«Bugonia» by Yorgos Lanthimos: review of the film of the week (and where to see it in Florence)

With the last «Bugonia», Yorgos Lanthimos and Emma Stone arrive at their fourth collaborationafter films like «The Favourite», «Poor Creatures!» and «Kinds of Kindness», which gave them success, fame and many Oscars, with the American star acting as commercial «guarantor» (here she is also a producer) of the Greek director, whoand can therefore go further and further in the contamination between his authorship and Hollywood dictates.

As in the previous ones, also with «Bugonia» we are faced with a sort of hippocervusto which we add the fact that it is a remake of a 2003 Korean title directed by Jang Joon-hwan and features the Stone/Plemons couple, already protagonists of one of the episodes of «Kinds of Kindness», when they were struggling with identity problems and self-impairments.

Two young people, Teddy and his cousin Donald, are obsessed with conspiracy theories. Teddy, in particular, is convinced that the disappearing bees are a harbinger of the end of the human race and that aliens are already infiltrating between us. To prove his theory, Teddy kidnaps Michelle Fuller, the CEO of a large pharmaceutical company, identified as an alien empress through a method he believes is foolproof. Start a harsh confrontation, both physical and psychological, between Teddy and the prisonerwho considers his captor to be mentally ill. The situation becomes further complicated when a real one begins “mental battle”which will also involve the kidnapper’s girlfriend and a private investigator who joins the case.

Very black and apocalyptic taleat the same time full of humor and chilling, «Bugonia» is a very painful parable about our timein which the definitive “loss of sense of reality” leaves all possible feelings out of the picture, to put the the only thing that (us) remains: the body. It is in this dimension that Lanthimos sinks his camera: before being a head-to-head between two characters, it is a challenge between the dimensions of power, it is the substance of a possible (fearsome and, in the end, paradoxical) truth. «Lies» is a film in which no one believes in anythingif not in one’s own need for salvation, while all around everything is consumed too quickly. Not even tears remain, just a dark laughter as the proscenium of nothingness.

Regia: Yorgos Lanthimos; Interpreters: Emma Stone, Jessie Plemons, Aidan Delbis; Screenplay: Will Tracy; Photograph: Robbie Ryan; Music: Jerskrin Fendrix; Assembly: Giorgos Mauropsaridis; Distribution: Universal. USA – South Korea – Ireland, 2025, 120′.

In Florence it is in these rooms: Joints Odeon, Principe, The Space, Uci.