Bugonia

LFF #1 Yorgos, you sick, beautiful genius. I wasn’t completely sold at first — even with Yorgos reuniting his dream duo Emma Stone and Jesse Plemons — but somewhere in the back half, it all clicked. The absurdity, the precision, the perfect domino effect of chaos. It’s that rare kind of film that starts strange, grows stranger, and somehow ends in total emotional clarity. The final act is an existential gut punch wrapped in hysterical comedy — I could feel the entire theater vibrating between laughter and awe. The script by Will Tracy (Succession) is wickedly verbose and self-aware in the best way, while Jerskin Fendrix’s gloriously extra score deserves its own standing ovation — so over-the-top and dramatic it practically becomes its own character. (Flowers to him for also blessing us with one of the most criminally underrated scores in *Poor Things). * And the cinematography — holy hell. Wide, voyeuristic, deliberate. There’s an early moment where Jesse and Emma’s characters are comically wrestling in the bushes outside her lavish home, and the camera cuts to a still, wide interior shot: an empty room, the glow of the indoor pool, floor-to-ceiling windows framing their chaos outside. The sound is muffled, everything feels distant, and suddenly you’re not just watching the scene — you’re lurking inside the house, complicit, part of the film’s quiet absurdity. Fucking genius. This is one of those films that demands to be seen in a cinema — to be fully swallowed by its sound, its space, and the collective nervous laughter it provokes. I saw the film last night and then caught Yorgos’s LFF talk today, where he was asked how much he thinks about commercial success. His answer was simple — he doesn’t. He just makes what he wants to make. Watching Bugonia, that’s entirely clear. Even without writing the script, the film is so distinctly his: deliberate, deranged, and totally unbothered. I love when directors make films for themselves — and Yorgos does it better than almost anyone. He also mentioned that it was Ari Aster that handed him the script, and all I can think about is how much Ari probably regrets letting it go. (Bugonia, based on the South Korean cult film Save the Green Planet!, which is now at the top of my watchlist). And yes — Yorgos admitted to watching the original just once. Iconic. A glorious addition to the “Jesse Plemons Plays a Little Freak” cinematic universe — and Emma Stone remains inexplicably hot bald. Funny, devastating, and bursting with deranged elegance. I cannot wait to rewatch it and drag some poor soul into Yorgos’s fever dream with me.