Bugonia (2025) - The Return of Yorgos

  

Bugonia (2025)

Strange film…a very strange film, not necessarily in a negative way, actually, but I think it’s objectively fair to call it peculiar. I only just discovered while writing this review that it’s a remake of a South Korean film, good to know. From my side, for a remake, hats off. Yorgos Lanthimos returns to directing after an insane run, marked by two successes (including this one) and one gigantic failure which was (personally) “Kinds of Kindness”. At the end of this long relay race, the Greek director (who here also keeps the title inspired by his origins) hands us the “baton” that is “Bugonia”. As in almost all of the director’s films, the technical register is untouchable. Excellent cinematography, dirty, extremely grainy, made of very warm and highly saturated tones. The use of the wide-angle is customary for his filmography, even if here he didn’t overdo it as usual with overly “distorted” or “fisheye” lenses. To narrow the field, the choice to close the characters inside 4:3; I imagine it’s for an aesthetic reason, but especially a narrative one, so much so that the story “closes” for most of its duration in a cramped and limited environment. I also think that among the various stylistic choices there was the intention to make the audience think the characters were trapped inside a beehive (given that the presence of bees is omnipresent). As if they themselves were nothing more than personifications of the winged insect. Characters that once again can only become iconic: Emma Stone is always extreme in her films with Lanthimos, to the point that here she even shaved her head to fully render the role. Her vitality in every part she plays is exemplary, so much so that she rightfully enters among the strongest actresses working today. 

Truly great, even if no one in this film comes even close to Jesse Plemons’ performance. Visceral and harrowing like few things I’ve seen recently. His Teddy is as destroyed as he is destructive, and Plemons with his expressions, his words and above all his physicality conveys every single emotion as if it were his own. He makes himself the character and becomes it completely. Really great. Far too great, so much so that the Academy completely snubbed him. Editing slow at times and tight rhythms only when necessary push the story beat after beat toward a series of unexpected but welcome evolutions, always in line with Yorgos’ narration and style. He truly takes a step forward from the slip that was his penultimate work and although on paper this “Bugonia” may seem simple, in reality beneath the surface it hides more than one critique of American society and what it means to be…human. Grotesque and a little bit gore, the staging never becomes tiring, it stays much more on the characters than on everything else, turning what could have been a calm story (on a thematic and visual level) into something that goes beyond. 

From a certain point of view it is the least artistic film by the European director. There are no particularly flamboyant sets or lavish costumes, here he wants to keep the focus on the characters, investigating and scrutinizing them to the bone. I appreciated this a lot, after all it’s the characters that make the story not the other way around. However the artistic nature and an aesthetic research emerge under other forms. It is quite violent, but it is not a gratuitous or unjustified violence as it could appear in the previous two works (not to mention the excessive sex scenes in “Poor Things”), here the violence serves first of all to underline once again the distinctive traits of each character and then to show us spectators what is morally right and what…a bit less. It is a film that invites you very much to take a side, without really knowing what that entails. Only in the finale are you faced with the reality of things, but even at that moment it is hard to really say what was right and what wasn’t. I don’t want to say much more to avoid spoilers, the only thing I feel like highlighting is that the writing and the direction are extremely strong elements that deceive the viewer a lot and play on different planes of reality to mislead and make you believe things that are not exactly what they seem. 

The evolution of events is betrayed by the very premise which however is nothing more than a conviction induced by the skilled hands of Yorgos Lanthimos and the screenwriter. Very successful and unsettling, even if on more than one occasion I would have hoped they dared more. A satisfying ending even if very pessimistic, it reminded me of Pluribus, but that’s another story. The important thing is that I saw it, especially that I had the luck to see it in a theater. This time, in the Russian roulette that characterizes the director’s filmography, we were spared.