Failed Experiment

Bugonia (2025) - Lanthimos It is pretty obvious why Yorgos Lanthimos chose to remake a wacky Korean sci-fi comedy, Save the Green Planet: it has all the elements we've grown to associate with his films - the cynicism, cruelty and absurd sense of humor. With Bugonia, starring very committed Emma Stone in their 4th collaboration, and Jesse Plemons, Lanthimos shoots for the most absurd film to date.

It's a hit or miss for me when it comes to Lanthimos films. For me, like his other fans, it all started with Dogtooth (2009), a perennial hit that started the Greek New Wave or Weird Wave or whatever it was labeled as. It was when Greece was battered with waves of crushing austerity measures and governmental restructuring. Greeks, being a rowdy bunch who didn't really have faith in their government anyway, made a series of films that vividly depicted generational divide and discontent of the younger generation with little prospects for the future. But however penetrating Lanthimos's observation of the world has been, it's his cynicism and cruelty that kept me at bay to be a full fledged fan. I admit that it's hard to do in comedy, considering he is not Haneke or Bergman.

When a Lanthimo's is balanced right, with the right amount of sweetness and heart, it's really great - Lobster, The Favourite, Poor Things. But when it is just cynicism, such as Bugonia or Kind of Kindness, it loses me.

Bugonia concerns Teddy (Jesse Plemons), a conspiracy-addled worker at an Amazon style processing facility. The conglomerate is headed by a ruthless Michelle (Emma Stone), by all appearances, Michelle is a powersuit wearing, posh CEO with all business and no heart. Teddy and his dim-witted cousin Donnie (Aidan Delvis), believing Michelle is an alien from The Andromeda Galaxy, bent on destroying the human race, kidnaps her and puts her chained to the floor in the basement of their rural house. Teddy tortures Michelle to admit that she is an alien and to arrange a meeting with her emperor in their space craft which is heading to earth during the next lunar eclipse which is three days away.

Things get complicated when Michelle manipulates them into harming themselves and their loved ones. Is she really an andromedan intent on eradicating the human species or are we just one of those cruel experiments by higher power, on the verge of failure?

If Bugonia is a satire of billionaires controlling the fate of humanity and we are all just their play things - either just pawns in the game or rebellious crackpots, it's just too bleak and too close to home to laugh about.

As Bugonia progresses to an absurdist territory with much blood shed, you are left with that cold feeling that we are supremely manipulated to and fro for laughs. But who is laughing anyway?

Acknowledging the Past, Then Moving On

Poor Things (2023) - Lanthimos Visually and thematically audacious, Yorgos Lanthimos's fantastical steam punk period piece, Poor Things, plays out like a female version of a Terry Gilliam film, but good. It also shares a lot in common with my other favorite this year, Bertrand Bonello's time traveling period sci-fi, The Beast, as both films set in Victorian era. But whereas Bonello's film is based on Henry James's novella, Beast of the Jungle of 1903 which is very much a product of its time- the preoccupation with fate, predetermination and compounded trauma that would repeat itself over generations, Poor Things, based on a 1990 Scottish satrical novel by Alasdair Gray, Poor Things: Episodes from the Early Life of Archibald McCandless M.D., Scottish Public Health Officer, is a parodic look at its Victorian age and refreshingly forward looking in its main character's self determination.

Bella Baxter (Emma Stone) is a revived pregnant suicide victim by mad genius doctor Godwin Baxter (Willem Defoe), who swaps her fetus's brain with the dead woman's. Therefore, Bella has an unencumbered infant's mind that slowly will need to learn the way of things in life. Godwin assigns his good natured pupil McCandles (Ramy Youssef) to look after Baxter and soon the young man is smitten by Bella's beauty and her total lack of social ettiquettes. Fearing her being taken advantage by the rotten world outside the confines of his castle, Godwin makes McCandles Bella's betrothed. As soon as she grows and learn sexual pleasures, she is prayed on by shyster playboy Duncun Wedderburn (Mark Ruffalo) and leaves the country in a sensual whirlwind trip across Europe and North Africa. There Bella learns that physical pleasure is not all there is to be in the world, but pain, pain of others and injustices also exist.

The heightened sense of Victorian imagination, in the hands of Lanthimos, the turn of the century Europe - From Lisbon and Athens to Paris and Alexandria are colorful and whimsical in that bizaare early Czech animation (ie. Karel Zeman) way. Bella learns the world's injustices and unfairness first-hand and determines her destiny every step of the way herself while keeping her always sunny and curious disposition. It might be a naive notion to think that our super complicated 21st century society is just a construct that the past doesn't hold any influence over our lives, that human beings start as a blank page and free to self determine the future. But it's a nice thought.

From Sheep to Bulldozers

Attenberg (2010) - Tsangari "From Sheep to Bulldozers," Spyros (Vangelis Mourikis), a terminally ill architect dad tells his daughter Marina (Ariane Labed) while looking outside the window overlooking the small seaside industrial Greek town where they live, as he laments about 20th century. He is worried that he will be gone with nothing to show for Marina's generation. Him being atheist, he wants to be cremated because he doesn't want to be food for worms. But Greece being strictly a Christian country, his body will be flown to Hamburg to be cremated then sent back over to Marina, when the time comes. Marina on the other hand, needs to figure out other things in life too, other than dealing with her father's illness. First, even though she is a young woman, she hasn't discovered being intimate with someone. Only person in town who can teach her how is her sexually active best friend Bella (Evangelia Randau), who works as a barmaid at a hotel.

Attenberg, along with Yorgos Lanthimos' Dogtooth, became the faces of the new Greek cinema in the late 2000s. And there are a lot of similarities between the two - generational divide, patriarchy, Lanthimos (who plays Marina's first lover), being metaphors for a country thrown into a new, globalized world in which she is not quite ready or comfortable. But Tsangari has a gentler touch and is much less cynical. Attenberg features one of the sweetest depiction of father-daughter relationship than any other films I can think of.

Sir David Attenborough, whose nature documentary program is what Marina grew up on, is her only constant companion. It's Attenborough's communing with the nature and animals, his compassion that is a contrast to Marina's banal surroundings - a mining factory with no prospects for young people.

Communication in Attenberg is not really done through dialog. With Marina and Bella, it's done through series of choreographed dance/movements/freakouts. With Spyro and Marina, it's constant word play where they top each others last words with a similar sounding word, when they are not frankly talking about the possibility of incest or body decomposition. Tender but still weird, it's a great entry point to the Greek New Wave.

Humorous Barry Lyndon

The Favourite (2018) - Lanthimos

Yorgos Lanthimos' first foray into a film not written by him (and his constant writing partner Efthymis Filippou), The Favourite retains all the witty cynicism and deadpan humor that the world has become accustomed to throughout his filmography. But it has rounded the masochistic edge and made it more palatable. And it's a good thing. It is in large part thanks to his three main actresses - Olivia Coleman, Rachel Weisz and Emma Stone who shine in their respective roles.

Olivia Coleman is Queen Anne, a blubbering womanchild whose health is failing and leaves all the queen's duties to Sarah Marlborough (Rachel Weisz), who is her strict disciplinarian and also her lover. It seems that thanks to her no bullshit approach and tough love that kept the wolves (opposition party headed by pompous Harley, played by hilarious Nicholas Hoult) at bay. Enter Abigail (Emma Stone), a distant cousin of Sarah, first hired as a kitchen maid, proves herself to be a cunning social climber using her looks and quick wit. It becomes a battle between Lady Sarah and Abigail to win the favor of the ailing and temperamental queen.

Think of The Favourite as humorous Barry Lyndon. The stately glacial façade of Kubrick's film was always a stone's throw away (pun intended) from parodying comedy anyway. Costumes,opulent interiors and harpsichord music tells you that you are watching a period piece, but its sardonic wit and amped up performances are quite the contrary. Lanthimos remains to be the only filmmaker who can get away with using wide angle lens shots because his comedy calls for it. Robbie Ryan's energetic candlelit interior shots are a thing of a beauty as well.

The favourite is a wickedly funny film that hits all the right marks. It touches upon all the hallmarks of Lanthimos other films - patriarchy/monarchy, desire and perversion and loneliness. Coleman, Weisz and Stone deserve all the accolades.

Eye for an Eye

The Killing of a Sacred Deer (2017) - Lanthimos

The story concerns a heart surgeon (Colin Farrell) being stalked by a boy whose father dies in his operating table. The doctor tries to make it up to the boy by being nice to him and buying him gifts, the boy inches towards him and his family in a very creepy way. Sensing that the boy is crazy, the doc shuts him off. Then the doc's young son suddenly gets paralyzed from waste down and refuses to eat food, literally starving himself to death. And this is what the creepy boy told him when he shut him off: all his family members will be paralyzed, then will refused to eat then will start bleeding from their eyes then die. His daughter is next to be hospitalized with the said symptom. Is the creepy boy and his mom some kind of witches?

Lanthimos is back to his sadistic shtick with Sacred Deer and there is nothing fresh about it at all. If it's his take on American society (taking place in Cincinnati Ohio), its context is completely lost to me. And if he was, this feels like a much lesser pointy version of his idol Haneke's American remake of Funny Games. The wide angle shots are all Kubrick and its sadistic nature is all Haneke and with actors doing their monotonous deliveries, there is absolutely no originality. Lanthimos loses the sight of creating a world that is slightly different and weird that he so successfully created in Lobster. With that shaky foundation, Sacred Deer never strikes the right emotional, tonal core and struggles to maintain its house of cards. Major disappointment.

Consider the Lobster

The Lobster (2015) - Lanthimos




An absurdist satire on modern relationship, The Lobster is the first English feature, with an international cast, by Greek badboy Yorgos Lanthimos. An unnamed middle-aged schlubby, bespectacled protagonist (Colin Farrell) is relocated to a remote lakeside hotel/sanitarium after his wife of 12 years dumps him. The place is full of such rejects, trying to fall in love with someone while staying there before they turn into an animal (of their choice). Our protag wants to be a lobster if the time comes, because it lives long, blue blooded and remains fertile all its life. There he befriends with two men- the man with a lisp (John C. Reilly) and the man with a limp (Ben Whishaw), both awkwardly, desperately trying to make connection with the opposite sex any way they can to avoid turning into an animal. Then they have to hunt loners in the woods (former hotel guests who ran away to avoid turning into an animal) with tranquilizer guns to prolong their stay.

After pairing with a sexy but heartless hunting champ (Angeliki Papoulia) by faking his heartlessness and things horribly go wrong, our protag escapes to the woods, only to fall in with a group of loners, headed by Léa Seydoux. This loner leader takes a polar opposite view on relationship, prohibiting any flirting or hooking up among members and punishing them severely if they break the rules. It's as if the hotel symbolizes (it does/doesn't really) the consumerist capitalism, the loners are like the emotionless commies. There he meets a fellow short sighted person (Rachel Weisz) and falls in love.

There are bunch of rules and inner logic in the world Lanthimos creates that are just as complicated as the hidden rules of our mating rituals in the modern world. He hits home hard that our arbitrary criteria in dating and finding a companion in our world largely depends on trivial matters like putting heavy emphasis on matching attributes (nearsightedness, types of music you like, whatev). That you can just easily reject someone by not liking that person is prone to nosebleed or having a lisp. Just like his other films, Lanthimos has a mean streak (especially against animals- obviously fake but still). But I can see many people shrugging it off as a lackluster film. It is visually, emotionally subdued by design. Its black humor pitched and delivered perfectly by Farrell, Reilly, Whishaw, Seydoux, Weisz, Olivia Coleman, and two stunning Lanthimos regulars - Papoulia and Ariane Labed.

While it's never laugh out loud funny, nor extremely disturbing, the film has a lot to say about the hollow nature of human courtship. I was touched by how sweet the film was: characters in the film still abide by the social conventions, but their desire to be with someone and not be lonely is stronger than anything. It's the most romantic movie I've seen in a while.