Lauren Sarney Editor-At-Large

Does art provide the viewer with escape, or does it hold up a mirror to their reality? Director Yorgos Lanthimos asks why not make it both, and why not make it haunting!

I took the winter break to meet with friends liberally and watch movies — two luxuries I felt the fall semester had not allowed for. One day I melded these two objectives, and so my dear friend and I sat in a theatre on Carlton Street, and as we watched the screen, the large popcorn between us got butter-soggier by the minute because we couldn’t remove our jaws off the floor long enough to chew. We watched Lanthimos’ newest flick Bugonia: it stars Game Night’s Jesse Plemons and newcomer Aiden Delby as moralistic Teddy and Don, holding bajillionaire executive Michelle (played by the effervescent Emma Stone) seemingly without ransom. Though the majority of the action occurs in this basement, with interactions wavering between too-calm prodding and all-out brawls, the tension successfully holds the entire time — even in the final moments, it is unclear what choice the characters on the screen will make next.

A critic I like found Bugonia to be too unwaveringly dismal for everyone involved, and they accused Lanthimos of being an artist who treats his characters as though they are the ants under a curious and/or sadistic eight-year old’s magnifying glass, waiting to see which creatures will fry. This is a fair assessment: the setting of Bugonia is miserable, the circumstances around the characters are miserable — it should by all estimation be a bummer of a film. And yet, it sings. It rivets.

This is due in large part to the acting. Michelle and Teddy, captive and captor, circle one another hungrily: she sees her situation as a battle of wits, while he sees it as a battle of wills. She believes she need only say the right thing to get out, hit him with the right combination of pain and carrot; he believes she is an alien sent to destroy him and his beloved cousin Don. Finding common ground is difficult.

As a duo these actors are, in a word, dazzling. Emma Stone is used to her characters living under Lanthimos’ thumb from her work on Poor Things in 2023, so she is game for a complicated character. Stone so expertly contorts her face through confusion, rage, measured patronizing, genuine reluctance; you hate her glass-paned house and endless wealth, yet you cross your fingers that maybe she can talk her way out of imprisonment. Jesse Plemons so wonderfully offsets her: as Teddy, there is no game to play. He is smart, and he is human, and he is scared. So scared he might hurt her, so scared he will.

If you’re tired of hearing about conspiracies, from the left or the right, then this is not the film for you. In truth, in our current climate, conspiracy is often either enormously dangerous or woefully passé. So much of real life already feels so dystopian, why would we reach for another truth? For me, this is where Lanthimos points his magnifying glass: with Bugonia he seems to question whether reality is stranger than fiction, or maybe where the two converge. Whatever the intent, Bugonia sings — it is one of the best films of the year, and this is coming from someone who watched some films of the year.