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. Here he’s joined forces with new collaborator Will Tracy, the former editor-in-chief of satire site The Onion and a writer on the similarly cutthroat series Succession. Tracy, then, lives at the centre of the great circus show that is contemporary America, and when he’s paired with Lanthimos’s trademark deadpan, we’re delivered a true alchemical wonder: violent, absurd, current, fantastical, shrewd, and unexpectedly heartbreaking.
The film it’s adapted from, Jang Joon Hwan’s Save the Green Planet! (2003), was always meant to feel at least a little outrageous. Yet it doesn’t take much from Tracy and Lanthimos to make its premise – a conspiracy theorist kidnaps a CEO, convinced they’re an alien – uncomfortably plausible in our real-life landscape of internet rabbit holes, loneliness epidemics, and AI-induced psychosis.
