Go See Bugonia This Weekend
I can't stop thinking about this movie. (Plus, my latest NPR interview.)
Teddy (Jesse Plemons), a psychologically unstable man beaten down by the tragic indignities of American life, takes biotech CEO Michelle (Emma Stone) hostage, convinced that she’s an alien bent on humanity’s destruction. Their life-or-death face-off in a dingy, rural basement becomes the most gripping two-hour cinematic experience I can remember.
Michelle tries to sooth her captor’s rage with corpospeak platitudes (“Can we have a dialogue, please?”), before the mask finally comes off in the third act. “You’re a loser,” she snarls at Teddy, “and I’m a winner.” Plemons’ heartbreaking performance reveals the fine line between mental illness and clear-eyed awareness of our fucked-up modern world.
I’ll try not to spoil the rest, since this is a film that won’t be half as fun without the shock factor, but I can promise that you will laugh, you will recoil, and your jaw will inevitably end up on the floor.
Like any Yorgos Lanthimos project, this film is sure to elicit strong reactions. I have either loved his movies (The Favourite) or hated them (The Lobster, Poor Things), and I give him credit for all of the above for provoking strong feelings. This one certainly fit into the love category.
It’s sort of baffling to me that Emma Stone is getting all the attention, when Jesse Plemons delivers the film’s (the year’s? the decade’s??) most raw and committed performance. I somehow have a feeling the Oscar Industrial Complex won’t recognize him for this, and that makes me preemptively furious.
On a happier note, I have been pleasantly surprised by the amount of original, art-forward films that made it to theaters in 2025. I had all but given up on Hollywood a few years ago, but I think the commercial successes of A24 and NEON have helped convince the big studios that strange and beautiful films are still worth making. (I loved Weapons, One Battle After Another; can’t wait to see Hamnet, If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, Die, My Love). In the meantime, I’ll make it my personal mission to boost Bugonia’s ticket sales so we can have more nice things.
Elsewhere on my mind… 💫
I was interviewed on NPR’s Code Switch this week, as part of a terrific series about population decline, eugenics, and reproductive rights.
Neo announced it would begin shipping its $20,000 home helper robots in 2026. Huh, that seems early given the state of automation, thought anyone who’s been following the industry. Well, it turns out that’s because these early products will be remotely operated by real people. Meaning paying users will be giving training data away for free, while inviting strangers into their homes via robo-cams. Seems like a pretty bad deal! Here’s the WSJ’s report: