BUGONIA***** - BFI London Film Festival 2025 - Day 4

BUGONIA is yet another absolutely brilliantly disturbing, darkly funny, occasionally moving, and frequently bonkers film from auteur Yorgos  Lanthimos. If Johan Cruyff coined the term “total football” then I am coining the phrase “total cinema” to describe the completely immersive, unique and genre-defying worlds that Lanthimos creates.  I left the LFF screening on a cinema-high, buzzing with amazement and admiration for yet another banger.  What a film!

Once again, he partners with his Oscar-winning muse Emma Stone, who plays a smart, resilient CEO of a biomedical firm.  It’s yet another masterclass performance from arguably the finest actress of her generation. And yet, she is more than matched, if not upstaged by Jesse Plemons, who has impressed me ever since playing a teen football start on Friday Night Lights, and has since matured into arguably the finest actor of that same cohort.  He plays a deeply tragic character called Teddy, whose childhood was marred by abuse and addiction, and whose adulthood was marred by medical injury.  As so many in these dark and divisive times, he spirals into an internet conspiracy that involves kidnapping the aforementioned CEO.

The film is basically a two-hander, and I could watch Stone and Plemons go at it all day. A potential criticism of the film is that those scenes almost play like a theatre production.  In support we have two performances from debutant Aidan Deblis and Stavros Halkias as Teddy’s malleable young cousin and old babysitter, now cop, respectively. The former is particularly heartbreaking.

The film moves through its gears and there were a lot of belly laughs and moments of horror.  I feel that you need a director who is in absolute control of a film’s construction and tone to pull this off successfully.  I also wonder whether the extremity and absurdity will alienate a mainstream audience.  I love that the final act can be interpreted in two very different and both equally valid ways.  I tend toward a more trauma-induced explanation but Mr007 took it literally. We both agreed that it owed something to Lars Von Trier’s MELANCHOLIA and that the themes of the film are a perfect encapsulation of all that’s wrong with our current moment: whether the banality and venality of corporate life, climate change or the rise of conspiracy nutters to high office.

There is nothing not to love about this film.

BUGONIA has a running time of 120 minutes. It played Venice, Telluride and London. It opens in the USA on October 31st and in the UK on November 7th.

POOR THINGS***** - BFI London Film Festival 2023 - Day 11

Iconic director of scabrous black comedies, Yorgos Lanthimos (THE FAVOURITE) returns to our screens with a steam-punk set, sexually charged satire so dark and strange that is left me gasping for breath.  Along with ZONE OF INTEREST, this film is doing something so audacious, so compelling and so far removed from the ordinary run of films that it deserves all the awards.  Whether it proves too strange, disturbing and provocative to appeal to a mainstream jury remains to be seen.

Emma Stone gives an astoundingly brave and career defining performance as Bella Baxter, a Frankenstein creation of adult woman and childlike brain.  We watch her rapid acquisition of language and intellectual ideas and sexual desires. Better explained in the source novel by Alasdair Gray, as she only knows her adult body, she has no shame or internalised misogyny. Bella is as free with her body as her thoughts.

Bella was brought to life by her guardian, Godwin (Willem Dafoe) and lives in an elaborate steampunk world of Lanthimos' vivid imagination. In Lanthimos' conception "God" is himself a victim of his surgeon-father's experiments.  Bella finds herself falling for the harmless, earnest Dr McCandless (Rami Youssef) but elopes with the charming, rogueish lawyer Duncan Wedderburn. It is here that her adventures, and ours, really begin, thanks to an uproariously funny and award worthy performance from Mark Ruffalo - apparently having the time of his life - and Lanthimos' beautifully reimagined  Mediterranean cities and Victorian hotel rooms. A shout out too for casting the iconic Hanna Shygulla as a wise old woman called Martha and Kathryn Hunter as a jaded Parisian madam. 

I cannot begin to describe the delights of a film that gives full flower to Lanthimos' dark gothic imagination - whether the production design of Baxter's house and successive interiors, to the wildly transgressive costumes that Bella wears, to the jarring, disturbingly brilliant score from Jerskin Fendrix. It is as if every element of the crew comes together in to deliver a heightened, sensual experience that frames and enables Stone's outlandish but also deeply moving performance. This is complete film-making of an extra-ordinary level of skill and accomplishment.  This is not to be missed, and on a big screen if possible.

POOR THINGS has a running time of 141 minutes and is rated R. It played Venice and London 2023. It will be released in the USA on December 8th.