‘Bugonia’ is another bizarre film by Yorgos Lanthimos that is only worth it for Emma Stone

In his filmography, Yorgos Lanthimos (Poor Creatures) has always treated domination as a cruel, meticulous and, at times, even strangely beautiful spectacle. In Bugoniathe Greek filmmaker returns to themes that are common to him and makes his version of Save the Green Planet! (2003), a South Korean film about a man who believes he is saving the world from an alien invasion, applying a contemporary, current and very North American vision. If the original was dirty and tragic; Lanthimos turns the chaos of his version into a showcase. Everything is calculated and perfectly insensitive, typical of his style — but does it match this story?

The premise remains: two men kidnap a powerful executive (Emma Stonefrom Types of Kindness) convinced that she is an infiltrated alien about to destroy Earth. The script, signed by Will Tracy (The Menu), seeks to weave together political satire and contemporary paranoia, but Lanthimos he seems more interested in his own symmetries, his millimetrically uncomfortable framings and in maintaining the clinical gaze that for years has confused bizarreness with depth. Everything here seems designed to provoke strangeness, not empathy.

Bugonia It wants to be a critique of the present — of conspiracy theories, delusional masculinity and digital paranoia — but ends up just mocking these figures without really understanding them. Jesse Plemons (Civil War), excellent as the kidnapping conspirator who imagines himself a hero, offers great mannerisms to his character, but the script and direction fail to extract more from this caricature. What could be a study of contemporary madness turns into a parade of grotesque types without depth and gestures that only reinforce the director’s own laugh of superiority.

It is precisely at this point that the film collapses. Lanthimos he appears to be a prisoner of his own method — the bizarre tone of the most emotional attitudes possible, the distant irony and the pleasure in reducing the characters to pawns in a moral game already known from his previous works. Bugonia sounds like a film that exists to prove that the author is still “himself”, repeating formulas and stylistic gestures, without adding anything new. It is pure self-imitation, a reflection of a director comfortable in his own strange and bizarre signature.

Emma Stonehowever, remains immune to this sterility. She is the only really interesting presence on the scene — besides Plemonswhich gets some breath. The delivery of stone it is physical and emotional: whether it is agreeing to shave her head, enduring the absurdity of the torture to which her character is subjected or sustaining silence with just her gaze. Every gesture, every expression, every sentence — which we don’t know if it’s true or not — becomes a contrast to the eccentric and strange universe that surrounds it.

Thematically, Bugonia is lost by transforming the absurd into an empty spectacle. The central question — the character of stone is it an alien or not? — sustains the film for a while, but the rest is repetition. Lanthimos clings to gestures and mannerisms, the satire that should yield more becomes merely superficial. In the end, the laughter that the film provokes is emptied by the final revelation, as if we realized that the true protagonist is the director’s own style, and not the story itself.

In short, Bugoniapresent in the programming of the 49th São Paulo International Film Festivalis more of a demonstration than the cinema of Lanthimos has become: self-conscious, predictable and a prisoner of his own style. It is a cinema of exhibition, of showcase and of formal gesture, but without the creativity that a story like this demanded. Only Emma Stone and its mystery, in the midst of all this, remains capable of transforming the film into something worth seeing.

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• 49th Exhibition

• 49th São Paulo International Film Festival

• Bugonia

• criticism

• Emma Stone

• jesse plemons

• São Paulo Exhibition 2025

• sp show

• São Paulo International Film Festival

• yorgos lanthimos