Yorgos Lanthimos’ new feature Bugonia is launching at the Venice Film Festival on Thursday night and critics are starting to have their say on the offbeat sci-fi black comedy starring Emma Stone and Jesse Plemons.
Bugonia marks a reunion for the director and Stone after the four-time Oscar-winning Poor Things. In their latest collaboration – an English-language remake of South Korean filmmaker Jang Joon-hwan’s Save the Green Planet! – Stone plays a high-powered CEO of a major company kidnapped by two conspiracists (Plemons, Aidan Delbis) who are convinced the CEO is an alien intent on destroying planet Earth.
The reactions have been largely positive, with the actors in particular coming in for high praise.
Deadline’s Pete Hammond called the film a “wild ride” and a return to form for the Greek auteur: “Bugonia is a dizzying, batsh*t-crazy story that ranks right up there with the filmmaker’s best films: Poor Things, The Favourite, Dogtooth and The Lobster. Each has a surreality in common with Bugonia, which is also insanely pertinent to the misinformation age of today and conspiracy-theorist nutjobs living in the deepest crevices of the internet and their own basements.”
He adds there are “bravura turns from both Stone, yet again pulling out all the stops, and a magnificently unhinged Jesse Plemons”.
Little White Lies notes Hollywood’s patchy record when it comes to English-language remakes of East Asian films but was pleasantly surprised: “The droll, disturbing and unexpectedly moving Bugonia more than justifies its offshoot existence…Bugonia is also far less oblique than Lanthimos’ previous works, particularly his collaborations with Efthymis Filippou, and at times [screenwriter Will] Tracy’s credentials as a former Succession writer and Editor-in-Chief of ‘The Onion’ are unmistakable.”
Indiewire gives the film a B score. The brand praises the actors in particular but also notes: “Lanthimos’ tenth feature would have been more consistently engaging, a real home run, as a 90-minute feature as opposed to two hours that encroach on a tedious overplaying of their themes. But would it then seem important enough? Bugonia is either profound or profoundly silly. It’s also both.”
Vulture was also wowed by the acting in particular: “Stone is remarkable (when is she not?), emotionally wriggling like a bug pinned to a wall, trying different tactics with this psycho. First, she’s calm and controlled and confident; then, she tries kindness and pliancy. Plemons’s laid-back confidence is bone-chilling initially. But he also has to fuel our ire, earn our pathos, and maybe even provoke some twinges of solidarity. The characters in Lanthimos’s films don’t really go on traditional emotional journeys. We, the audience, do.”
The Guardian‘s Peter Bradshaw was mixed on the film giving it three stars out of five. He praised the “macabre and amusing” film for its “predictably strong performance from Emma Stone, an intestine-shreddingly clamorous orchestral score from Jerskin Fendrix and, most importantly, a wonderful montage finale”.
But he goes on to say “frankly, it’s a very, very long run-up to that big jump,” and ponders whether “this bizarre if sometimes heavy-handed black comedy has fully earned its eventual pivot to serious tragic issues in the ending.”
Screen International was a fan, commenting: “Emma Stone and Jesse Plemons are dynamite in explosive Yorgos Lanthimos thriller,” also describing the film as “a gloriously gonzo, sharply satirical chamber piece.”
Meanwhile, the UK’s Radio Times gives the film four stars out of five, describing it as “offbeat and outrageous but with a deadly serious underlying theme.”
The UK’s Daily Telegraph gives the movie five stars, saying it “buzzes with virtuoso mischief,” but you’ll need to pay up to read that review as it’s behind a paywall.
Focus Features is releasing Bugonia stateside at the end of October and dropped a first trailer today.
Written by Tracy and also starring Stavros Halkias and Alicia Silverstone, Bugonia is produced by Ed Guiney, Andrew Lowe, Lanthimos, Stone, Ari Aster, Lars Knudsen, Miky Lee and Jerry Kyoungboum Ko.
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