Reviews and Comments by Ken Burke
I invite you to join me on a regular basis to see how my responses to current cinematic offerings compare to the critical establishment, which I’ll refer to as either the CCAL (Collective Critics at Large) if they’re supportive or the OCCU (Often Cranky Critics Universe) when they go negative. However, due to COVID concerns I’m mostly addressing streaming options with limited visits to theaters, where I don’t think I’ve missed much anyway, but better options are on the horizon. (Note: Anything in bold blue below [or near purple] is a link to something in the above title or the review.)
My reviews’ premise: “You can’t please everyone, so you got to please yourself.”
(from "Garden Party" by Rick Nelson and the Stone Canyon Band, 1972 album of the song’s name)
However, if you’d like to know more about rationale of my ratings visit this explanatory site.
Here’s the trailer:
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If you can abide plot spoilers read on, but this blog’s intended for those who’ve seen the film or want to save some $ (as well as recognizing those readers like me who just aren’t that tech-savvy). To help any of you who want to learn more details yet avoid these all-important plot-reveals I’ll identify any give-away sentences/sentence-clusters with colors plus arrows:
⇒The first and last words will be noted with arrows and red.⇐ OK, now continue on if you prefer.
WHAT HAPPENS: Michelle Fuller (Emma Stone) is the successful CEO of pharmaceutical conglomerate Auxolith when she’s kidnapped one day at the end of her drive home by Teddy Gatz (Jesse Plemons)—who’s got a grudge against her because his mother (Alicia Silverstone) was in one of Fuller’s medical trails which went wrong, leaving the woman in a comatose condition—and his autistic cousin, Don (Aidan Delbis). When Fuller wakes up from being drugged she finds herself in the men’s basement in handcuffs and leg cuffs with her hair shorn to keep her from using it to contact her outer-space alien colleagues from the Andromeda Galaxy, the closest star-cluster to Earth’s Milky Way, all of this furiously told to her by seemingly-rabid conspiracy theorist Teddy who claims to have done extensive research on ways the clandestine Andromedans have infiltrated our planet resulting in how we’ve come to believe in their brainwashing that has weakened our species, encouraged social animosities, and killed off massive amounts of honeybees, among other transgressions. Teddy wants to be teleported to the secret Andromedan spaceship, soon to arrive, to meet with their Emperor in hopes of convincing these aliens to leave so that Earth might recover.
Fuller denies all of this, assumes Teddy’s insane, tries to dialogue with him even as he rejects her offers. He tortures her with electricity but becomes impressed at her level of tolerance (although we hear her awful screams), decides she’s Andromedan royalty, unlocks the shackles, but when they go upstairs for dinner they’re interrupted by local sheriff’s deputy Casey Boyd (Stavros Halkias) who was a babysitter for young Teddy, molested him, is now trying to make amends, with Michelle hustled back to the basement where Don tells her he wants to go into space with her, then kills himself. Teddy’s frantic over Don’s death until Michelle tells him the antifreeze in her car trunk is actually an antidote to cure his mother so he rushes to the hospital, puts it in her IV, she dies. ⇒Back home, Teddy’s surprised when Fuller says she is an alien, that Andromedans introduced human life on Earth, then became upset as we deteriorated; she agrees to take Teddy to her Mother Ship, but when they get to her office he’s wearing a vest with a bomb which detonates, killing him. Then, the big shock! She’s from Andromeda, goes back to her ship where all agree Earth’s humans are hopeless so they somehow kill them, sparing other animals and plants.⇐ If you want more plot details go to this site and/or watch this video (8:55 [ads at 2:55, 7:35]), Spoilers in both of them.
SO WHAT? Bugonia (whenever you like, you can scroll down a bit to the quote from Amy Nicholson’s review to get a definition of this ancient word) is yet another weird experience from Lanthimos—including 2015’s The Lobster, 2023’s Poor Things (the latter winning Stone an Actress in a Leading Role Oscar, to go with a nomination for one of those from a more-conventional film [for this director], The Favourite [2018]); she also won in this category for La La Land [Damien Chazelle, 2016])—this one adapted from the South Korean film, Save the Green Planet (Jang Joon-hwan, 2003). Bugonia features some 2026 Oscar nominees also, for Best Picture, Actress in a Leading Role, Adapted Screenplay (Will Tracy), and Original Score (Jerskin Fendrix). Although I’m still behind on seeing all films that employ this year’s Leading Role Actress I’d have a hard time assuming Stone shouldn’t be in that group, where for me she verges on taking home another Academy statuette, although she’ll face strong competition from Jesse Buckley in Hamnet (Chloé Zhao, 2025). As for Plemons as an Actor in a Leading Role Oscar nom I’m also behind on a couple of the actual chosen few, but he certainly deserves serious consideration as he—whom we have good reason to believe for most of this story to be a self-absorbed idiot until we learn more—does a marvelous presentation of a man determined to reverse what he understands to be the demise of the human species, just as Stone displays a commanding sense of control of her situation even when hindered in metal cuffs, both of them giving impressive substance to a narrative which is successfully intended to push us in a specific direction until we suddenly find ourselves in the unexpected realm.
Given the confined settings of most of the scenes that make up such a narrative, a film like this one depends almost completely on the quality of the lead actors presenting an engaging rendition of the underlying script: Bugonia does all of that in a most compelling manner, giving us solid reason to stay engaged from one situation to the next, confident we know what to expect from Michelle and Teddy (not so much Don, as it’s intentionally difficult to know how much he really understands about what’s going on as events transpire) until we find out we didn’t know as much as we thought we did. Another thought that comes to me off and on (in a disturbing manner), though, is whether the ending might not be the right choice for our species, given the horrors I see on the nightly news about the dehumanizing direction far too many of us seem to now willingly choose; it would be the most radical development, but we may be instigating such a closure in other ways than this film depicts anyway.
BOTTOM LINE FINAL COMMENTS: Bugonia was released to domestic (U.S.-Canada) theaters on October 24,2025, seems to still be in a few of them, has made $17.7 million ($41.6 globally) so far but is most likely available to you via streaming where you can rent it from Amazon Prime Video or Apple TV for $5,99 (possibly even better for your viewing budget, it’s free to Peacock subscribers). The CCAL’s in support with 88% positive reviews at Rotten Tomatoes, a 72% Metacritic average score; the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences lends their support too with nominations for Best Picture, Actress in a Leading Role, Adapted Screenplay (Will Tracy), and Original Score (Jerskin Fendrix), all of which helps underscore my 4 stars-rating.* Next, a bit farther below, I’ll cite some other opinions that'll support or challenge my response to Bugonia.
*I’m in line with the Academy concerning One Battle After Another (Paul Thomas Anderson, 2025) as I gave it one of my rarely-awarded 5 stars while it got 13 Oscar noms; however I’m not in sync with them regarding Sentimental Value (Joachim Trier, 2025), to which I gave only 3½ stars while it garnered 9 Oscar noms (Best Picture, Director, Actress in a Leading Role [Renate Reinsve], Actor in a Supporting Role [Stellan Skarsgård], Actress in a Supporting Role [Elle Fanning, Inga Ibsdotter Llilleaas], International Feature, Original Screenplay [Eskil Vogt, Trier], Film Editing), while one of our biggest disconnects is about Nuremberg (James Vanderbilt, 2025), which received one of my equally-rare 4½ stars yet nothing from the Academy. Another one of my 3½ stars decisions went to Sinners (Ryan Coogler, 2025) even though this film nabbed a record 16 Oscar contentions (see this site for the full list of Oscar noms) so you can see it’s a tossup if you ever bet on how my stars ratings will match major awards nominations when they’re announced. I do a bit better at predicting Oscar winners (even when they wouldn’t be my choice for the prize), so we’ll see how I do with that in early March when the awards are presented (sometime before then I’ll make my predictions, but first I must wait for a few of these nominees to come to streaming before I can finalize anything—such as whom I'd dump as a Best Actor nominee to make room for Russell Crowe in Nuremberg).
Agreements with me include reviews from Amy Nicholson of the Los Angeles Times: “ ‘Bugonia’ is a hilarious movie with no hope for the future of humanity. What optimism there is lies only in the title, an ancient Greek word for the science of transforming dead cows into hives, of turning death into life,” Michael Andor Brodeur of The Washington Post: “Lanthimos digs into the absurdity (and cruelty) that attends our desire to care for one another — one that can easily curdle into an appetite for destruction. In the flickering basement light of ‘Bugonia,’ humanity comes off like an alien instinct,” and Justin Chang of The New Yorker: “ ‘Bugonia’ is its own skillful exercise in brand maintenance—more an expertly engineered Lanthimos product, perhaps, than a full-bore Lanthimos triumph. But that’s more than enough. Tracy’s dialogue, though absent the staccato non sequiturs of the director’s earlier work, has a bracing nastiness.” Nevertheless, if I seek a contrarian account I need go no further than G. Allen Johnson of my local San Francisco Chronicle: “Yorgos Lanthimos is a provocateur in the way an 8-year-old is when he pulls the wings off insects — eager to shock, but more fascinated by the act itself than what it reveals. He has a point to make, but can’t get beyond the infantile fantasy of ‘wouldn’t it be cool if …’ ." However, rather than quibble with people who get paid to write reviews, let’s just move on to the last element of my posting. As you might know, I try to finish each of these reviews with a Musical Metaphor (if I can think of something even marginally-related to what I’m writing about), but this time I must ask your indulgence regarding how I’ve stretched the concept of “Musical” to include something that has a bit of music to accompany its visuals yet also focuses on spoken narration with my choice being the weekly introduction to the sci-fi series The Outer Limits (ABC TV 1963-'65;. Showtime, Syfy, Channel 7, syndication 1995-2002), picked because of its connection (in my warped mind at least) to what we ultimately encounter in Bugonia, given the tensions that were regularly built up by the antagonists in those old TV episodes.
SHORT TAKES
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