The Pet Shop Boys’ synth-pop banger “Paninaro” is a tongue-in-cheek anthem to hedonistic Italian youth culture of the 1980s, its label-whore obsessions and its blithe superficiality. Fittingly, the song’s thumping beat is heard twice, real loud, in Rosebush Pruning, Karim Aїnouz’s high-gloss, pitch-dark satire about an American family described by one of its scions as mediocre, vapid egotists, who will never have to work thanks to a large inheritance. Fashion and techno music are the chief interests of the surviving members, one of whom dreams of Bottega Veneta loafers floating in the sky.
The Taylor family left New York for the Catalonia coast six years earlier and have never quite managed to fit in, which is not surprising given the insular bubble of circle-jerk flattery that have built.
Rosebush Pruning
The Bottom Line
Tart and amusing at times but leaves a sour taste.
Venue: Berlin Film Festival (Competition) Cast: Callum Turner, Riley Keough, Jamie Bell, Lukas Gage, Elena Anaya, Tracy Letts, Elle Fanning, Pamela Anderson Director: Karim Aїnouz Screenwriter: Efthimis Filippou, inspired by the film Fists in the Pocket, by Marco Bellocchio
1 hour 35 minutes
Their late mother (Pamela Anderson) was drawn to the region by her passion for the architecture of Antonio Gaudí, while her widower (Tracy Letts) and their four adult children, Ed (Callum Turner), Anna (Riley Keough), Jack (Jamie Bell) and Robert (Lukas Gage), revere it as the birthplace of Cristóbal Balenciaga. The fact that the Spanish designer was actually from a town in the Basque Country on the opposite coast is likely part of the joke.
Loosely inspired by Marco Bellocchio’s 1965 debut Fists in the Pocket, the scathing takedown of the bourgeoisie that put the Italian director on the map, Rosebush Pruning was penned by Efthimis Filippou. It has a close kinship with the deadpan absurdism of the Greek screenwriter’s collaborations with Yorgos Lanthimos on The Lobster and especially Dogtooth.
The peculiar energy, creepy sexual vibes and deliberate acid reflux of Aїnouz’s movie will make it an acquired taste. Or not. What it takes from Bellocchio is primarily the outline of a dysfunctional family of four siblings with a blind parent — in this case the father, not the mother — a young man prone to epileptic seizures and a multiple-murder plot that includes a fatal clifftop fall.
The objective of the killings, in both cases, is to free the adored eldest brother to break away from the family’s incestuous grip and live with the woman he loves. In the new iteration that would be Jack and his girlfriend Martha (Elle Fanning), whose introduction to the Taylors is one of many scenes played out with squirming discomfort.
Given that he can’t see, the pervy father (neither parent is named) asks Anna to describe Martha for him, starting with her handbag — “Is it Bottega, or not?” he demands to know — and continuing with her breasts. Bristling with jealousy, Anna calls them “average, at best,” then proceeds to break down her outfit, judging the dress to be from a premium fast-fashion brand like Zara or Cos, and correctly identifying the luxury items of the handbag and a Cartier ring as gifts from Jack. No one mentions the term “gold-digger,” but they are all thinking it.
Not even Ed’s bizarre “welcome to the family” spiel causes Martha to bolt. Hilariously, he reassures her that sadness and disappointment are only temporary by recounting his search for an impossible-to-find Comme des Garçons bag, which turned up online and was gone before he could iron out a credit card glitch. He wept for an entire day, but then scored an even better bag from Raf Simons, made of moreluxurious leather. Turner manages to put across this supreme shallowness with total sincerity.
(As a supremely shallow person who spends an inordinate amount of time and money scrolling through sites like Mr. Porter, SSENCE and Editorialist for luxury menswear markdowns, I have to confess I found this funny. Others might not.)
One reason Martha isn’t put off is possibly that she’s not much different. While chafing at Jack’s hesitance to commit, she nods to the massive chunk of real estate porn with glorious sea views that they have just toured with the broker. “I’m sick of having to beg for basic things!” she huffs.
Maybe this material — and certainly this knockout ensemble — could have delivered a movie with a less rarefied tone, if indeed the filmmakers were interested in that. But Rosebush Pruning is not funny enough to get away with its abrasiveness or make its unsympathetic characters palatable. The heady sensuality of Aїnouz’s best films (Invisible Life, Madame Satã) is somewhat smothered by the cold cerebral mischief of Filippou’s writing. It makes the movie seem counterfeit — way more Yorgos than Karim, but second-rate Yorgos.
That’s not to say the film is ever dull. Ed likes to invent proverbs and sayings, and the title pertains to one of the more coherent of them — “People love roses. Families are rosebushes. Rosebushes need pruning.” The vicious means by which that pruning happens and the underlying abusive motivations for it provide intrigue. If you’re wondering why Mrs. Taylor’s teeth are so unnaturally white, don’t worry, a sicko explanation will be forthcoming, as will the nasty particulars of Mr. Taylor’s nightly tooth-brushing ritual.
It’s a kick to watch Keough’s Anna in baby blue go-go boots get high on the sexual frisson between her and pretty much the entire family. She’s funny flirting with the politely distanced local butcher and complaining afterwards to Jack that he was hitting on her. Gage’s Robert is also no slouch in the come-on department, gushing over Jack’s appearance and enticing him by wearing women’s lingerie and doing you don’t want to know what else. (Marco Bellocchio certainly never had anyone chewing on his brother’s cumsock.)
Bell and Turner expertly convey the charisma of Jack and Ed while also revealing that there’s something a little unsavory about them both. Ed is seen at intervals on a mic, practicing his imitation of Jack’s voice by repeating the words likely to be engraved on his tombstone: “Edward Taylor, 1991 to 2025.” Almost every bit of weird shit that happens foreshadows a later development. That includes the family’s monthly offering of a sheep carcass in the forest to keep the wolves that supposedly tore Mrs. Taylor apart from killing some other poor unfortunate.
That’s one of many visually striking sequences shot by talented French cinematographer Hélène Louvart, its lush darkness contrasting with the dazzling color and light that fill the widescreen frame elsewhere. Matthew Herbert’s score is highly effective, notably in the first wolf scene, where it builds to a molto agitato orchestral hysteria. AndBina Daigeler’s costumes are a hoot, ostentatiously fashionable and expensive and sexy. (Gage scores the best fuckboy mesh shirt since Franz Rogowski in Passages.)
The outcome of the family’s skulduggery, revealed over the end credits, should be a lip-smacking wicked delight. But there are too few grounding remnants of humanity in the characters to make us share in the shamelessly cynical pleasures of ruthless victory. There’s no shortage of stylish craft here and much to enjoy in the performances, but ultimately, Rosebush Pruning is too glib to work, leaving only an acrid aftertaste.
Remaking a Korean cult film once known as “the cursed masterpiece” could easily have seemed like a reckless bet in today’s variously challenged movie business. But for Yorgos Lanthimos and his stars, Emma Stone and Jesse Plemons, former Succession writer Will Tracy’s script was simply so good that taking a swing at the uncategorizably strange premise that would become Bugonia was a no-brainer.
“This was the first time we received a script and were like, ‘Whoa, let’s go make this right away,’ and it basically doesn’t require any process,” says Stone.
“Up until this point, I’d read scripts, but I’ve never been so excited immediately afterward that I would say, ‘This is almost ready for me to make just as it is,’” Lanthimos recalls. “To be handed something that was already so great was a tremendous gift.”
The movie is a loose adaptation of the 2003 South Korean cult oddity Save the Green Planet!, a genre-blending black comedy about a troubled young man who kidnaps a corporate CEO he believes is an alien bent on destroying Earth. The original was the debut of Jang Joon-hwan, a close early collaborator of Bong Joon Ho, but its commercial failure stalled Jang’s career for more than a decade, even as the film gained a reputation as a misunderstood classic.
The remake, co-produced by Korean studio CJ ENM and distributed by Focus Features, took shape after Ari Aster and Lars Knudsen, longtime fans of the original, signed on as producers under their Square Peg banner and brought in Tracy, fresh from penning The Menu and several episodes of season three of Succession, to craft an English-language version.
Plemons stars as Teddy, a paranoid beekeeper who, with the help of his pliant cousin Don (first-time actor Aidan Delbis), kidnaps Michelle Fuller (Stone), the steely CEO of a pharmaceutical and pesticide empire he believes is an extraterrestrial leader in disguise. Much of the film unfolds in Teddy’s basement in a tense, darkly comic standoff that pits conspiracy thinking against center-left corporate rationalism, blurring the boundaries between political grievance and cosmic delusion.
Tracy’s script skewers the hollow moral language of powerful corporate elites like Stone’s character, while also probing the anger and alienation driving Teddy and Don, treating their bonkers beliefs with both satire and unsettling flashes of emotional truth.
“Will really pulled off a magic trick,” adds Plemons. “You have two characters with totally opposing beliefs — and my character, Teddy, is preaching his beliefs nonstop through the whole movie — but the film itself somehow doesn’t feel preachy and leaves it all to the viewer to decide.”
Tracy boasts a top-shelf comedy writing pedigree. After rising from writer to editor-in-chief of The Onion, he moved into television writing on Last Week Tonight with John Oliver before becoming a key writer and executive producer on Succession, where he earned multiple Emmys. His feature screenwriting debut came with the acclaimed dark comedy The Menu, which he also executive-produced.
The Hollywood Reporter connected with Tracy over Zoom to discuss how he transformed a Korean cult film into a distinctly American fable, how isolation and paranoia seeped into his writing process, and why he believes the ambiguity of the film’s shocking ending is its most radical political gesture.
How did this project come to you?
It came to me through Ari Aster, who’s a producer on the film and a friend of mine. We had lunch in the East Village, where he lives, and he mentioned this Korean film called Save the Green Planet! from 2003. I’d never heard of it or seen it. He didn’t tell me much — just that he thought there might be something there I’d find interesting. It was hard at the time to find a properly translated copy, so he sent me what was basically a janky Vimeo link.
I watched it and immediately understood what he meant. I think he knew a bit about my work on Succession and had seen The Menu, and somehow sensed I’d connect with something in this very peculiar Korean film. It’s quite Korean in its sensibility and political preoccupations, but I also saw something in it that felt contemporary and distinctly Anglo-American. Without possibly anticipating it, those original filmmakers had created a premise that felt quite right for an American adaptation in these times.
What did you see in it? Because on one level, it’s one of those wildly original cult films where, from a distance, it’s natural to say, “How could you ever remake that?” The original is such a unique blend of tones — it’s kind of a miracle it ever worked in the first place.
Exactly. I decided very early on — within a few minutes of watching — that if I were going to adapt it, I’d take a very free hand. I’d never really written an adaptation before, and I wanted both films to stand on their own. Otherwise, what’s the point of remaking it, right?
The original is quite preoccupied with this brutal torture situation and the parallel police investigation. I decided to move away from both of those and make something more contained — a movie about a conversation. What if I could put two people who represent extreme ends of an American cultural divide in a room together and let them have it out? People who’ve only encountered each other online, who think they know what the other believes, who’ve already been having a “pre-argument” in their heads for years. I wanted to see what happens when they finally face each other and talk.
As their rhetorical facades start to fall, we begin to see who they really are, what they really want, and what’s truly motivating them.
Tell me a little about the circumstances of your writing process — in general and on this project.
Well, as I said, I only watched the original film once — I didn’t want it living in my head. I took a few notes, then wrote a full scene-by-scene outline, down to the slug lines and key bits of dialogue. That’s usually the heavy lifting for me; once I have the outline, the script comes quickly.
When it came time to write, I had just returned from the Succession writers’ room for season three — this was March 2020. We were supposed to start shooting that spring, and then, of course, COVID hit. Suddenly, we were in full lockdown in New York. My wife and I had just had our first baby, and we were living in a tiny studio apartment in Brooklyn.
That’s when I wrote the script — actually, I wrote while I had COVID myself for part of the time. Because I was locked down and had nowhere to go, I wrote it quickly — about three weeks, which is fast for me. In hindsight, I think that atmosphere of confusion, paranoia and uncertainty helped. Not knowing what information to trust, not knowing what the world would look like on the other side — it all seeped into the script in a way that I think benefitted it.
That’s fascinating. It’s all there in the film.
Yeah, and what’s really interesting is that five years later, rather than feeling like a period piece, the story feels even more resonant. I think that’s because we’re still, in many ways, living downstream from that moment — we’re psychologically still in those COVID months, just in a different form.
Will Tracy speaks onstage at the BAFTA New York screening of Bugonia at Village East Cinema.
When Yorgos came on board, what kind of collaboration did the two of you have? He told me recently that he loved your script and didn’t want to change much, which is very uncommon for him.
Yeah, he told me that, usually, when he directs a script, he’s involved from very early on — helping guide the structure and development. But in this case, he came in when it was already quite close to shootable. He just had a few ideas to make it more directable for him.
One big change he suggested was structural. In my version, we began by meeting the two cousins — Jesse Plemons’ and Aiden’s characters — as they lay out their plans, then we jumped to Emma Stone’s character. Yorgos proposed intercutting the two introductions: while the cousins talk about their world and beliefs, we see Emma’s character going through her morning routine, getting ready for work, doing her anti-aging regimen, heading into the corporate office. It was a great idea. That adjustment gives the opening a great rhythm.
He also made some tweaks in the third act, but nothing major. The biggest change was the title. I still had Save the Green Planet! as a placeholder. Yorgos suggested Bugonia, which comes from an obscure Greek myth about a colony of bees that arises from the corpse of a cow. We both felt it resonated with the film’s themes. Plus, it sounds like a bug, or an alien planet — or even a flower, or a mental disorder. It has all these vague, poetic associations that felt just right. Greeks know their mythology.
What were your impressions when you heard Yorgos was going to direct? What makes him right for this kind of material?
It just felt perfect. I’d written it as a very contained film — mostly three people in a house, talking — which can be a challenge to make visually dynamic. You need a director who can make a small space feel spectacular. Shooting in VistaVision was such a brilliant choice. Even though we’re in one room, the faces of these actors become these landscapes.
And then there’s tone. Coming from a comedy background, I’m always wary of a director overplaying humor — making it too broad or satirical. I knew that wouldn’t be a problem with Yorgos. All you have to do is watch Dogtooth or The Favourite to see how he can play absurdity straight. His comedy is dry and precise, grounded in a strange realism even when the world is stylized.
When I met him and later spent time on set, I realized how lucky I was. Our sensibilities were completely simpatico.
Lanthimos and Stone say Plemons was a “no-brainer” first pick to play Teddy following their collaboration on the 2024 bleak comedy anthology film Kinds of Kindness, which won Plemons best actor honors at Cannes.
Courtesy of Focus Features
One of the things I love about your script is how Teddy, Jesse Plemons’ character, is a conspiracy theorist but one driven by many legitimate, sympathetic grievances — which are embedded within all of these other crazy-sounding ideas. That central element of the story really feels like it captures a core challenge of our time — how do we disentangle the legitimate critiques of neoliberalism from the bonkers radicalism that they have spawned?
That’s right. And it’s only gotten harder, because in America our current government has quite purposefully and cynically co-opted a lot of conspiratorial thinking to muddy the waters to further their own cultural and political project. So people tend to paint all conspiracy-minded lines of thought with the same brush — right-wing, crazy or stupid — without investigating what’s driving that mindset, and what are the underlying causes for why they are so enraged.
In Teddy’s case, he’s absolutely been abused by the system: big pharma, big tech, big agriculture, the government, the police — capitalism generally. He and his community have been misled and mistreated.
And then, in a larger sense, I think he, like a lot of us, feels isolated and atomized. He kind of looks around his world — or American society, at least — and he doesn’t feel like he’s connected to any community or civic project. Every once in a while he’s told to cast a vote, but what does that even mean? Does he feel like he really has any other agency? I don’t know that I do. Like a lot of people, I more feel like I’m just watching a lot of things get worse and worse. So that fundamental feeling of powerlessness in the face of larger, ominous and obscure forces doesn’t feel very crazy or conspiratorial to me. Even though I’m much more advantaged than someone like Teddy, I understand that feeling, and I have a lot of time for that way of thinking, actually.
So it was important that his emotional, political and cultural rationales be well-founded. His methods aren’t sound, but he’s right about a lot. I wanted the audience to empathize with him — not see him as a kook, but as someone making many good arguments.
And on the flip side, how did you approach Emma Stone’s character? There’s great satire in the way she embodies the farce of a “caring corporate culture.”
I wanted the audience to be of two minds about her. On one hand, she’s in an impossible situation — she’s been violently kidnapped, she’s terrified, and trying to reason with someone who seems misinformed and unmovable. We empathize with that frustration, with wanting to be heard. And it’s kind of easy for many of us to imagine being in that situation, like, “Oh my gosh, what would I do if I were stuck in her place and had to try to reason with some nut?”
But she’s also well practiced in a kind of smooth, frictionless corporate rhetoric, which she’s trying to leverage in this situation. So we have this feeling that she’s not a completely honest or authentic broker. Even before the kidnapping, we sense a disingenuousness to her, even though it’s Emma Stone, who is usually a presence who feels quite easy to access emotionally. She makes compelling points herself, but also some flawed ones that Teddy swats down effectively.
The goal was to put the audience in that uncomfortable space of not knowing who to side with. That’s an interesting place to be.
I had a theory about how your script aligns with Yorgos’ sensibility. His films often feel like social experiments, where the audience is positioned to observe human nature from a strangely abstracted distance. Bugonia seems to bring that ambiguity and dread right into the story itself — and it’s one of very immediate contemporary political relevance, which is somewhat unusual for him.
I think that’s right. Yorgos has always explored themes of social control — power, domination, people forcing others to live within their own constructed realities. In his earlier work, that kind of behavior felt outrageous or surreal. Now it feels almost ordinary. We’ve been encouraged, by design, to live in our own realities — through social media, politics, everything.
So even though I didn’t set out to write a “Yorgosian” film, it’s absolutely in his wheelhouse. At the same time, it’s probably the most specifically American film he’s made — it’s the only one written by an American — so it has that specific social preoccupation, while still inhabiting an emotional space that suits him perfectly.
Lanthimos (in tan jacket), DP Robbie Ryan (crouching) and Stone on location in the U.K.
Atsushi Nishijima/Focus Features
Did you two talk about that — the meaning and themes of the film?
Not really, and that’s one of the things I loved about him. Yorgos doesn’t want to overanalyze. We never had those long, “What does it all mean?” conversations. His notes were always specific and practical.
Because he didn’t over-talk the meaning, no one else did either. He and I are both interested in preserving ambiguity — keeping the mystery alive. We don’t want to lock the film into one interpretation. I like when people leave the theater debating whether it was a happy or sad ending, or who was more sympathetic. Those are the best conversations a movie can make you have.
Where do you think the film leaves us? What does it resolve — or not resolve?
I’ve heard people call it bleak, but I’m not sure that’s right. On one level, the planet itself probably has a better shot at survival without us — that’s the practical interpretation. But at the same time, when we see that world without us at the end, we’re still there — our bodies, our traces, these funny, intimate, sad images of who we were. So maybe it’s also a reminder of what we’d be losing — who we are when we’re not shouting at each other, when we’re not reduced to categories. I’m not advocating any one reading, but there’s definitely more than one way to see it.
One thing that baffled me a little were the flashbacks. They’re so radically different, aesthetically, from everything else in the film. Was that how you wrote them? How are we supposed to read them — as abstract representations of Teddy’s trauma?
That was one of the bigger changes Yorgos made. I’m not big on flashbacks, but they felt necessary here, and I worried they’d come off as conventional. Yorgos’ idea was to make them nonliteral — very abstract.
So they’re not “memories” in the usual sense; we don’t cut from Teddy gazing out a window into a flashback. They just appear, almost violently. They might be the film’s abstract interpretation of his trauma, or his own internal abstraction of it. That ambiguity makes them much more interesting. What could have been clunky exposition became something more poetic and impactful.
Do you have a favorite scene in Bugonia?
My favorite scenes are the long confrontations between the two of them — those lengthy, charged chats where Emma and Jesse really go at each other. I love their second chat, when he comes back down to the basement and they have it out a little, and then she says to him, “Teddy, I think I know what’s wrong with you” — and then she launches into this little liberal soliloquy cribbed from centrist liberal newspaper op-ed pages about echo chambers and rabbit holes. He’s quite ready for that, and he counters it beautifully. I’m happy with that scene in particular. The way Jesse and Emma played it is better than I could have hoped or imagined, as the writer. And I think that scene is our first really clear hint that this conversation and this film aren’t going to lead where you expect.
From left: Emma Stone, Aidan Delbis and Jesse Plemons arrive at Palazzo del Casinò for the ‘Bugonia’ press conference during the 82nd Venice Film Festival on August 28, 2025.
Bugonia, the new film from director Yorgos Lanthimos, is now available at home, and that’s great news for a few reasons. The most obvious is that the movie is amazing. Emma Stone stars as a CEO who is kidnapped by two men (Jesse Plemons and Aidan Delbis) because they think she’s an alien. It’s a twisty, turny, intense tale told with a unique whimsy only Lanthimos can deliver.
Another reason it’s great that Bugonia is now at home is that you can control the volume. And, let us tell you, the score for Bugonia is incredible. It’s by composer Jerskin Fendrix, who also did Lanthimos’ previous two films, Kinds of Kindness and Poor Things, and it’s just wholly weird and unexpected. For a movie that’s largely set in a single location, the music at times soars like a sci-fi space opera. At others, it’s a 1970s paranoia thriller. Basically, it’s manic as hell, and it’s easy to understand why once you watch the clip below.
io9 has an exclusive look at a clip from The Birth of the Bees: The Making of Bugonia, a documentary that’s included on the film’s digital release. In this clip, you’ll get a sense of why Fendrix’s score for the film is so unique. And it’s because he got some truly unbelievable direction from Lanthimos. Here it is.
As it turns out, Lanthimos did not want Fendrix to know anything about the movie, didn’t let him read the script, and only gave him three keywords: “bees,” “basement,” and “spaceship.” So, from that, you start to understand why the score has all of those different elements.
Earlier this year, io9 spoke with Lanthimos, and, in our chat, we asked about his relationship with Fendrix and this score in particular. “Well, I knew one thing: that I wanted the music to mostly juxtapose the claustrophobic feel that the movie had and the contained space aspect of it,” the director said.
“So the first thing I told him was that [he] would not read the script for this film. We’ve worked together with Jerskin on two other films, so [I didn’t want him to] read the script. ‘I’ll give you [three] keywords to work on. And then you’ll compose music and I’ll instinctually guide you here and there.’ And then I told him, ‘I think you should write big. Think of an orchestra. Make it big. Don’t hold back.’ Because I wanted the music, as you said, to be at times so bombastic it’s out of this world. And it worked really well. I mean, that’s how I’ve worked with Jerskin before. He always composes the music before I start editing. So I can use a library of music that he made for the specific film.”
“The previous times he had read the script, [so] I thought we should take it a step further and just let him know less this time,” Lanthimos continued. “And I think it worked even better. And he himself says that he wouldn’t have composed this music if he had read the script beforehand. So we’ve figured out this way of working, which is great. I mean, I have all this beautiful music that I can use while editing. We do have to roughly cut it in order to fit the scenes, and then Jerskin goes back and fixes it properly.”
Bugonia is now available wherever you rent or buy films digitally. It’s one of the best of the year.
The European Film Academy on Tuesday unveiled the nominees for the 2026 European Film Awards (EFA), the top pan-European honor for cinematic excellence.
In the director race, Yorgos Lanthimos is nominated for the Emma Stone/Jessie Plemons starrer Bugonia, alongside Laxe for Sirāt, Panahi for It Was Just an Accident, Schilinski for Sound of Falling and Trier for Sentimental Value.
Panahi also picked up a best European Screenwriter nomination for the script to It Was Just an Accident. Laxe and Sirāt co-writer Santiago Fillol were nominated in the same category, alongside Schilinksi and co-writer Louise Peter for Sound of Falling; Trier and co-writer Eskil Vogt for Sentimental Value; and Paolo Sorrentino for La Grazia.
The Best European Actress nominees include Renate Reinsve (Sentimental Value), Leonie Benesch (Late Shift), Valeria Bruni Tedeschi (Duse), Léa Drucker (Case 137), and Vicky Krieps (Love Me Tender). European actor nominees include Sirāt star Sergi López, Mads Mikkelsen for The Last Viking, Toni Servillo for La Grazia, Stellan Skarsgård for Sentimental Value, and Idan Weiss for Franz. Stone and Plemons, as Americas, can’t be nominated for the EFAs.
Trier’s Sentimental Value has a slight edge in the overall nominations, with 5 noms across the top 5 categories. Laxe’s Sirāt is right behind it with 4 noms, for best feature, director, actor and screenplay, followed by It Was Just an Accident and Sound of Falling, with 3 noms each.
The European Film Awards group their documentary and animated film nominees into the Best Feature category. Documentary contenders include Afternoons of Solitude, Fiume o Morte!, Riefenstahl, Songs of Slow Burning Earth and With Hasan in Gaza. The 2026 Animated feature nominees are Arco, Dog of God, Little Amelie, Olivia and the Invisible Earthquake and Tales From the Magic Garden.
In the European Discovery category, honoring up-and-coming young filmmakers, the nominees include Urška Djukić for Little Trouble Girls, Akinola Davies Jr. for My Father’s Shadow, Laura Carreira for On Falling, Murat Fıratoğlu for One of Those Days When Hemme Dies, Mathias Broe for Sauna, and Mara Tamkovich for Under the Grey Sky.
European Young Audience Award nominees include Bienvenu’s Arco, Nóra Lakos’ I Accidentally Wrote a Book, and Siblings from director Greta Scarano.
The Academy announced the nominations in front of a live audience at the iconic Real Alcázar palace at the Seville European Film Festival.
The winners of the 38th European Film Awards will be announced at a gala ceremony in Berlin on Jan. 17, 2026.
The European Film Awards have traditionally been held at the end of the year, but the Academy has moved the date to mid-January to position the EFAs as part of the international awards season, and as a harbinger for the Baftas and the Oscars. Indeed, many of this year’s EFA nominees, including Sentimental Value, Bugonia, It Was Just an Accident, Sirat, and Sound of Falling, are among the Oscar frontrunners.
Liv Ullmann, the two-time Oscar-nominated Norwegian actress and director, best known for such 1970s classics as Cries and Whispers, and Scenes From a Marriage, will receive a lifetime achievement honor at this year’s EFAs. Alice Rohrwacher, the Italian director of La Chimera, Futura, and Happy as Lazzaro will be honored with the European Achievement in World Cinema Award.
See the nominations for the 2026 European Film Awards below.
EUROPEAN FILM
Afternoons of Solitude, dir. Albert Serra Arco, dir. Ugo Bienvenu Dog of God, dir. Raitis Ābele and Lauris Ābele Fiume o Morte!, dir. Igor Bezinović It Was Just an Accident, dir. Jafar Panahi Little Amelie, dir. Maïlys Vallade and Liane-Cho Han Olivia and the Invisible Earthquake, dir. Irene Iborra Rizo Riefenstahl, dir. Andres Veiel Sentimental Value, dir. Joachim Trier Sirāt, dir. Oliver Laxe Songs of Slow Burning Earth, dir. Olha Zhurba Sound of Falling, dir. Mascha Schilinski Tales From the Magic Garden, dir. David Súkup, Patrik Pašš, Leon Vidmar and Jean-Claude Rozec The Voice of Hind Rajab, dir. Kaouther Ben Hania With Hasan in Gaza, dir. Kamal Aljafari
EUROPEAN DOCUMENTARY
Afternoons of Solitude, dir. Albert Serra Fiume o Morte!, dir. Igor Bezinović Riefenstahl, dir. Andres Veiel Songs of Slow Burning Earth, dir. Olha Zhurba With Hasan in Gaza, dir. Kamal Aljafari
EUROPEAN ANIMATED FEATURE FILM
Arco, dir. Ugo Bienvenu Dog of God, dir. Raitis Ābele and Lauris Ābele Little Amelie, dir. Maïlys Vallade and Liane-Cho Han Olivia and the Invisible Earthquake, dir. Irene Iborra Rizo Tales From the Magic Garden, dir. David Súkup, Patrik Pašš, Leon Vidmar and Jean-Claude Rozec
EUROPEAN DIRECTOR
Yorgos Lanthimos for Bugonia Oliver Laxe for Sirāt Jafar Panahi for It Was Just an Accident Mascha Schilinski for Sound of Falling Joachim Trier for Sentimental Value
EUROPEAN ACTRESS
Leonie Benesch for Late Shift Valeria Bruni Tedeschi for Duse Léa Drucker for Case 137 Vicky Krieps for Love Me Tender Renate Reinsve for Sentimental Value
EUROPEAN ACTOR
Sergi López for Sirāt Mads Mikkelsen for The Last Viking Toni Servillo for La Grazia Stellan Skarsgård for Sentimental Value Idan Weiss for Franz
EUROPEAN SCREENWRITER
Santiago Fillol and Oliver Laxe for Sirāt Jafar Panahi for It Was Just an Accident Mascha Schilinski and Louise Peter for Sound of Falling Paolo Sorrentino for La Grazia Eskil Vogt and Joachim Trier for Sentimental Value
EUROPEAN DISCOVERY – PRIX FIPRESCI
Little Trouble Girls, dir. Urška Djukić My Father’s Shadow, dir. Akinola Davies Jr On Falling, dir. Laura Carreira One of Those Days When Hemme Dies, dir. Murat Fıratoğlu Sauna, dir. Mathias Broe Under the Grey Sky, dir. Mara Tamkovich
EUROPEAN YOUNG AUDIENCE AWARD
Arco, dir. Ugo Bienvenu I Accidentally Wrote a Book, dir. Nóra Lakos Siblings, dir. Greta Scarano
Robbie Ryan, the winner of the inaugural THR Visionary in Cinematography Award at this year’s EnergaCamerimage festival, is one of the most inventive, adaptable, and quietly influential DPs working today.
The 55-year-old Irish lenser has built a career defined by radical range: Staring from the raw, handheld urgency of Andrea Arnold — his first major collaborator — to the fixed-tripod, long-lens approach of kitchen sink master Ken Loach, to the wild, rule-breaking experimentation of Yorgos Lanthimos and the actor-centered, classically composed approach of Noah Baumbach.
The throughline isn’t a signature look but a signature philosophy: That the story dictates the style. Ryan has shot on a 4:3 ratio [for Arnold’s Fish Tank] and on VistaVision [Lanthimos’ Bugonia]. He’s experimented with Ektachrome stock and tiny 6mm vignetted lenses [on Poor Things]. But the goal has never been to show off. “Lens choice isn’t about proving something, but about emphasizing an aspect of the film story,” he notes.
Ryan spoke to The Hollywood Reporter about his beginnings as a Super 8-obsessed kid, the lessons he’s carried from Arnold, Loach, and Lanthimos, and why celluloid remains his creative North Star. “Film has an identity… There’s an alchemy, a magic, to it.”
I’ve read you decided to become a cinematographer when you were 14. Did you already know then you wanted this to be your life’s work?
Well, I certainly didn’t know what a cinematographer was back then. I remember being in a library when I was about 17, and finding a cinematography handbook and thinking, “Oh, that sounds like a good word: Cinematographer.” But at 14/15, I didn’t have an iota of what cinematography was.
I just loved making short films. Me and my cousins and my friends had a Super 8 camera, and we’d just wait for the holidays so we could shoot another short film. It was our way of getting through school, knowing we’d be making some silly movie in the holidays. My brother would write these scripts, and we’d film them. It hasn’t changed much for me in 40 years.
I think in my generation, you see a lot of directors who landed here in the same way, Spike Jones and such. We were all doing the same thing, making mad little movies. It has a bit to do with the technology being more accessible to us than to the generation before. It’s essentially what the TikTokers are doing these days. We were the weirdo kids on the street, hanging around on our bikes and also making movies.
Director Yorgos Lanthimos, cinematographer Robbie Ryan and Emma Stone on the set of ‘Bugonia’
Atsushi Nishijima/Focus Features
Your first major collaboration was with Andrea Arnold on her short film Wasp. How has working with her shaped your approach and your overall career?
It’s fundamental to the way I am. Where I’m at now is through working with Andrea. It was a blessing to have crossed paths and started working and collaborating when we did. She was still doing shorts. It was an important juncture in her career, as well as mine. A junction in our lives, really. We’re fast friends. We’re very close.
Andrea loves telling the story of our first day shooting that short, Wasp. She shoots consecutively, and that first shot is following these little kids, running downstairs backwards. She’s like: I’d like to get the shot where I’m you’re in front of them going down backwards. I was like: Sure, I’ll give it a go. She’s still impressed I was able to do that without falling over. I passed the test of the Andrea Arnold School of Filmmaking.
Her style is really distinct. Like all great directors, she really knows what she likes, and she kind of zones in on that, creates a rule book for herself, even if the rules are there to be broken. I’ve worked with a lot of different directors since then, and I’ve learned that if you can kind of figure out what ingredients each director likes and what they’re hoping to do for this particular film, you can really hook in as a DP.
For example, all of Andrea’s films are very handheld. She hates tripods. Her edit choices within the handheld world are very restrictive to a certain style. She doesn’t make many films; she makes one about every five years. So you’ve forgotten about the system by the time the new one comes around. But if you’d watched them all back to back, you’d see they are similar in a certain way. It’s her film style, which I find totally honest, which is what she is as a person, and why, I think, her films resonate with so many people.
‘Bird,’ directed by Andrea Arnold, shot by Robbie Ryan
Mubi
From Arnold, you started working with Ken Loach, also a realist filmmaker, but with a very different style.
I remember going into an interview with Ken, and he goes: “If you were to film this, us sitting here, what would you do?” I’m like: I don’t know. I had no clue, really. I didn’t know much about Ken’s films, except maybe My Name is Joe, that era, the 90s ones. I was a newbie in the Ken world.
He cut across me and went: “What I do is put a long lens, a 50 mm or 75 mm lens, in the corner over there. I was like: Kind of the complete opposite to Andrea Arnold, but also trying to achieve a kind of realism and doing it extremely well. They are both realist filmmakers, but they come at it from a different way. Ken, if he could, would have the camera in another room. He doesn’t want a camera near his actors to get them distracted.
He doesn’t want lights, but he loves lighting. He loves backlight. Look at his work with Chris Menzies (Kes, Black Jack, The Gamekeeper). It’s so beautiful, so thought through. Ken would go on a recce and would say no to a location if the light wasn’t naturally coming in as backlight. I found that fascinating, because Ken’s films tend to be Northern England and Scotland, which is pretty gray. There’s a 70 percent chance there’s not going to be any light. But if there’s that 30 percent chance there, he’ll get it.
Ken Loach’s ‘I, Daniel Blake’
Courtesy of TIFF
Ken’s approach is really austere, and he is very camera-centric. In a way, Ken and Yorgos (Lanthimos) are quite similar, because they always know what lens they want to use. I remember working on I Am Daniel Blake, and Ken would start a scene on a 75 mm lens, and then he realized that he hadn’t used the 50 mm yet, so we had to re-shoot the whole scene from the beginning. Because he needed to start with the 50 and then move up the ranks.
He’s got a big notebook, where he’s written notes on exactly where the camera will be and what lens he’s going to use. In Ken Loach films, I’m literally the operator, and it’s a joyful place to be, just watching this master choreograph the reality he wants, grasping the honesty and the truth he sees.
He’s usually on a long lens, and what’s great is you’re following the protagonist all the time. So the camera always feels like it’s moving; it never feels static. If you’re on a 100 mm lens following somebody walking around, you feel like a fly on a wall. And because the cameras are way off in the distance, the actors are in the middle of their little world. It’s a technique I never would have wanted to do on my own, but with Ken, I got more and more into it and really enjoy it.
How did you move from Andrea Arnold and Ken Loach to Yorgos Lanthimos, who seems to have a completely different visual style and approach in his films?
We had a couple of meetings and tried to work together on a short film, then on The Killing of a Sacred Deer, but the schedules didn’t work out. Then Yorgos came back and asked: “Would you like to do The Favourite?” And I was weirdly stupid about it. I thought: “You have your own DP (Thimios Bakatakis)”. You’ve got a relationship there. I didn’t want to be, like, the new girlfriend. And I was cautious because The Favourite was a biopic. I don’t like biopics. And it’s about a Queen, royalty. And I hate royal films. I didn’t really know Yorgos’ approach to filmmaking, so I was a little bit reticent, a little bit cautious about signing up to it.
I remember doing prep on The Favourite, and he said, “I don’t want to use any lights.” And I was like: “Yeah, but can that work?” I’ve noticed over the years with Yorgos is if you ask a question, you might get an answer, but if you don’t ask, you’re not going to get much information. So you try and offer up the best you can within what brief you’ve been given.
Emma Stone on the set of ‘The Favourite’ with Robbie Ryan (far right)
Yorgos Lanthimos/Twentieth Century Fox
On the first day of The Favourite, Yorgos came up to me — he had a digital stills camera at the time — and he was taking stills. He’d get the shot he wanted, show me the picture, and say: “We’ll go for this.” I realized he was going to offer up shots and tell me what way we are going to approach it. That’s when I breathed a sigh of relief.
That’s the way we do it all the time now. He sets up the film set with everything at his disposal, where we’re in a room where we can literally shoot 360, without any paraphernalia in the way. We’ve got all the lenses we’ve chosen. We’re on the camera we want to use. We’re on a dolly or whatever camera support system we’re using. And then he’s free to do what he feels is the right thing on that day. He wants to have an element of spontaneity. And I love that. It’s a matter of getting everything ready to go at the last second. His filmmaking is not elaborately complicated. It’s one camera shooting most of the time. There are no crazy techno cranes everywhere. And it’s always on film.
He’ll be sitting there with a handheld monitor, very close to the action. Most of the directors I work with use a small monitor. Ken doesn’t use a monitor at all. All those directors are very close to the action, and I think that’s really important.
Emma Stone and Mark Ruffalo in ‘Poor Things’
Atsushi Nishijima/Searchlight Pictures
What led to the lens experimentation – the wide-angles and fisheyes — on The Favourite and Poor Things?
Yorgos was going through quite a period of curiosity for wide-angle lensing, and we researched. We went to Panavision and researched their wider lenses. We happened upon the 6 mm fisheye when lensing The Favourite, which he loved, and is amazing, and suits that film so well because of the architecture and the fact that Queen Anne (Olivia Colman) is this tiny element within the massive space of her world. I think ironically, the lensing makes her world look very claustrophobic, her very isolated.
Usually, lens choice isn’t about proving something but about emphasizing an aspect of the film’s story. With Poor Things, he wanted to go further, to almost have, like a portal into that world. That vignetted wide-angle lens makes it feel like you’re looking in from another world. That’s one of the times when I felt I actually came up with a good idea.
We went with a 16 mm wide lens, and we used it on a 35 mm format. So essentially, the aspect ratio of the lens wouldn’t cover the whole 35 mm negative. So you had this natural vignette, and at the same time, it’s a very wide angle. That was something we used on Poor Things, and I think it’s used very cleverly.
Anytime a scene felt like it was a little bit lacking, Yorgos would go: “Let’s get the 4 mm out.” And the actors would all be a bit like: “Oh, we haven’t done well enough, we’re going to be sentenced to the 4 mm,” because they’re just tiny in it.
Poor Things is a film that totally leans into that world. It’s kaleidoscopic, very otherworldly. I love the idea of the wide-angle 4 mm, as a portal into that world. But when you use those lenses, everything is in vision, so you’ve got to be on a very simple camera support system. Usually on a tripod or a dolly. The dolly is even in shot on those lenses. So you have a really small footprint for the camera support system. We shot Poor Things very simply, really.
Jesse Plemons and Emma Stone during the production of ‘Bugonia’
Atsushi Nishijima/Focus Features
With Bugonia, you made another jump, to shooting in VistaVision.
When we were filming Poor Things, I remember Yorgos saying he wanted to try out VistaVision. We found a camera and we tested with that. But it was very noisy. Yorgos does not do ADR on his films. He said: “This is a good camera, but I need to be able to shoot sync [sound].” There is a scene in Poor Things where there’s no sync sound, so we used it for that.
I love to think we were one of the first to bring back VistaVision, because nobody else had a big feature film on it at that stage, in 2021. We also shot it on Ektachrome, which was even more of a challenge, using this old camera with a very old stock that we didn’t know much about. But the results were phenomenal.
That planted the seed to try and endeavor to shoot a film on VistaVision. I was doing a bit of research on Poor Things, and I met with this guy called Scott Smith, who’s a large-format technician in Hollywood. He told me about this other camera, the only “sync sound film” VistaVision camera. The Wilcam W11 camera. We wanted to try it out, but it was still getting renovated with the electronics; it wasn’t up to speed.
But about year later, two years later, I did test with that camera. And it was great. We were worried about the noise, but it’s actually quite a quiet camera, relatively, for what it’s doing.
The lens choice on Bugonia is really interesting, because it’s such a large-format camera, but he decided to shoot the majority of the time on faces. The whole film is these portrait shots of faces. It’s a shrewd choice, because the landscape quality of that camera lends itself to the close-up as well. It renders the close-up more beautiful in a way. There’s a fall off to the image that is really special. It elevates the film to another level. Yorgos wanted to go in a different direction, so we went with a large format with a tighter lens.
Robbie Ryan shooting a close-up of Emma Stone on ‘Bugonia’
How do you see the state of film versus digital today?
The majority of the films are digital, obviously. It’s a bit like how a lot of people love Mac and Apple, but Dell and Microsoft are still the majority of computers. I looked at the list of what films have been shot on what this past year, and everybody seems to be shooting on the ARRI Alexa 35. Now it’s purely my opinion, but I think it still doesn’t really get close to what film does, straight out of the can.
Film, even if it’s overexposed, underexposed, or correctly exposed, has a unique quality to it. It’s hard to make digital look horrible, though I have seen a lot of horrible digital stuff, whereas film, if you made a mistake, looks wrong. Though I still find those “film mistakes” really beautiful. For me, film has an identity. It lands with the viewer without them necessarily knowing it was shot on film. There’s an alchemy, a magic, to it.
Ironically, if you shoot on an old chunky format like VistaVision or 70mm or IMAX these days, that creates a big bump in sales for getting people into cinemas. You can charge a little bit more, and you get people interested. I think the work Paul Thomas Anderson did on his film [One Battle After Another] by promoting the way to watch his film in the cinemas was genius. I haven’t been to an opening night of a film for a long, long time that was as exciting as it was to go see the Paul Thomas Anderson film.
Which film felt like the best “dance” between you and your actors?
If we’re talking literally about dancing, it’d be Andrea’s films. She loves dancing. In American Honey, the way Sasha Lane moves was really special. That was one of the rare digital films I’ve done, because we were shooting on the road a lot in America, and shooting on film was just going to be too complicated. We ended up shooting on an Alexa camera, one of the older, chunky Alexas. So I’m bearing down on Sasha all the time, and she never once looked in the camera. She was just brilliant and free and fluid.
Obviously, Yorgos also loves a dance. Every film he does has a dance. Emma [Stone] in Poor Things was really good fun. We had a lot of fun doing the dance in that film.
Robbie Ryan filming Emma Stone’s dance scene in ‘Poor Things’
Atsushi Nishijima/Searchlight Pictures
I also have to think of a static “dance” you shot: The breakup scene in Marriage Story.
Oh my God, yeah. That was amazing. Noah [Baumbach] likes to go through quite a lot of takes. For that scene, it was me, Scarlett Johansson, Adam Driver, and a grip, Jose [Santiago] in a room. That was it. We just went at it. At the end of it, Jose and I are like: “I feel like we’ve been through this breakup as well.” The acting in that is phenomenal, and they really pushed it. I can only imagine where an actor goes. We spent a whole two days filming that scene.
Beyond your own work, were your favorite-shot films of this year?
Scott, I’m so glad you asked me. I go to a lot of film festivals and try to catch up on films before everyone else is talking about them. Ready? I’ll give you five.
There’s The Heart That Remains by Hlynur Pálmason. He made the film Godland. He shoots his own stuff. He’s a bit like an Ingmar Bergman. He lives in Iceland. He shoots all his own films on 35mm.
There’s Motel Destino. I love anything that [cinematographer] Hélène Louvart does. That woman is the most prolific DP of our time. She shoots at least 3-4 films a year, and they’re all superb. Motel Destino is another way-out-there movie. It’s neo-noir Brazil, and it’s just no bullshit; it just goes for it.
There’s a film I saw, which I thought was great, called To the West, in Zapata. It’s a film shot by a guy on his own [David Bim]. It’s an ethnographic movie, shot on a Sony FX6, or whatever it’s called, and he just follows this couple in Cuba during COVID, and it’s black and white. It’s about this guy who hunts alligators to sell the meat or something.
And there’s a shot in it that’s like 20 minutes long of this guy getting an alligator, but the camera guy is in the water as well. I’m watching that, going “Fair fucking dues to you. There are alligators in those waters, and you’ve not moved the camera for 20 minutes.”
(L to R): Scarlett Johansson, Robbie Ryan and Noah Baumbach on the set of ‘Marriage Story’
Netflix
Of course, there’s One Battle After Another,which isphenomenal, absolutely inspiring. He’s a very Zeitgeist director. He knows what he’s doing.
And the other film I loved this year was Mark Jenkin’s Rose of Nevada. All shot on a Bolex and it looks amazing!
What advice would you give to young cinematographers starting out today?
I get this one a lot. I think: Just be enthusiastic. Always be filming. Don’t try and second second-guess what your path will be to get you to where you want to go. Just try and enjoy the work and try and meet with like-minded people.
That’s why I think colleges are so important, because you’re kind of immersed with a group of people all doing this for the first time, all learning together. You’ll bump into people and can bounce ideas off each other, and maybe start a collaboration. It’s a collaborative art form.
I still think film school was so fundamental for me. I was never a cinephile at all. I didn’t really watch films. I just loved making them. So I don’t think you need to know anything about other films. Just be instinctive and enjoy the process.
The fact that AI is coming along and might take away the most fun bit of filmmaking, which is being on a film set, makes me very sad. My advice would be: Make sure you’re out there shooting stuff and just having a laugh. It’s an enjoyable thing to do in life. That’s why I’m still doing it at my age.
The film, in which he plays a conspiracy theorist who kidnaps and tortures Emma Stone’s pharma CEO, believing her to be an alien, is the kind that might seem small in scope. On a certain level, it’s three people — the possibly insane mastermind Teddy (Plemons), his cousin and accomplice Don (Aidan Delbis) and their victim Michelle Fuller (Stone) — in a basement. And yet, in the hands of filmmaker Yorgos Lanthimos and his collaborators, it feels big in scope too, with a booming score, raw performances, grand themes about perceptions of reality and the human experiment and an ever-escalating tension as you try to figure out whom to believe.
“It’s a very entertaining film and a ride,” Stone said in an interview alongside her co-star. “It’s not this heavy meditation on something. There is a bit of absurdism and that stamp that he (Yorgos) puts on everything where there’s humor laced all throughout.”
“Bugonia” arrives in select theaters this weekend on a wave of good buzz and reviews after premiering at the Venice Film Festival. But it’s also coming into a theatrical marketplace that has been, at best, tough on art films and awards hopefuls, no matter how starry or well-reviewed.
Lanthimos’ films have broken through the noise before, especially when Stone is involved. “Poor Things” was hardly an assured box office hit, but managed to make over $117 million — over three times its production budget — by the end of its run.
“Bugonia” marks Stone’s fourth film with Lanthimos and Plemons’ second — they both recently appeared in his “Kinds of Kindness.” And they hope it breaks the current streak of art house fizzles.
Jesse Plemons and Emma Stone pose at the premiere of “Bugonia” in London, Friday, Oct. 10, 2025. (Photo by Scott A Garfitt/Invision/AP)
Jesse Plemons and Emma Stone pose at the premiere of “Bugonia” in London, Friday, Oct. 10, 2025. (Photo by Scott A Garfitt/Invision/AP)
“It’s a movie that feels made to be experienced in theaters,” Plemons said. “I’d like to talk to all the people out there right now and say, ‘You can do it. You can pause Netflix, and come back to it, but you should see this in a theater.’”
Stone chimed in, laughing: “He said it! He said the controversial thing!”
From ‘Save the Green Planet’ to ‘Bugonia’
“Bugonia” is based on a 2003 Korean movie called “Save the Green Planet!” which also blended elements of science fiction and black comedy in its satirical meditation on truth and corporate misdeeds. It was the era of the coronavirus lockdowns when the idea of making an English-language version took hold, with screenwriter Will Tracy (“Succession,” “The Menu”) behind the adaptation. In Tracy’s script, the setting would switch to the U.S. and the CEO would become a woman.
“Sometimes you make these big decisions like that and it’s not like there’s a lot of premeditation about why and gender politics and any of it,” Tracy said. “It just seemed interesting.”
The gender switch had been made before Lanthimos came on board three years ago, but it was the kind of choice that opened up a door for him to call one of his favorites: Stone.
“So much about the story was intriguing,” Stone said. “This sort of tightrope walk of what she’s being accused of. The tension between her and Teddy.”
Also, she said, there was something exciting about playing the kind of boss who makes big pronouncements about staff feeling free to leave at 5:30 p.m. — unless, of course, they have work to do.
Emma Stone in “Bugonia” (Atsushi Nishijima/Focus Features via AP)
Emma Stone in “Bugonia” (Atsushi Nishijima/Focus Features via AP)
Emma Stone, Aidan Delbis and Jesse Plemons in “Bugonia” (Atsushi Nishijima/Focus Features via AP)
Emma Stone, Aidan Delbis and Jesse Plemons in “Bugonia” (Atsushi Nishijima/Focus Features via AP)
“Speaking these sorts of corporate-trained platitudes was really fascinating, to learn how to sort of give the illusion of humanity and connection, but done in a way that’s obviously allowed through HR,” Stone said.
It was Lanthimos’ idea to make the title “Bugonia,” which comes from a Greek word referring to a belief that bees were born out of the carcass of a dead ox. Teddy was always a beekeeper on the side, but suddenly they had an apt extended metaphor to play around with, too.
The non-professional breakout star
At Teddy’s side throughout the ordeal is Don, who seems to have his own misgivings about the plan and causing Michelle pain, but whose first loyalty is to his cousin — the only person who seems to care about him. Lanthimos wanted to cast a non-professional, neurodivergent actor in the role and worked with casting director Jennifer Venditti, who had helped make a documentary about a neurodivergent kid, to find the right person.
Delbis, who is autistic, did not do any training before joining the cast at age 17. Some little changes to the script were made to reflect his way of speaking and his presence. But the point, Lanthimos said, was that “he would bring his own experience and perception and way of thinking and energy. And that was what was so priceless.”
Stavros Halkias, Aidan Delbis, Yorgos Lanthimos, Emma Stone, Alicia Silverstone and Jesse Plemons attend the premiere of “Bugonia” at The Museum of Modern Art on Tuesday, Oct. 21, 2025, in New York. (Photo by Evan Agostini/Invision/AP)
Stavros Halkias, Aidan Delbis, Yorgos Lanthimos, Emma Stone, Alicia Silverstone and Jesse Plemons attend the premiere of “Bugonia” at The Museum of Modern Art on Tuesday, Oct. 21, 2025, in New York. (Photo by Evan Agostini/Invision/AP)
It’s perhaps the most important relationship in the film, and Plemons said that he immediately felt bonded to Delbis.
“We just hit it off very quickly and very quickly he began to feel like my cousin that I wanted to protect and hang out with,” Plemons said.
Fighting for a vision
“Bugonia” is a surprisingly physical film, which everyone learned the hard way. Plemons and Stone worked with stunt coordinators for the big fights and the kidnapping scene. But she didn’t foresee just how much physicality was involved in being a captive, bloody, slathered in antihistamine cream and constantly trying to break free.
“Generally I think it was quite a challenge for everyone because it’s such a constrained film, just being in those few locations,” Lanthimos said. “We started forgetting what day it was, and if it was day or night outside.”
Plemons also had quite a bit of biking and running around for the exciting final 30 minutes of the film.
“Hats off to them for putting up with my writing,” Tracy said.
Emma Stone attends the premiere of “Bugonia” at The Museum of Modern Art on Tuesday, Oct. 21, 2025, in New York. (Photo by Evan Agostini/Invision/AP)
Emma Stone attends the premiere of “Bugonia” at The Museum of Modern Art on Tuesday, Oct. 21, 2025, in New York. (Photo by Evan Agostini/Invision/AP)
Stone, who also produced, remembered filming a scene one night in which she’s walking barefoot through a parking lot with ambulances all around her and giving Tracy some grief. What sounded fairly straightforward took on a lot of complications because they were shooting in England and the vehicles needed to be American.
“I was like, ‘You were just sitting there in your room, and you wrote one sentence: Michelle limps across the parking and there are ambulances,’” Stone said. “It was just like, wow must be nice! We spent a lot of money on that one line you wrote. You could have cut it!” Stone said.
She is mostly kidding. It might have been expensive, but they still did the shot. As a producer, Stone says she wants nothing more than to protect the integrity of a film, whether she’s acting in it or not.
“The American film system is really tricky with notes and studios and so many things that come in the way of people being able to realize that vision in the fullest capacity,” Stone said. “There’s no better feeling than getting to help facilitate someone bringing their story to life in the fullest way that they can imagine it being, and trying to be their advocate throughout every step of the process.”
Dakota Johnson tried out a new side gig on Friday night, serving as moderator for a Bugoniaconversation with Emma Stone, Jesse Plemons and director Yorgos Lanthimos — while also teasingly suggesting herself for the filmmaker’s next project.
Johnson said she had seen Bugonia — which follows two conspiracy-obsessed men who kidnap a major CEO when they become convinced that she’s an alien who wants to destroy Earth — twice in the past 24 hours, but repeatedly told the crowd that she was “the wrong person” to be moderating. “This is not going to be a good interview. I just want you guys to be aware I’m not good at this. I don’t know why I was asked but here we are,” she said to laughs.
As Johnson weeded through questions on her phone, she brought up the fact that this is Lanthimos’ fourth film with Stone, following The Favourite, Poor Things and Kinds of Kindness. “Are you aware that there are other actresses, that are really talented, maybe even very close by?” she joked, as Stone chimed in, “What! No, right?,” while looking at the filmmaker. She turned back to Johnson and said, “No, go for it, do your pitch, work on your pitch.” The Materialists star admitted, “I already did and it didn’t work, remember? You were there,” as Stone laughed.
Johnson also praised Stone for shaving her head for the film and noted how she is covered in skin cream or blood for the majority of the movie. “Who on Earth looks so beautiful with a shaved head covered in blood?” she mused, while Stone joked back, “You’re flirting.”
Plemons also spoke about his own hair journey, as he wore extensions to play his conspiracy theorist character. “Hair was a big thing, the losing of the hair and then the gaining of the hair — there was a while there where when I first got any extensions in, I would come up to Yorgos and was maybe like experimenting with some of the physicality and every time he would see me, he would just laugh,” the actor remembered. “I was like, I don’t know if this is good?”
Later in the chat, Stone commented on the film’s big twist ending, noting how “I had never played a character that I thought about the audience seeing it for the second time before. Would it still make sense? Would it be able to track through if you were watching the film again, knowing what you know — like I did after reading the script for the first time — and have more to give or be interesting in some way? I don’t know that that was effective, but it was a really fun challenge.”
Johnson closed out the conversation by declaring, “I regret doing this. I’ll never do it again. [Stone] warned me, but I had said yes already. Is there anything you guys would like to say before this terrible interview is over?”
Plemons insisted, “It really hasn’t been that bad,” as Lanthimos teased, “I think you’re the third best moderator that we’ve had,” on a night when they were doing several chats. Johnson replied, “That’s huge. I’ll come on the road.”
If you think gifts for movie lovers begin and end with Blu-Rays and cineplex gift cards, think again. There’s lots of ways to get creative (and impress) the film fan in your life.
For the very forward-thinking, you could help the Christopher Nolan fan in your life brush up on “The Odyssey” before next July with Emily Wilson’s translation (at bookstores.)
Here are a few of our other favorite finds this holiday season for all kinds of movie fans.
The ultimate Wes Anderson box set
The Criterion Collection’s 20-disc Wes Anderson Archive box set is an investment for the true diehard. Anchored around 10 films over the past 25 years, from “Bottle Rocket” through “The French Dispatch,” the mammoth package includes new 4K masters, over 25 hours of special features, and 10 illustrated, chicly clothbound books, as well as essays from the likes of Martin Scorsese and James L. Brooks. $399.96.
Mise en Scènt candles
Home movie nights need the right atmosphere, and this female-owned, Brooklyn-based company creates (and hand pours) candles inspired by favorite movies. Their bestselling — and sometimes out of stock — “Old Hollywood” candle will bring you back to the silver screen’s golden age with the smell of “deep, smoky and worn-in leather,” which might be ideal with TCM playing in the background. The “Rom Com” scent evokes the feeling of a “meet-cute in a grocery aisle” with something clean, fresh and floral (maybe for watching “Jane Austen Wrecked My Life” or “Materialists” ). There’s also a “French New Wave” candle that would work well with Richard Linklater’s “Nouvelle Vague.” Other scents include “Mystery,” “Fantasy,” “Macabre,” “Villain Era,” “Bad Movie” and “Main Character.” Starting at $24.
Baby’s first movie book
These adorable and beautifully illustrated board books take parents and kids on a journey through genres, from “My First Hollywood Musical” and “My First Sci-Fi Movie” to the very niche “My First Giallo Horror” and “My First Yakuza Movie.” There are also three box sets available for $45 each. Oscar-winning “Anora” filmmaker Sean Baker called them his “go-to gifts for new parents.” From ’lil cinephile. Starting at $15.
Pajamas fit for a KPop Demon Hunter
Rumi’s “choo choo” pajama pants would make a cozy gift for days when you find yourself chanting “Couch! Couch! Couch!” Don’t understand what any of that means? Don’t worry, the “KPop Demon Hunters” fan in your life will. Available from Netflix. $56.95.
A Roger Deakins memoir
Even if you don’t know the name Roger Deakins you certainly know his work — simply put, he’s one of the greatest working cinematographers in the business. His credits include “Fargo,” “The Big Lebowski,” “No Country for Old Men,” “Sicario,” “Skyfall” and “1917.” Fittingly, his memoir “Reflections: On Cinematography” is uniquely visual, with never-before-seen storyboards, sketches and diagrams. The 76-year-old Oscar winner also looks back on his life, his early love of photography and how he found his way into 50 years of moviemaking, where he’d find longstanding partnerships with some of the great auteurs, from the Coen brothers to Sam Mendes and Denis Villeneuve. Hachette Book Group. $45.
An alternative streamer for cinephiles
If Netflix is too pedestrian for the cinephile in your life, the Kino Film Collection offers a robust and rotating lineup of classic and current art house and indie films. Categories include Cannes Favorites (like Yorgos Lanthimos’ “Dogtooth”), Classics (like “The General,” “Metropolis” and “Nosferatu”) and New York Times Critics’ Picks (like Jafar Panahi’s “Taxi” and Agnieszka Holland’s “Green Border”). At $5.99 a month or $59.99 year, it’s also less expensive than the Criterion Channel ($10.99/month, $99/year) and Mubi ($14.99/month, $119.88/year).
The Celluloid card game
Who’s the biggest film buff in your family or group of friends? This clever card game might have the answer for you. Each Celluloid card contains prompts (like location, character and action) and you have to pick a movie that fits as many cards as possible. $19.
An expressionistic dive into Chloé Zhao’s ‘Hamnet’
Oscar-winning filmmaker Chloé Zhao, actor Jessie Buckley and photographer Agata Grzybowska collaborated on a gorgeous coffee-table book about “Hamnet,” opening in theaters in limited release on Nov. 27 and expected to be a major Oscar contender. The film, based on Maggie O’Farrell’s story, which won the National Book Critics Circle prize for fiction, imagines the circumstances around the death of William Shakespeare’s 11-year-old son and how it may have influenced the writing of “Hamlet.” The coffee-table book, called “Even as a Shadow, Even as a Dream,” is not a making-of, or behind-the-scenes look in any conventional sense, but an otherworldly, haunting companion piece of carefully chosen images and words. Mack books. $40.
Cinematographer Robbie Ryan’s collaboration with Yorgos Lanthimos has always been defined by technical daring and dark humor, and “Bugonia” is no exception. In their latest project — a surreal sci-fi tale “about bees and a basement,” as Ryan recalls — the pair leaned into both analog imperfection and formal precision to create a visual world that feels unsettlingly alive.
That sense of unease extends to the story itself: “Bugonia” buzzes with eerie tension as Michelle (Emma Stone), a sharp-tongued pharma CEO, is kidnapped by Teddy (Jesse Plemons) and his cousin Don (Aidan Delbis), who demand she confess to being an alien. Held captive in a shadowy basement, Michelle’s ordeal blurs the line between paranoia and revelation on Teddy’s remote ranch, where his hive of bees becomes a haunting metaphor for control.
From the start, Ryan and Lanthimos were determined to push the boundaries of large-format film. They chose to shoot “Bugonia” on VistaVision cameras — specifically the Wilcam W11 and the Beaucam — using prototype lenses developed by Dan Sasaki, nicknamed “GW lenses” after the late cinematographer, Gordon Willis. The combination produced extraordinary resolution and texture, but also a fair share of headaches. “The camera pushes the film horizontally through the gate instead of vertically,” Ryan explained, “so you get brand new problems that I didn’t know existed, which is camera jams. We ended up using it in the film. It’s interesting looking.”
Lanthimos’ signature low-angle framing returns here, grounding the film in a subtly distorted perspective that keeps viewers off balance. Speaking with Variety, for Inside the Frame, Ryan said, “If there’s ever a shot at normal height.” He added, “He’ll say, ‘What’s this all about? This is horrible.’” Movement, too, is meticulously choreographed: “Yorgos’ approach to filmmaking is if somebody’s moving, the camera should be moving; if they stop, you stop. The timing is very precise.”
One of the film’s standout moments — the early kidnapping sequence — captures that precision and playfulness. Shot over the first days of production, the scene was rigged with cameras on the bonnet of a G-Wagon, capturing chaos as Emma Stone’s character fights back against her would-be captors. Despite a few technical hiccups (“the speed bumps made [the camera] shake and jam”), the sequence embodies Lanthimos’ blend of absurdity and tension. Ryan describes it as “observational,” filmed mostly in wide shots that let the awkward clumsiness of the attack play out in real time.
Lighting, as usual for Lanthimos, leaned heavily toward the natural. “He tends not to want film lighting if he can get away with it,” Ryan said, admitting he snuck in a small light for one car shot out of fear that the reflections would obscure Stone’s face. “He probably would’ve given out to me for that,” he added with a grin.
Perhaps the most striking shot in the kidnapping scene, filmed through the glass of Stone’s character’s modern home and across her indoor pool, was born from improvisation. A crane setup intended for a cut scene became a new vantage point.
“Yorgos just said, ‘Why don’t we try the attack from inside over the pool?’” Ryan recalled. The result is a quietly surreal image that encapsulates the film’s tone: brutal yet darkly funny.
In “Bugonia,” the imperfections of vintage cameras, the precision of Lanthimos’ direction, and Ryan’s instinct for how the camera should move fuse into something wholly unique. “Anytime I work with Yorgos,” Ryan reflected, “I feel like an audience member. I never know what’s coming next.”
Yorgos Lanthimos’ Bugonia is a film that exists somewhere between satire, science fiction, and psychological thriller and true to the Greek auteur’s temperament, it refuses to pick a lane. The director, known for his surreal dissections of human behaviour in The Favourite and Poor Things, reimagines the 2003 South Korean cult classic Save the Green Planet! for a modern audience. The result is a film that is both audacious and uneven, equal parts allegory and absurdity.
The story follows two disillusioned men, Teddy Gatz (Jesse Plemons) and Don (Aidan Delbis), his neurodivergent cousin, convinced that a powerful pharmaceutical CEO, Michelle Fuller, played by Emma Stone, is, in fact, an alien orchestrating humanity’s demise. Acting on their paranoid conviction, they abduct her and hold her captive in a basement, hoping to extract a confession that could “save the planet.” What follows is a strange, often disturbing tug of war between delusion and truth, power and helplessness, rendered with Lanthimos’ signature blend of deadpan humour and unnerving precision.
The director has worked once again with long-time collaborator, cinematographer Robbie Ryan, who has used wide-angle lenses, one-point perspectives and exaggerated depth of field to create a world that feels both clinical and grotesque. The film is shot in VistaVision, giving its carefully composed frames a heightened sense of visual distortion. Every space seems too bright, every face too close, every pause too long. It’s a movie built on discomfort, using form as a mirror to its fractured themes.
At the heart of this disorienting narrative are two magnetic performances. Emma Stone, continuing her fruitful collaboration with Lanthimos, turns the cool composure of a corporate titan into something eerie and unreadable. Her role demands restraint and ambiguity and she excels on all fronts. Another Oscar nomination seems to be on her way. Whether she’s a manipulative CEO or an extraterrestrial predator is never entirely clear and that’s exactly the point.
Opposite her, Jesse Plemons delivers a career-best performance as the unhinged beekeeper-turned-conspiracy theorist. He embodies his character’s paranoia with terrifying sincerity, balancing absurd humour with deep tragedy. Plemons steals the show, grounding the film’s surreal energy in something painfully recognisable, the modern paranoia that fuels online misinformation and distrust. Aidan Delbis is himself autistic and hence his act rings with lived-in truth.
Thematically, Bugonia dives into various terrains: environmental collapse, corporate greed, and the seductive logic of conspiracy theories. It’s a film about power structures and the fragile human need to find meaning in chaos. In that sense, it feels eerily reflective of our own moment, where truth has become a matter of belief and belief a weapon of survival. Lanthimos doesn’t spoon-feed his audience answers but crafts a cinematic space where absurdity feels like the only rational response to the world.
Yet for all its ambition, Bugonia is not without flaws. The middle act, dominated by the hostage scenario, begins to drag under the weight of its own repetition. The tonal shifts from farce to horror to philosophical reflection can feel jarring, even indulgent. The film raises questions about faith, power and truth, but leaves them suspended, unresolved, perhaps intentionally so.
Ultimately, Bugonia is a film that dares you to either engage or walk away. It’s not meant for those seeking tidy endings, straight narratives or moral clarity. But for viewers willing to surrender to Lanthimos’ warped worldview, it offers a biting, funny, and often haunting reflection of contemporary anxieties. Like the best of his work, it finds beauty in the bizarre and discomfort in the familiar.
In the end, Bugonia may not convert anyone who isn’t already in Lanthimos’ corner. But for those attuned to his peculiar rhythm, it stands as another fascinating, if imperfect, entry in a filmography obsessed with human delusion and the strange, buzzing noise it makes when confronted with the truth. Just like the much-loved bees, so central to the film. The end will shock you for sure. But the absurdity of the human condition, even in its collapse, will bring a smile as well. Are we really needed in this world to keep? Wouldn’t it fare better without us? Such questions will haunt you for sure, much after the end credits roll away.
When the director of the modern weird, Yorgos Lanthimos, teamed up with frequent collaborator and muse Emma Stone on their wild, conspiratorial environmental-extraterrestrial film, Bugonia, they drew inspiration from a little-known source: a 2003 Korean film called Save the Green Planet. If you walked away from Lanthimos’ deliciously odd and of-the-moment movie, wondering if it could’ve stood to be even more bizarre, its progenitor is definitely worth checking out.
Directed by Jang Joon-hwan, Save the Green Planet’s premise, which writer Will Tracy adapted for Bugonia, closely informs its Western remake. That said, unlike Bugonia, which lets you coast in cold on the promise that Lanthimos and Stone are cooking up another slow-burn oddity, Save the Green Planet doesn’t wait to get weird. It does it from frame one.
It frontloads its madness, declaring its brand of environmentalism to be less Greta Thunberg and more Giorgio Tsoukalos, driven by a dead-serious belief in ancient aliens from Andromeda. It centers on Lee Byeong-gu (Shin Ha-kyun), a young man who abducts Kang Man-shik (Baek Yoon-sik), a top Korean executive, believing he’s part of an insidious alien reptilian invasion trying to take over Earth while operating under the guise of the pharmaceutical industry.
Like any fringe conspiracy theory, the story soon escalates; Byeong-gu conducts grueling experiments on Man-shik in his secluded basement torture chamber/film studio and tries to extract a confession out of the exec.
Given Bugonia’s conceit as a remake of Save the Green Planet, it almost goes without saying that there are small, apparent differences between the two films. Instead of Bugonia‘s bumbling pseudo-manipulative brother duo of the redpilled Teddy (Jesse Plemons) and bright-eyed and loyal-to-a-fault Don (Aidan Delbis), who threaten to force the truth out of Stone’s Amazon-esque executive Michelle Fuller, Byeong-gu works hand-in-hand with his girlfriend, the charming, spacey Su-ni (Hwang Jeong-min). They’re unified in their effort to extract a confession from Man-shik, whom they believe is intergalactic royalty, by any means necessary.
Other notable differences include the fact that Bugonia‘s scene-stealing cop, Stavros Halkias’ Casey, is mainly there for Nathan Fielder-coded awkward conversational laughs, while Save the Green Planet has a more developed B-plot with seasoned Detective Choo (Lee Jae-yong) and green Detective Kim (Lee Joo-hyun) as they track Byeong-gu and piece together the deep-seated psychological motivations behind his fringe machinations.
Lanthimos’ Bugonia is delightfully chaotic, dry-humored, and utterly captivating—especially with wide shots letting Plemons and Stone chew the scenery—but it left me with the nagging feeling that it could’ve been even weirder on the whole. It was plenty bizarre from start to finish, with an almost blank check assurance that whether Teddy’s conspiracy proved true or false, an explosively entertaining climax was guaranteed. Still, it elicited more reactionary “aha!” laughs rather than “oh wtf” mouth-agape smirks and raised-eyebrow gawking at the weirdness it committed to celluloid. Save the Green Planet delivers that exact brand of strangeness in excess.
Despite its wild tone, whipping between intense Korean dramas like Kim Jee-won’s I Saw the Devil and the darkly comedic yet ultra-violent style of Takashi Miike’s Ichi the Killer, Jang keeps his conspiratorial, manic thriller dream afloat without seeming tonally dissonant. If anything, the film reveals layers like an infinite matryoshka doll, with more spectacle and suspense to show in spades, in tandem with its gruesome, Saw-like traps. The director’s erratic, experimental, and expressive handheld camerawork and naturalistic framing create a kind of visual synesthesia—blurring mood and meaning to create some of the wildest swings between slapstick absurdity and gut-punch drama ever committed to celluloid.
One of my favorite scenes is Byeong-gu’s full-blown Telltale Heart spiral, where he scrambles to hide the still-breathing evidence of his botched abduction. The undercover inspector drops by for a casual drink and chat about aliens, unknowingly leaning against the very CCTV broadcasting Man-shik—crucified in the basement dungeon, clear as day. Meanwhile, Man-shik’s hand creeps out from a hidden latch, clawing desperately at the inspector’s boot, only for Byeong-gu to stomp it down mid-sentence, all while trying to pass as a normal guy who isn’t sweating bullets at all over his destiny as humanity’s savior, having his DIY makeshift toilet Andromedan torture device unearthed.
Interwoven with this comedy of errors, Su-ni’s on some random bullshit, dressing up her Barbie doll while monitoring Man-shik, or walking a tightrope between his torture sessions and bathroom breaks. Either that or you’re witnessing Byeong-gu’s delusions—daydreaming himself as a kung fu hero with all the wire-performing skill of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon as he pirouettes through the air and high-kicks his meth dealer. The film plays like a lucid acid trip where dreams and reality, revelation and hallucination, teeter with each subsequent scene. All the while, the film refuses to reveal which is which.
Save the Green Planet feels less cynical than its 2025 remake and also more sincere, even as it oscillates between overt goofiness and oppressively serious tones. Bugonia plays like a prescient black comedy that both sides its way through modern paranoia—laughing equally at the 4Chan-adjacent, QAnon-flavored conspiracists and the woke-pandering corporate execs who speak in syrupy platitudes about inclusivity while quietly wringing every last drop of labor from their workers before clock-out (making sure never to explicitly call it overtime). The satire lands easier on the fringe weirdos, who’ve long been the internet’s favorite punching bag, while the executive class gets the safer treatment: flanderized, ironic, and meta-commentary-lite.
Lanthimos’ version lets the shoe drop either way, leaving you satisfied whether the corporation is alien or not. You even feel a flicker of sympathy for Stone’s Michelle Fuller—her emotionally violent corpo-speak is so gently antagonistic it feels more like a parody of culture than a critique of character. For American audiences, Bugonia is a laugh at the corrosive ideological split of Teddy: the radical environmentalist who lost the forest for the trees to the echo-chambered conspiracist who, perhaps, never saw the forest to begin with.
Save the Green Planet, by contrast, doesn’t just gesture at corporate evil—it goes all-in on it. Despite Byeong-gui’s absurdity, you can’t help but root for him. Teddy’s chaotic misadventures, meanwhile, feel more like a car crash waiting to happen, keeping you on the edge of your seat to see how much worse his misadventurous situation can get.
Western remakes often carry the burden of standing on the shoulders of giants, especially amid the steady outpouring of adaptations from Asian cinema. As Quentin Tarantino once riffed, “Great artists steal. They don’t do homages,” noting that he steals from every single movie ever made. The same argument can be made for Western remakes, which Bugonia now joins in the ranks of with frequent homage-payer Spike Lee’s Highest 2 Lowest—a skinnier example of a remake that, despite Denzel Washington’s star power, can’t quite go toe-to-toe with Akira Kurosawa’s original. Some remakes simply don’t have arms long enough to box in the same weight class as the source.
Pointing this out isn’t a dig at Bugonia or other remakes—it’s to trace how directors like Lee and Lanthimos zero in on a single thread of the original and amplify it to fit their own cinematic musings, whether it’s AI dread in the arts, conspiracy spirals, or the slow rot of corporate doublespeak to iron them over.
These films stand shoulder to shoulder with other 2025 anxiety-laden time capsules like Ari Aster’s Eddington and Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another—works steeped in the paranoia of being terminally online, politically scrambled, and spiritually exhausted. Jang did the same with Save the Green Planet, but louder and weirder, for 2003’s anxieties and his own ethos. And he did so by stealing explicitly.
Jang mines the internet for wild celebrity sex-alien rumors and spoofs 2001: A Space Odyssey‘s apes and obelisk. More pointedly, he flips Misery‘s dynamic, asking what his chimera of a story might look like from the abductor’s point of view. It’s less plot theft and more joy theft, if there ever was a term. A kind of genre larceny that Lanthimos channels too, less brazenly but just as intentionally in Bugonia. It’s a quality that makes both films different enough to walk away with entirely different takeaways despite, ultimately, being the same story.
There was a gimmicky movie screening to see The Long Walk, and now the upcoming Bugoniais doing one of its own.
Anyone living in LA who wants to see Yorgos Lanthimos’ absurdist comedy before everyone else can do so on Monday, October 20 at the Culver Theater at 8 PM. Tickets are free, but there’s a catch: the screening’s for “anyone who is bald, or willing to become bald”—so if you wanna get into the first-come, first-serve screening, you gotta be bald to get in. Show up with hair, and there’ll be an on-site barber starting at 6 PM who you’ll have to let chop it all off to get in. Things don’t stop there: Focus is going to film some of the screening and use it for promotional purposes, similar to commercials for horror movies.
Based on the South Korean film Save the Green Planet!, Bugonia stars Emma Stone as Michelle, a pharmaceutical CEO kidnapped by Teddy (Jesse Plemons) and Don (Aidan Delbis). Conspiracy-pilled as hell, the two have it in their heads that Michelle’s actually an alien who’s come to destroy Earth and while they’ve got her captive, shave her head so she can’t contact her ship. (No, really.) Stone genuinely went bald for the role and if it helps, she called it pretty great back in August to not have her hair.
For everyone else, you can see Bugonia with your hair intact when it hits theaters Friday, October 24.
The Oscar-nominated filmmaker, director of movies The Favourite, Poor Things and Kinds of Kindness, jokingly told BFI London Film Festival attendees on Saturday that he’s willing to send out a computer-generated avatar of himself if it helps him get out of promotional duties.
Lanthimos spoke with Succession creator Jesse Armstrong the day after the U.K. premiere of his latest thriller, Bugonia, starring Emma Stone as a powerful CEO who is kidnapped by two conspiracy-obsessed men, played by Jesse Plemons and Aidan Delbis, convinced she is an alien about to destroy Earth.
“I have mixed feelings about… figuring out what the best way to do it is, because [producers] spend a lot of money and they do have to make it back,” Lanthimos began when asked if he cares about the commercial success of his features. “It’s not my passion to go around being photographed and tell people stuff. It’s almost the same amount of time as making a film — you spend four to six months filming, six months editing and then you have, like, six months going around promoting the film.”
He continued about the repetitive nature of a film’s press run: “Isn’t there another way? You sit down with your people and they say, [You need to do] this interview, this interview. Can’t you just take out some of them? Do I have to do all of them and say the same thing a thousand times? By the middle of the day, I won’t remember the things I’ve said. I’m looking at people like, ‘Did I tell you this?’” It’s a big part of it, I understand… But especially now with technology, you capture something and everyone has it! Why do I have to do it a million times?”
As audience members erupted with laughter, the director joked, “I mean, AI… I’ll make an avatar and send it out. That sounds really opposite to my beliefs [about AI]!”
Armstrong quipped back: “First you want a dictatorship and now you want an AI version of yourself to talk about your films.” The award-winning Brit writer was referring to earlier in the session when Lanthimos told Armstrong he believes the world needs a benevolent dictator to combat the far-right dominating the world’s current political landscape. “The way things are going, [we have] ones that are doing the bad things, but [we need] a dictator who does good things for the people.”
Lanthimos clarified: “Because it seems like, whatever you call it, maybe the left, they haven’t found a way to do this. You need someone who will take responsibility and go: ‘We’re going to do the good things.’”
Across the session, the men covered a myriad of topics including how Lanthimos made films in the wake of the 2008 financial crash — which hit Lanthimos’ native Greece particularly hard — and finding creative freedom in moving to the U.K. to make English-language films.
Stone, in particular, is already garnering more awards buzz for Bugonia only two years after her Oscar win for Poor Things.
It was last summer when Focus Features announced Bugonia, the latest film from director Yorgos Lanthimos. That alone is enough to get anyone excited, as Lanthimos has long established himself as a filmmaker whose work you turn up to, no matter what. But then, the film had this tagline, and instantly, we were hooked: “Two conspiracy-obsessed young men kidnap the high-powered CEO of a major company, convinced that she is an alien intent on destroying planet Earth.” Yes, please, and thank you.
Written by Will Tracy, based on a 2003 South Korean film called Save the Green Planet, Bugonia stars Emma Stone as the CEO and Jesse Plemons and Aidan Delbis as the conspiracy nuts. It opens in limited release on October 24 before expanding wide on October 31. And while we’ve seen several trailers so far, as well as some mostly stellar reviews, this latest one leans heavily into that wildly intriguing question. Is Emma Stone an alien?
We love the repetition in this trailer, as well as the catchy Chappell Roan beats, which were also used in the previous one. But it’s that ending, where Plemons forces Stone to say the words that he wants to hear, that really gets us. It not only speaks to the mystery of the film, but it also speaks to life as we know it these days. A world where people believe what they want to believe, no matter what, and live to be validated, even if it’s not true. Does Plemons even care if she’s actually an alien? Or does he just want her to say it?
You have to think that’s one of the big reasons Lanthimos wants to tackle this subject. This idea, which originated over 20 years ago, feels as pertinent now as ever. Then you throw a two-time Oscar winner into the lead role, opposite an actor who is sure to have an Oscar before long, and you’ve really got something cooking.
Tickets for Bugonia are on sale now. Are you going to be checking it out?
Yorgos Lanthimos’s Bugonia began life as a remake of the 2003 South Korean film Save the Green Planet!, and it retains the broad outlines of that strange classic. But it also feels like Lanthimos through and through, albeit with the strangest of twists: It’s the first picture of his populated by characters who feel like they exist in the real world, people you could run into if you walked out the door. The power of Lanthimos’s work has always come from his ability to provide surreal but dead-on metaphors that take on lives of their own: a futuristic resort where one must debase oneself to find a mate, in The Lobster; or a family where the parents have trained their kids to accept absurdities as reality, in Dogtooth. With Bugonia, it feels like he’s entered our world at last, at least for a while. Which also makes it maybe the saddest film he’s ever made.
Bugonia, which premieres at the Venice Film Festival and will release in theaters in October, is basically a two-hander, albeit with three central characters. Teddy (Jesse Plemons) and his neurodivergent cousin Donald (played by newcomer Aiden Delbis) live in a ramshackle house in the woods where they keep bees and are methodically preparing for a shocking act: They will kidnap high-powered, slick-suited pharmaceutical-company executive Michelle (Emma Stone) and hold her hostage until she confesses that she’s an alien who has been sent to experiment on humans. “Welcome to the headquarters of the human resistance,” they declare after shaving her head and taking off her blindfold. Teddy wants Michelle to contact her mothership and take them to her queen, with whom he intends to negotiate for the aliens’ withdrawal from Earth.
Teddy has done his research. He’s studied all the YouTube videos and photos and he’s gathered all the necessary information, and he knows exactly what these aliens are and what their ships look like; the good-natured though not entirely convinced Donald goes along with him out of loyalty and love, and also because Teddy seems like the one person who treats him as an equal. Michelle, meanwhile, is at a loss to how to react: She’s a tough, wealthy power player, the kind of person who does martial arts in the morning and doesn’t take any shit from anyone. And she has no idea how she’s going to convince these kooks to let her go.
Lanthimos has guided multiple actors, including these, to some of the best performances of their careers (Stone won an Oscar for 2023’s Poor Things, and Plemons won the Best Actor award at Cannes for Kinds of Kindness last year), so it seems weird to say that Bugonia is also his first film to feel like a true showcase for his stars. But it is: The movie unfolds as a series of confrontations between Teddy and Michelle, her increasingly insistent desperation crashing against the rocks of his languorous immovability. Stone is remarkable (when is she not?), emotionally wriggling like a bug pinned to a wall, trying different tactics with this psycho. First, she’s calm and controlled and confident; then, she tries kindness and pliancy. Plemons’s laid-back confidence is bone-chilling initially. But he also has to fuel our ire, earn our pathos, and maybe even provoke some twinges of solidarity. The characters in Lanthimos’s films don’t really go on traditional emotional journeys. We, the audience, do.
The director’s work has always turned on humiliation and power trips. (Think of The Favourite and how beyond all its ornate rituals and ironclad hierarchies, the line between power and disgrace remained so tenuous.) Bugonia is no different. If what Teddy is saying is true, Michelle would be a more powerful being than he could ever dream of. And yet, he needs it to be true. He needs to explain his own powerlessness, even as he seemingly holds her life in his hands. If she is, in fact, an emissary from an alien race, then the degradations of his life will finally make sense. “We are not steering the ship, Don,” he tells his cousin. “They are.” It’s hard not to sense the slightest bit of hope amid all that outrage.
Gradually, we learn what lies at the root of all this. Surreal flashbacks show us how Teddy’s ill mom (Alicia Silverstone) suffered at the hands of Michelle’s company, how the empty corporate platitudes offered in exchange for his family’s horror merely confirmed his belief that there was more to what was being said and what had been done. Bugonia’s narrative trajectory is, on one level, a predictable but resonant one, as we slowly learn to accept Teddy’s irrational actions as a response to a fundamentally irrational world. But we also see that the only thing that will lead to resolution and a way out of this mess is, well, more humiliation.
So, that describes most of the movie. Bugonia heads in, let’s say, a different direction as it reaches its conclusion. (If you’ve seen Save the Green Planet!, you’ll know where it’s going.) While these developments aren’t exactly new or shocking — some viewers will probably find them predictable — they actually bring the world of this film further into Lanthimos-land. His style is Olympian on the surface, the ironic detachment of his pictures casting a cold, curious eye at humanity’s follies and derangements. But this coolness is a ruse, and he always lets the sadness peek through, making it clear that he is, after all, one of us. By the time Bugonia is over, with a series of beautiful and haunting images that seem to come out of nowhere, we understand that beneath its bemused dispassion lies a deep longing for connection. Early in the film, Teddy looks at his dying bees and sees similarities with humanity: “A dead colony atomized in a trillion directions with no way home again.” By the end, it’s clear the director has seen the same thing.
“The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power” returning for its second season and Adam Sandler’s first comedy special since 2018 are some of the new television, films, music and games headed to a device near you.
Also among the streaming offerings worth your time as selected by The Associated Press’ entertainment journalists: John Legend offers his first-ever children’s album, season four of “Only Murders in the Building” shifts to Los Angeles and DJ and dance producer Zedd is back with an album after nearly a decade.
NEW MOVIES TO STREAM
— “The Fall Guy” is finally coming to Peacock, where it will be streaming starting Friday, Aug. 30, alongside an “extended cut” version. It might not have reached the blockbuster heights the studio dreamed about during its theatrical run, but it’s pure delight: A comedy, action, romance that soars thanks to the charisma of its stars. Based on the 1980s Lee Majors television series (he gets a cameo), the film features Ryan Gosling as a stunt man, Emily Blunt as his director and dream girl, Aaron Taylor-Johnson as an egotistical movie star and “Ted Lasso’s” Hannah Waddingham as a Diet Coke slurping producer.
— Ishana Night Shyamalan’s thriller, “The Watchers,” in which Dakota Fanning plays an artist stranded in western Ireland where mysterious creatures lurk and stalk in the night, begins streaming on MAX on Friday, Aug. 30.
— Emma Stone gives a performance (and interpretive dance) worth watching in “ Kinds of Kindness,” her latest collaboration with Yorgos Lanthimos fresh on the heels of her Oscar-winning turn in “Poor Things.” The film, streaming on Hulu on Friday, Aug. 30, is a triptych with a big ensemble cast including Willem Dafoe, Jesse Plemons (who won a prize for his performance at Cannes), Hong Chau, Margaret Qualley, Mamoudou Athie and Joe Alwyn. Jocelyn Noveck, in her Associated Press review, described it as “a meditation on our free will and the ways we willingly forfeit it to others — in the workplace, at home, and in religion.” Noveck wrote that the “Stone-Lanthimos pairing… is continuing to nurture an aspect of Stone’s talents that increasingly sets her apart: Her fearlessness and the obvious joy she derives from it.”
— Somehow the Yorgos Lanthimos film is not the most eccentric new streaming offering this week. That title goes to “ Sasquatch Sunset,” Nathan and David Zellner’s experimental film about a family of sasquatches just living their lives. Starring an essentially unrecognizable Jesse Eisenberg and Riley Keough (in addition to Nathan Zellner), this Sundance curiosity begins streaming on Paramount+ on Monday. In his review for the AP, Mark Kennedy wrote that it is “a bewildering 90-minute, narrator-less and wordless experiment that’s as audacious as it is infuriating. It’s not clear if everyone was high making it or we should be while watching it.”
— DJ and dance producer Zedd is back with an album after nearly a decade, “Telos.” The first single is the appropriately titled “Out of Time” featuring Bea Miller, a dreamy tune with atmospheric strings that builds into a dancefloor banger. Zedd has revealed that he started writing “Out Of Time” way back in 2015 but was never able to finish it. That changed with Bea — “her voice added an emotional depth that completed the song. ‘Out Of Time’ really encapsulates the DNA of the Telos album, which is why I chose it to be the song that introduces this new era,” he says.
— If you’re into a slower change of pace, check out John Legend, who releases his first children’s album, “My Favorite Dream,” on Friday, Aug. 30. It’s produced by the chamber pop polymath Sufjan Stevens and centers on universal themes like love, safety, family and dreams across nine original tracks, two covers, a solo piano track and three bonus covers of Fisher-Price songs.
— Get ready for a blast of K-pop — on your television. Apple TV+ has the six part documentary “K-Pop Idols,” a behind-the-scenes look at the highly competitive reality of K-pop stardom, starting Friday, Aug. 30. It features Jessi, CRAVITY and BLACKSWAN as they learn choreography and pull everything together to seize the stage. Producers say the series “follows the superstars through trials and triumphs, breaking down cultural and musical barriers in K-pop with passion, creativity and determination as they chase their dreams.”
— RZA takes a sharp turn as a classical composer with the album “A Ballet Through Mud.” The composition made its debut in the form of a ballet last year, performed by the Colorado Symphony Orchestra. Composed and scored by the Wu-Tang Clan star, the piece mirrors his journey from growing up in the projects in New York City to famous artist, “weaving in tales of love, loss, exploration, Buddhist monks, and a journey ‘through mud.‘” RZA says he began the project early in the pandemic after rediscovering notebooks full of lyrics he had written as a teenager. “The inspiration for ‘A Ballet Through Mud’ comes from my earliest creative output as a teenager, but its themes are universal — love, exploration, and adventure,” he says.
— Adam Sandler has the feels in his new Netflix special “Adam Sandler: Love You” featuring his standup and trademark comedy songs. It’s directed by Josh Safdie who — with his brother Benny — co-directed Sandler in the 2019 movie “Uncut Gems.” “Love You” is Sandler’s first comedy special since 2018. It premieres Tuesday on Netflix.
— Charles, Oliver and Mabel (Steve Martin, Martin Short and Selena Gomez) head to Los Angeles in season four of “Only Murders in the Building,” because their podcast is being turned into a film. Their Hollywood life is interrupted when another murder occurs, meaning the trio has a new case to cover. Eugene Levy, Zach Galifianakis and Eva Longoria join the cast. “Only Murders in the Building” premieres Tuesday on Hulu.
— A new animated series in the “Terminator” universe comes to Netflix on Thursday. It follows new characters voiced by “House of the Dragon” actor Sonoya Mizuno, Timothy Olyphant, André Holland Rosario Dawson and Ann Dowd.
— Luke Skywalker may get the headlines, but the true MVPs of the Star Wars franchise are rascals like Han Solo and Lando Calrissian. Ubisoft’s Star Wars Outlaws introduces a new scoundrel: Kay Vess, a young thief who’s trying to work her way up the galaxy’s crime syndicates and make the big score. She isn’t a Jedi or a Sith, but she knows how to fire a blaster and fly a spaceship. Outlaws comes from Massive Entertainment, the developers of Tom Clancy’s The Division, and it aims to spread Ubisoft’s brand of open-world adventure across multiple planets. It launches Friday, Aug. 30, on PlayStation 5, Xbox X/S and PC.
— Many gamers who grew up with the Super Nintendo Entertainment System remember 1993’s Secret of Mana as their introduction to a particular type of high-fantasy role-playing. It’s been 15 years since we’ve gotten a new chapter in the marquee Mana series, but Square Enix is finally delivering Visions of Mana. A youngster named Val is chosen to accompany his friend Hinna on a pilgrimage to the life-sustaining Mana Tree, and they’ll need to use magic and swordplay to fight all the monsters along the way. The lush, anime-style graphics are bound to stir memories in old-school RPG fans, starting Thursday, Aug. 29, on PlayStation 5/4, Xbox X/S and PC.
For those who only just got acquainted with Yorgos Lanthimos because of his star turn at the Academy Awards this year for Poor Things, it would come as no surprise that viewers hoping for “more of the same” might be disappointed by his quick follow-up, Kinds of Kindness. While, sure, both movies are in keeping with Lanthimos’ penchant for “quirky” (a reductive term if ever there was one in terms of describing anything that is “weird”—also usually a reductive term) narratives starring Emma Stone, Kinds of Kindness is distinctly begat of the auteur’s mind. This being in contrast to Poor Things, which was an adaptation of someone else’s work—specifically, Alasdair Gray’s 1992 novel of the same name. Presented even more overtly as “a Frankenstein story” in Lanthimos’ hands (though, as some pointed out, it was more like the plot of Frankenhooker, released in 1990), audiences were more easily charmed by this kind of “quirk,” paired with Stone’s rendering of Bella Baxter. Put it this way: Poor Things is the most “Tim Burton” Lanthimos has ever allowed himself to get.
In truth, Lanthimos’ “return to himself” with Kinds of Kindness seems in part designed to remind people not to get too used to the linear, “easy-to-pinpoint message” of Poor Things. So it is that the film commences with the first story in the “triptych,” where we’re introduced to the unifying thread of each story: R.M.F. (indeed, that was one of the original titles of the movie, apart from the more abstract And). A man who is never given a clear backstory, yet whose shirt and initials will serve as a consistent talisman. In fact, it is R.M.F. (Yorgos Stefanakos) who we first see enter the scene via car while blasting the Eurythmics’ signature 1983 track, “Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)” (a song that will also serve as another consistent thread in each story). So begins “Vignette #1,” if you will, titled “The Death of R.M.F.” When R.M.F. knocks on the door of the lavish house he’s arrived at, Vivian (Margaret Qualley) answers the door in a silk robe that’s cut as short as it can be without her ass showing (and, in truth, if Qualley had an ass, it would definitely peek out of a robe like that). She takes one look at the shirt he’s wearing, with his initials monogrammed on the breast pocket and tells her husband, Raymond (Willem Dafoe), over the phone exactly what R.M.F. is wearing, including the assurance that his shirt doesn’t look wrinkled. Even so, she still sends a picture of the shirt to prove it (an initial glimpse into Raymond’s fastidious nature).
R.M.F., we’ll soon find, is the man that Raymond’s emotional whipping boy, Robert (Jesse Plemons), has been tasked with crashing his car into. And why? Simply because Raymond wants him to. Indeed, this particular segment comes across as an allegory for the average employer-employee relationship, with the employer demanding to have total and unbridled control over the person they “own.” For the past ten years, Robert has been only too willing to do whatever Raymond has asked of him—from marrying Sarah (Hong Chau), the woman Raymond “picked out” at the Cheval Bar (where they’re regulars) to lacing her coffee with mifepristone because Raymond doesn’t want Robert to have children (that could be very distracting from work, after all). Thus, the toxicity masquerading as “love” (mainly for all the material things that Raymond provides him with in exchange for Robert’s total lack of autonomy) shines through at its most unignorable when Raymond makes this request. The request for Robert to crash into R.M.F. Of course, Robert has no idea who R.M.F. is, he’s merely told that the man is willing to die (if the crash should happen to be too impactful) for this bizarre exercise in fealty.
One might say that the entire running motif of Kinds of Kindness is, in fact, fealty. And the lengths that people are willing to go in order to prove it to a toxic “alpha” in the situation. This much is also true in the next “vignette,” “R.M.F. Is Flying” (perhaps an allusion to his limbo state after finally being run over multiple times by Robert in response to Raymond cutting him off cold turkey from his “love”). In this setup, Plemons is now Daniel, a police officer reeling over the recent disappearance of his wife, Liz (Stone), who is some kind of marine biologist lost at sea. Her miraculous return with her fellow researcher, Jonathan (Ja’Quan Monroe-Henderson), is met with joy and relief by their friends, Neil (Mamoudou Athie) and Martha (Qualley), and Liz’s father, George (Dafoe). However, it is less comforting to Daniel when he starts to suspect that the woman who has returned is not his wife at all. Mainly because it’s “little details” about her that aren’t tracking with the “original” Liz. For a start, this Liz is perfectly okay to eat chocolate, a sweet she hated before, and, secondly, because her feet are suddenly slightly too big for all her shoes. When Daniel tells his theory to Sharon (Chau), Jonathan’s wife, she can only stare back at him in disbelief.
Despite no one believing him, Daniel’s conviction that his wife isn’t really his wife only intensifies, causing him to have an “episode” on the job that leads to his suspension from the force. Still convinced that Liz is someone else, he proceeds to test how devoted she is to him, demanding that she cook her own thumb for him to prove her love (side note: he’s been on a hunger strike against anything she makes for him). When she actually does, he not only says her thumb is disgusting and he would never eat it, but he also then ups the ante by requesting that she cook her own liver for him (talk about a Hannibal Lecter-esque sweet fantasy, or “sweet dream,” to be more Eurythmics-centric). At the end of this petite histoire, the real Liz does show up once Fake Liz ends up killing herself with a self-extraction of the liver to prove her love. What’s the additional message here? Perhaps that “real” love isn’t always that selfless. Otherwise it can get pretty tainted pretty fast.
And, speaking of “tainted,” that’s what the final “vignette,” “R.M.F. Eats A Sandwich,” is all about. Namely with regard to (sex) cult leaders Omi (Dafoe) and Aka (Chau) insisting on their subjects’ “purity” if they are to be accepted into the, er, fold for fucking. Whenever Omi or Aka hears that one of their “subjects” has broken the bonds of “loyalty” to the cult (which is somewhat ironic considering they’re all fucking multiple people…but hey, so long as it’s within the cult, it’s fine), they have their ways of testing for compromised “purity” (a.k.a. STDs).
Emily (Stone), a recent convert to the “cause,” seems overly eager to prove herself and her, again, fealty, to Omi and Aka by seeking out a healer that can supposedly reanimate the dead. Which is why the story begins with measuring and weighing the latest “potential” healer, Anna (Hunter Schafer), like she’s a piece of meat. Joining Emily in that task is Andrew (Plemons), a fellow cult member that’s been “assigned” to Emily, as it were, by Omi and Aka. When they try to get Anna to deliver on the final (and most important) test—reviving the dead—she fails…much to Emily’s (in particular) dismay.
After the disappointment, Andrew and Emily get into her vibrant purple Dodge Challenger and continue on their way, talking to Aka over the phone about whether or not they have enough water for the journey. This rather precise question sets up one of the cruxes of the storyline, which is that, in order to be “pure,” the cult members must only drink water that has been “crafted” out of Omi and Aka’s tears. Ergo, they’re given thermoses filled with this “special” kind of water (a kind of kindness, duh) whenever they hit the road on one of their quests to find the healer. Of course, they’re not flying totally blind. There are certain known criteria about the healer they’re looking for: she’s a woman, she’s a twin, she’s a twin whose other twin died and she has a specific age, height and weight.
As for Emily’s “former” life before becoming a cultist, she was a mother and a wife to Joseph, portrayed by Joe Alwyn, who takes the chance on playing a role where he “has to” rape in a climate that already has him in “villain mode” thanks to his breakup with Taylor Swift (who, yes, will probably uncomfortably watch this movie and scene since Emma Stone is in her “squad,” as is Jack Antonoff’s wife, Margaret Qualley). Occasionally pulled back to that “old life” of hers out of a sense of, let’s say, wifely and maternal duty, Joseph ends up getting her cast out of the cult when he date rapes her, and Omi, Aka and Andrew immediately find out when they catch her coming out of the house the following morning.
In the wake of her “affront” to their “cause” (like all cult leaders, that cause is ultimately self-aggrandizement), they drag her to their outdoor “steam room.” A “hot box” is more like it—and one that looks like something out of Midsommar. Cranking the heat up as high as possible to “purify” her, when she is taken out of the box and placed on a perch for Aka to lick sweat off her stomach and see if she’s still “contaminated,” the result is not in Emily’s favor. Shunned from the cult, Emily determines to prove her commitment by finding the healer, once and for all. A quest that, predictably, results in catastrophic circumstances.
As Kind of Kindness concludes with a mid-credits scene where we finally do see R.M.F. eating that sandwich, the viewer is left to reconcile the idea that maybe blind loyalty is more pathetic than it is noble (see: Republicans and Trump). Something that shouldn’t have to be spelled out for people at this juncture, but, sadly, still needs to be. As a matter of fact, many will likely not get that message because Kinds of Kindness doesn’t spell it out enough for the average feeble mind. And, maybe, in his own meta way, Lanthimos is actually testing the loyalty of his “true” devotees with this film.
Last year, Yorgos Lanthimos directed a dark comedy about a woman named Bella who was assembled from the body of an adult and the brain of a fetus in a Frankenstein-like surgery and who went on to fuck her way to self-actualization across a fantastical Europe. It was the most accessible thing the Athens-born director had ever made, which really says more about his overall body of work than it does about Poor Things.
Lanthimos is one of film’s reigning sadists, though he’s always funny about it — if not funny haha, then funny in a tone so arid as to render the humor borderline subliminal. He makes films set in deadpan universes that sit at Dutch angles to our own and feature characters struggling to live in accordance with arbitrary and frequently cruel conventions. All of which is true of Poor Things as well. What sets it apart is the way that Bella, the wiped-blank heroine played by Emma Stone, rejects the rules and strictures she’s told she has to abide by as she speedruns her way from child to woman of the world. Lanthimos, as unlikely as it seemed, had created a story of empowerment as well as something tailor-made to polarize the internet.
The frankness of the sexual content — which begins with Bella’s innocent explorations of her own body, progresses to her voracious pursuit of what she calls “furious jumping” with a louche lawyer played by Mark Ruffalo, and eventually brings her to work in a Parisian brothel — kicked off arguments about the degree to which Poor Things is mired in the male gaze. It seemed as though the only person who didn’t care to weigh in on the validity of the film’s feminism was the filmmaker himself, who shied away from the label like someone being introduced as a boyfriend by a person they thought they were just casually dating.
Watching the world discover Lanthimos by way of one of his least characteristic and, honestly, weakest films has been akin to watching someone you know become the internet’s latest main character, stripped of other context with their actions scrutinized via a very specific lens. Lanthimos is many things — a champion absurdist, an arguable nihilist, an occasional edgelord, and an artist who has maintained a decidedly Euro sensibility despite having worked in English with Hollywood actors since 2015. His movies have the brain-burrowing quality of an insomniac’s thought spiral and are so insistently off-kilter that the Greek Weird Wave, the movement he’s sometimes described as being a part of, feels less like a trend in national cinema and more like a summary of how his distinct sensibility has filtered through to some of his peers. If he considers himself a feminist — and there’s no reason to believe he wouldn’t, even if there is a “please clap” quality to Bella’s journey in Poor Things that leaves it lacking in conviction — it has felt largely incidental until this point.
His work does have an awareness of the role that gender plays in the abuse of power and in sexual violence, and his films feature their own fun-house-mirror versions of patriarchy. But when it comes to the degradations his characters are subjected to, he’s equal opportunity. The most challenging aspect of his movies, which run the gamut from the brilliant (Dogtooth,The Favourite) to the irritatingly opaque (Kinetta,The Killing of a Sacred Deer), has more to do with the impassivity of his gaze and the delectable swagger behind it. He skewers his characters like he’s pinning butterflies to corkboard, and it’s not always evident whether that’s done in service of some greater purpose or out of a more basic desire to provoke. Kinds of Kindness, his hilariously hostile follow-up to Poor Things, is a return to the director’s primary interest, which has always been control. In particular, he’s fascinated by what makes people continue to obey, how they fumblingly fit themselves into roles laid out for them, why they might submit to the will of others even when it causes them harm.
The anthology film, which premiered earlier this year at Cannes, is made up of a trio of surreal fables rife with coercion, druggings, assaults, and self-mutilation. In its first section, Jesse Plemons plays a man who lives his entire life — from the clothes he wears to the house he lives in, the woman he marries, and the size of their family (he puts an abortifacient in his wife’s coffee to maintain their childless state) — according to the dictates of his boss (Willem Dafoe). In the second, Plemons is a cop who subjects a woman (Stone) who claims to be his missing wife to a series of escalating tests in order to prove she’s an impostor. (The ensemble, which includes Joe Alwyn, Mamoudou Athie, Hong Chau, and Margaret Qualley, recurs across each part.) And in the third, Stone belongs to a cult whose members pledge sexual fidelity to its two leaders and are in search of a messiah — a position that involves being able to raise the dead but also having the correct distance between your nipples. Lanthimos has made inroads with American audiences, but Kinds of Kindness brings to mind his earlier and less approachable work, which is in Greek and focuses on the dynamics of people devoted to inscrutable group activities that involve turning yourself over to someone else’s whims.
There’s also an obsessive cop in Kinetta, Lanthimos’s barely parsable 2005 solo debut, one consumed with coaching a hotel maid and a photoshop clerk through reenactments of violent crimes, a project they keep coming back to despite its appearing to make them miserable. There’s a cultlike collective in his 2011 Alps, a group of four people who, as a service to the bereaved, fill in for people who have died, wearing the deceased’s clothing and parroting past conversations — a process that leads one of its members, played by Lanthimos’s favorite non-American leading lady, Angeliki Papoulia, to become destructively overinvested. These aren’t films about people who overcome limitations and discover themselves but something uneasier: films about people who barely have a sense of self at all and who accept being told what to do because they’re at a loss otherwise.
It’s fair to say that all of Lanthimos’s movies are meant to be received as comedies, even 2017’s The Killing of a Sacred Deer, which takes on the contours of a thriller when members of a family learn they’re required to sacrifice one of their own. But he isn’t in any way a warm filmmaker, which may have something to do with how so many of the oddball enterprises his characters are involved in read as distorted versions of filmmaking with someone in charge of direction and others playing parts. His characters are unfailingly stilted and juvenile and a little alien, designed to keep the viewer at arm’s length rather than to invite sympathy. Given how regularly his films veer toward debasement, that distance serves as a protective measure, a means of making the ludicrous and disturbing situations he conjures up easier to tolerate.
The most excruciating sequence in his entire filmography, in 2009’s Dogtooth, rests entirely on the mechanical behavior of its participants. Papoulia, as one of three adult siblings who were raised in stunted isolation, is directed to have sex with her brother by their parents, who have created a whole mythology about the dangers of the outside world but who fully buy into the idea that men have urges that must be tended to. Lanthimos shoots the encounter in a series of frank, static shots that leave nothing to the imagination until the end, when the film cuts to Papoulia’s character in profile, her brother visible only in the reflection of the mirror as he moves above her, her face contorted in an involuntary grimace. This framing is echoed in Kinds of Kindness in a scene in which one of Stone’s characters is roofied and then raped, her head jostling as her unconscious body is assaulted by someone offscreen. These aren’t moments anyone would trumpet as feminist, though what’s upsetting about them isn’t that they feel exploitative — it’s that they’re presented impassively, with no more compassion than prurience and with an unsparing gaze that provides no guidance for what a viewer is supposed to feel aside from discomfort.
There’s something haunting about how Lanthimos keeps returning to these dynamics. He treats the desire to be dominated as an elemental aspect of human nature, though it’s one he prefers to explore on a granular level. He may not offer empathy to these characters, but he doesn’t hold himself apart from them. If the triumphant found-family ending of Poor Things rings false, that’s only because it provides closure when his efforts are very much ongoing.
It’s ridiculous to allow the executive you work for to decide what you should read at night and how many children you can have, but it’s worth reflecting on the forces shaping each of our own decisions on those matters. That’s not an especially friendly way to think about how we all exist in the world — but then Yorgos Lanthimos was never your friend.
CANNES – Beneath intermittent rainy skies, the Cannes Film Festival opened Tuesday with the presentation of an honorary Palme d’Or for Meryl Streep and the unveiling of Greta Gerwig’s jury, as the French Riviera spectacular kicked off a potentially volatile 77th edition.
A 10-day stream of stars began flowing down the Cannes’ red carpet with the opening night film, “The Second Act,” a French comedy starring Lea Seydoux, Vincent Lindon, Louis Garrel and Raphaël Quenard. They play squabbling actors filming a movie directed by an artificial intelligence.
The festival’s first lengthy standing ovation, though, went to Streep, who was awarded an honorary Palme d’Or during Tuesday’s opening ceremony. After Juliette Binoche introduced her, Streep alternatively shook her head, fanned herself and danced while the crowd thunderously cheered.
“I’m just so grateful that you haven’t gotten sick of my face and you haven’t gotten off of the train,” said Streep, who soon thereafter declared Cannes officially open with Binoche.
“My mother, who is usually right about everything, said to me: ’Meryl, my darling, you’ll see. It all goes so fast. So fast,″ added Streep. “And it has, and it does. Except for my speech, which is too long.”
The reception was nearly as rapturous for Gerwig, the first American female filmmaker to serve as president of the Cannes jury that will decide the festival’s top award, the Palme d’Or. Thierry Fremaux, Cannes’ artistic director, on Monday praised her as “the ideal director” for Cannes, given her work across arthouse and studio film and her interest in cinema history. And, Fremaux said, “We very much liked ‘Barbie.’”
In the days to come, Cannes will premiere George Miller’s “Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga,” Francis Ford Coppola’s self-financed “Megalopolis” and anticipated new movies from Paolo Sorrentino, Yorgos Lanthimos, Andrea Arnold and Kevin Costner.
But much of the drama surrounding this year’s Cannes has been off screen.
After French actor Judith Godrèche earlier this year accused two film directors of rape and sexual abuse when she was a teenager, the French film industry has been dealing with arguably its defining #MeToo moment. On Wednesday, Godrèche will premiere her short “Moi Aussi.”
Asked about #MeToo expanding in France, Gerwig told reporters in Cannes on Tuesday that it’s progress.
“I think people in the community of movies telling us stories and trying to change things for the better is only good,” Gerwig said. “I have seen substantive change in the American film community, and I think it’s important that we continue to expand that conversation. So I think it’s only moving everything in the correct direction. Keep those lines of communication open.”
Gerwig is joined on the jury by Lily Gladstone, star of “Killers of the Flower Moon,” French actor Eva Green, Spanish filmmaker J.A. Bayona, French actor Omar Sy, Lebanese actor and director Nadine Labaki, Japanese filmmaker Hirokazu Kore-eda, Turkish screenwriter Ebru Ceylan and Italian actor Pierfrancesco Favino.
“I thought I just got over my imposter syndrome last year,” said the Oscar-nominated Gladstone. “But I’ll start all over again.”
The jurors were asked how the many real-world concerns outside the festival might affect their deliberations. One film in competition, Ali Abbasi’s “The Apprentice,” stars Sebastian Stan as a young Donald Trump. Labaki was questioned on the war in Gaza.
“I truly believe that one of the tools to really change something in the situation we all live in right now, which is a situation I think is not that great, is really through art and through cinema,” said Labaki. “It may propose a more tolerant way of seeing things and seeing each other as human beings.”
Filmmakers, Favino said, play the important role of reminding the world of where it can find beauty.
“This is why I decided that I could be here without feeling guilty as a human being,” said Favino. “Because if we look for beauty, then we might look for peace.”
Other concerns are also swirling around this year’s Cannes. Festival workers, fed up with short-term contracts that leave them unqualified for unemployment benefits in between festivals, have threatened to strike. During Tuesday’s opening ceremony, two small bands of festival workers protested, including one group that unfurled a banner from the roof of the Palais.
On Monday, the Iranian filmmaker Mohammed Rasoulof, whose film “The Seed of the Sacred Fig” is premiering next week in competition in Cannes, said he had fled Iran after being sentenced to eight years in prison and flogging. The film is said to be a critical depiction of the Iranian government.
As Cannes continues, though, many will be focused on the stars parading the festival’s famous red carpet. They’ll include Emma Stone, Anya Taylor-Joy, Demi Moore, Selena Gomez, Nicolas Cage and Barry Keoghan. At the closing ceremony on May 25, George Lucas is to receive an honorary Palme d’Or.
Regardless, the 77th Cannes will have a lot to live up to. Last year’s festival, widely celebrated for its robust lineup, produced three Oscar best picture nominees: “Anatomy of a Fall,” “The Zone of Interest” and “Killers of the Flower Moon.”
A good Cannes will help France keep the global spotlight through the summer. The festival will be followed by the French Open, the Tour de France and the summer Olympics in Paris. On May 21, the Olympic flame will be carried up the steps to the festival’s hub, the Palais des Festivals.
To help rekindle the spirit of last year’s festival, Messi, the canine star of “Anatomy of a Fall,” was the first star to hit the red carpet Tuesday. The border collie, enlisted to film daily snippets for French TV, frolicked up and down the carpet while tuxedo-clad photographers hollered “Messi! Messi!”
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It’s time for one of the most glamorous events of the year—the Cannes Film Festival. Every May, filmmakers, producers, directors, actors and other A-listers make their way to the French Riviera for 12 days of movie screenings, parties and, of course, plenty of glitzy red carpets and exciting fashion moments on La Croisette.
The 2024 Cannes Film Festival runs from May 14 to May 25, and we’re keeping you updated on all the best red carpet moments throughout the entire spectacle. Below, see the best-dressed looks from the Cannes Film Festival red carpet.
