Bugonia or Why Misery Looks So Good Now
Yorgos Lanthimos belongs to that rare breed of filmmakers who never enter a room without first shifting the walls, repainting the ceiling, and asking whether the very idea of “comfort” isn’t, at heart, a bourgeois construct.
The Greek director usually writes his own scripts (not in this case), refining them since film school with the same obsessive rigor Stanley Kubrick once applied to his neuroses.
Film after film, he works with the same editor—a near-monastic fidelity that gives his cinema its peculiar sensation: Swiss watchmaking performed by a Greek surgeon under morphine.
Bugonia is no exception.
With Lanthimos, discomfort is never a side effect.
It’s an editorial stance.
A method.
A belief system.
More than two decades after Save the Green Planet! (2003), Jang Joon-hwan’s gloriously unhinged Korean cult film, Lanthimos dares a remake—a bold move, arguably a reckless one.
Remaking such a film is a bit like revisiting Reservoir Dogs through the A24 lens: sleeker, more legible, impeccably designed… and inevitably less feral.
Despite my admiration for Lanthimos, honesty demands this: Bugonia does not deliver the same visceral punch. Everything here is immaculate, tightly controlled, visually exquisite—but the pain is intellectual rather than bodily.
Where one filmmaker strikes the gut, the other targets the cortex.
I left the theater the way one leaves a Radiohead concert: impressed, stimulated… but not emotionally wrecked.
Let’s be clear: this is not a bad film.
But it isn’t a FABULOUS one either.
One of the first shocks is visual.
Where the earlier film wallowed in sickly greens and toxic blues—colors that evoked cyberpunk nightmares or an episode of Breaking Bad shot in an industrial wasteland—Bugonia erupts in saturated oranges and blood reds worthy of a Francis Bacon canvas.
It feels as though Lanthimos fused Suspiria with a Balenciaga runway show.
We’ve moved from grimy cinema to contemporary art installation.
And that shift changes everything.
Bugonia is smoother, more accessible, clearly calibrated for the Netflix–A24–Instagram era. That accessibility reshapes the film’s perspective.
Two directors, two worldviews.
One approaches class struggle with raw absurdity and frontal rage; the other studies the bourgeoisie the way an entomologist observes insects under glass—a posture Lanthimos has perfected in The Favourite and Poor Things.
Grime versus polish.
Punk versus opera.
Emma Stone’s Michelle feels like a CEO torn straight out of a Black Mirror nightmare: shaved head, vacant gaze, clinical delivery—part Tilda Swinton, part TED Talk, part pharmaceutical ad.
Her performance is icy, sculpted, precise. A cinema of control.
By contrast, earlier incarnations of this archetype leaned into physicality and instinct.
Two acting philosophies emerge: Stone channels Kubrick; others favored Cassavetes.
The same applies to the supporting roles.
A subtle shift in characterization alters the emotional texture of the film, nudging it toward a dynamic that recalls Of Mice and Men filtered through conspiracy logic.
The change is quiet but meaningful—like switching from Dostoevsky to J.D. Salinger.
As Teddy, Jesse Plemons delivers a performance of remarkable restraint. An actor I would personally defend at all costs, Plemons plays this role inward, sedated, permanently holding his breath.
Where other interpretations might explode outward, he implodes slowly.
Two kinds of madness:
one volcanic,
the other depressive.
Plemons sinks into the character like Travis Bickle wandering through New York—minus Scorsese’s bravura.
If Heath Ledger’s Joker was an expressionist blaze—a collision of Taxi Driver, London punk, and Francis Bacon—Plemons is the dead signal before disaster.
The calm before the bomb.
Yin against hysterical yang.
No comic-book makeup, no theatrical grandstanding à la Willem Dafoe—just a man fracturing methodically, like a Paul Schrader protagonist who replaced scripture with Reddit.
Nothing explosive. Nothing operatic. A flat, domestic violence—almost IKEA-like.
Here, Lanthimos brushes against Haneke (Funny Games), but also Bret Easton Ellis: horror doesn’t erupt from chaos; it settles into normality—clean, organized, disinfected.
And hovering above it all is the internet.
An endless reservoir of absurd theories.
Esoteric TikTok.
Paranoid Reddit threads.
Prophetic YouTube videos.
Bugonia is a film about the post-truth era—where The X-Files collides with QAnon, where Lovecraft leaks into comment sections.
What if evil isn’t cosmic, but algorithmic?
With Bugonia, Lanthimos returns to familiar territory: cruel absurdity, glacial satire, curated unease.
The film is a remake, yes—but also a contemporary reworking shaped by digital paranoia, pharmaceutical capitalism, and male loneliness.
Imagine a Don DeLillo novel filmed by David Cronenberg on Prozac.
Lanthimos remains a filmmaker of extremes.
Not always kind.
Not always accessible.
But always singular.
Bugonia may not be his most radical or most devastating work, but it proves something essential: few directors today can transform contemporary unease into pop-intellectual spectacle with such confidence.
An imperfect, stimulating film—deeply symptomatic of our time.
Best experienced on the big screen,
where strangeness can still breathe.
By Giulia Dobre
Paris, December 15, 2025
















































