess that's a trope as old as the Biblical flood myth.

Not to get too into the philosophical weeds of that in what is a film discussion, but yes, I do think "who wouldn't destroy humanity?" is an abhorrent perspective and at best relies on circular logic – either the suffering people endure at the hands of other human beings, the harm done to the planet, etc. matters because human life itself matters, because we are humans and this is the planet we happen to live on, or nothing matters and we're just like ants running around a rock in space doing ant-like things – or else depends on the idea that there's something morally better out there than inherently flawed humans (say, animals, God, aliens or some abstract notion of what humans could be) that we somehow fall short of. Ironically, Von Trier seems to think the non-human natural world is evil too, so I guess he's an equal-opportunity hater!

I do think both you and twbb make good points about Michelle's character and I concede I may be thinking of her too narrowly; I see the point that, even as an alien, she's experiencing "human" emotions including shock, disappointment, anger, etc. But whereas Teddy is deluded, manipulative and murderous for reasons that he (somehow correctly, in the absurd trolley problem the film presents us with) thinks are justified, Michelle is self-evidently a psychopath – and if we had any reason to doubt that, I would have thought that the decision to snuff out humanity rather than, idk, float back off to her home planet and leave us to our own mess made that clear.

But I suspect Lanthimos is indeed trying to have this both ways, and the pairing of the stakes he offers us with the film's misanthropic conclusion is what feels kind of dumb and offensive to me, particularly when something like the ending of Bugonia was being enacted in a localised setting quite recently and will undoubtedly be again somewhere else sometime soon.

Perhaps there's not a huge overlap in the Venn diagram, but it's curious to me that there are some people who might rightly consider, say, the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki an unspeakable war crime but see the expansion of that to the entire world as, hmm, interesting thought experiment. And it frightens me to think that there are even more people who might think both are okay, for basically the same reason.

[Mr Sausage]

Spoiler

Don't you think you're being a tad literal? Both about the ending and Murdoch's statement? Surely they're both expressing hopelessness, not a newfound desire for widespread extermination.

Also, you haven't quite got the logic of the pessimism. It's not "suffering is bad because human life matters". It's that humanity has put the planet into a death spiral (hence the bees) and course correction is impossible. Humanity is the fatal flaw in a closed system, producing endless compounding errors whose only end is total collapse. The movie can kill everyone in a fanciful moral judgement just to hammer home how peaceful things are without us, but the real darkness is that there are no transcendental overlords who can save the world from us. We will eventually cause our own extinction and take the planet down with us. The end is showing the scale of the judgement, not providing a solution, dear god. Getting yourself tangled in the ethics of annihilation is missing the point.

[spectre]

Spoiler

That’s a totally legitimate read, but keep in mind that this discussion began around the portrayal of the character of the Michelle and how the film frames her decisions morally. It absolutely made sense to me to read her (after the final-act twist, when we understand that she’s everything Teddy thought she was) as akin to a god or a robot, in which case you’d be right and the film could be seen to function as an allegory for our present moment: what she does and why is less important than what it says about our relationship with our planet / each other. We could even read the end as merely being Teddy’s fantasy. But Murdoch is asserting that she is, in fact, a point of audience identification and that her decisionmaking can be understood as existing on a moral spectrum. That implies a literal interpretation.

To be clear, I find the first reading far less repugnant than the second – because if Lanthimos wants us in Michelle-as-alien’s shoes, then he does indeed want us to ask whether we would do the same thing in her position. It’s a subtle difference but an important one that I think inevitably alters how you read the film.

Personally, I don’t think Lanthimos is doing anything all that deep and is mostly getting off on the ironic bombast, because that’s the impression I’ve gained from most of his earlier films. I just don’t think he’s taking any of this particularly seriously.

[Mr Sausage]

Spoiler

Sorry, I didn't want to speak for Murdoch too much so I kept things general. But you are being awfully literal in assuming that identification with Michelle means one now believes in exterminating the human race as a moral necessity. This would require a near total identification, as opposed to the fanciful identification of putting oneself in a character's shoes, say. At most, one feels that, yeah, given the circumstances, an alien eradicating humanity as an act of transcendental compassion is appropriate, and one would feel similarly were one said alien. It's fanciful, a giving in to the moral and emotional thrust of a character in a non-transformative way. We do it all the time at the movies. We do it every time we want some bad guy to die, or feel satisfaction at an annoying character getting killed off. No need to treat this as a literal change in our moral landscape (and then invoke atomic bombs!). It's fanciful.

Personally I think we're not meant to identify with Michelle the embodied human. Instead I think Michelle the alien overlord (ie. the position she assumes once outside the world) is also the perspective of the filmmakers, who are overlooking this filmic world of theirs from a position of judgement and handing down a severe one, and we are meant to share that removed perspective rather than any of the more limited ones. So we are invited to approve of the extermination of the human race (in this context, given these circumstances) by sharing the position of the satirist himself overlooking his ugly creation, as if we are to imagine for the moment a god smudging out a mistake and starting over. Why? --well, see my previous post. If you see the world of the film and our actual world in a 1:1 relationship, then there's a literalism argument to be made here, but you're also unhinged from reality. I don't want to call art a thought experiment, because that sounds obnoxious, but it's closer to that than to public policy decisions (again, dropping bombs). I mean, when Swift wrote Gulliver's Travels he expected his readers to understand why he was saying horses were wiser than dumb old humans without also expecting them to literally run out to live in stables!

If you really want to get into the philosophical weeds, look into Galen Strawson's No Loss argument about death, which would find nothing bad in the instantaneous annihilation at the movie's end. And there's the fact that we cull animals to preserve the balance of the system. Is it really so offputting to ask if the planet, the galaxy, the universe are better off without humans, and then make a grimly comic film about that suggests it might well be? If anything it risks being trite.

Oh, and Lanthimos isn't being sincere, but he is being serious.

[pianocrash]

I find it hard to believe that Bugonia, Eddington & OBAA all "speak" to the 2025 of today, as all three were conceived & filmed within the previous two or three years, and primarily why I believe they are all relatively toothless in terms of taking on "today" as they were "yesterday", let alone anything resembling a serious take on any of their chosen (albeit similar) subject matters. Sure, they all use the heavy subject matter of Today's World in differing gauges, to their own end (the box office receipts for all three are evidence of that gambit, unfortunately), but Bugonia takes the cake for being, at least in this small grouping, the most deeply stupid of them all:

Spoiler

Pretty pictures can no longer save us, and I wish that were the gist of Bugonia, since Lanthimos is partially obsessed with a visual style that is at once captivating as it is bereft of any real ideas. Poor Things had the benefit of a deeper text to which he was able to plumb, but Bugonia literally lifts whole chunks of dialogue from the original film, to the point that the rejigging of that material (the opiod crisis! diversity in the workplace! autism!) becomes a kind of broken puzzle in search of a sturdy form. Why is Don surprised that Teddy has captured & tortured other people, when they have clearly been sharing the same house, side by side, for years? Stone's hopping from one end to the other of the dramatic pool does nothing to center her character in either one realm or another, whereas in the original, the tortured CEO's gradual knowledge of his captors align with the oncoming events which follow. The mother's poisoning/death sequence holds none of the heft in Bugonia for precisely that reason: it becomes an act of direct violence vs. the Teddy character following his "alien" into a spiral, a hole they both end up digging together. The violence, likewise, holds less resonance that just pure gore and spectacle (and for Teddy, a spectacularly dull thud), whereas the original, even with all it's 2000-era glory effects, felt slightly more sinister (I blame the recurring "Somewhere Over The Rainbow" versions, to which "Where Have All The Flowers Gone?" in Bugonia feels too pat, whereas the original's sappiness was, perhaps, uplifted by the fact that it was presented as both misty ballad & pop-punk idiocy (and, as a result, the Green Day torture scene feels absolutely overbaked). While lots of Lanthimos apologists seem to be crying that he was just a hired hand here, it's the lack of overall depth by which the material had turned into a glib missive on These Days in his hands - I'm not sure if he ever had it, ever wanted it, or will ever get "it". In a better world, Attenberg would be held in higher regard than Dogtooth ever was or has been, but that's an order for another popabble (or already popped) universe that we've already lost.

[Matt]

It’s been 2025 for two or three years, right?

[diamonds]

In a better world, Attenberg would be held in higher regard than Dogtooth ever was or has been, but that's an order for another popabble (or already popped) universe that we've already lost.

I agree with this, and I would add that the absence of Tsangari's Harvest in the conversation about current films which speak directly to "today" is mysterious to me. It certainly hit me harder than the two of the aforementioned trio that I saw.