Yorgos Lanthimos’s latest film out, is an English language adaptation of the 2003 South Korean film Save the Green Planet! by Jang Joon-hwan.
The Guardian: *** “Bugonia is a very well made film, and while it is not true to say it is less than the sum of its parts, it is less than that final and very powerful part. Like Ari Aster’s recent film Eddington, it also shows how difficult it is to make internet conspiracy obsession interesting. For me, Bugonia doesn’t have the ingenuity and elegance of Lanthimos’s previous film Kinds of Kindness, nor the emotional generosity and audacity of his steampunk fantasia Poor Things. It’s a spiny, prickly, hothouse flower.”
IGN.com: “It’s a film that tries to balance barbed, doomy themes and loony ideologies funneled through Lanthimos’ trademark quirks, enough to raise eyebrows for a while, but it slips off the pommel horse on the dismount.”
Variety: “As terrific as Stone is, though, it’s Jesse Plemons who gives the film’s most extraordinary performance. His desperate, lacerating Teddy is a character who has ruined his own life, who has martyred himself out of his devotion to The Truth. Yet he’s got a handle on where the world is heading. And the more that Plemons lays him bare, the more we connect to the tragedy of Teddy’s masochism. In a way, he stands in for an entire generation. This is acting on the high wire.”
Time Out: *** “Stone and Plemons’ verbal battles of wits are worth the price of admission, even if the script co-written by Will Tracy (The Menu) is overly reliant on culture war jargon.”
City Am: “This being Lanthimos, the plot writhes like a beached octopus, becoming increasingly explosive, violent and demented, the whole thing held together by a thread of deliciously black humour. It is unmistakably a Yorgos Lanthimos movie and I, for one, am here for it.”
The FT : ” Bugonia works best when it is most theatrical. The ever-shifting balance of power in Teddy’s claustrophobic home is sharply mapped out in his and Michelle’s adversarial speechifying, with Tracy’s elegantly crafted dialogue acutely sensitive to the vocabulary of online polemic.”
The Independent: ***** “Bugonia is one of the best films in recent memory to capture what it feels like to be alive right now. Because of that, it is Yorgos Lanthimos’s darkest and most timely work.”
BFI.org.uk: “Satire is arguably the most difficult mode to pull off in narrative, and Lanthimos has clearly mastered its blackest, most classic principles.”
Metro Weekly.com: **** “After directing Stone to her second Academy Award in the nympho-Frankenstein Victorian epic Poor Things, Lanthimos presumably had a blank check to make whatever he wants. What he wants to make, it seems, are yet more disturbing movies starring Emma Stone. We’re all the luckier for it. If humanity is doomed, we may as well go down laughing.”
Empire: **** “While it works perfectly well as a tense and darkly funny thriller, there are bigger ideas at play, the colony collapse of Teddy’s bees serving as a dark omen of humanity’s own end. What begins as Lanthimos’ most straightforwardly accessible film yet ends wildly, divisively, and cynically. This is neither as uncomfortably unpleasant as Kinds Of Kindness, nor as weirdo crowd-pleasing as Poor Things, but it shows a director-actor collaboration in rude health. Long may it continue.”
Roger Ebert.com: ** 1/2″It all comes back to cleansing oneself of “psychic compulsions,” a phrase with Freudian psychosexual undertones but also one that demands we not give in to easy impulses. It’s telling that a film about aliens judging the rottenness of our species comes from a Greek filmmaker using America as a setting.”