Bugonia

Part of my coverage of the 61st Chicago International Film Festival

BUGONIA   ***

Yorgos Lanthimos

2025

IDEA:  A battle of wills ensues after a conspiracy-obsessed man and his cousin kidnap a prominent female CEO they believe to be an evil alien.

BLURB:  Fittingly, 2025 has seen a number of films reflecting the yawning madness of our time, and Yorgos Lanthimos’s Bugonia is a deliriously grotesque exemplar. Co-produced, shockingly, by Ari Aster (director of the year’s even grimmer satire of American anomie, Eddington), Bugonia comes at its timely commentary by remaking someone else’s work, Jang Joon-hwan’s 2003 film Save the Green Planet! In updating it, Lanthimos demonstrates how little has changed since then in regard to class struggle and capitalist exploitation, but also how one thing in particular has gotten exponentially worse: the Internet’s capacity, abetted by governments and corporations, to foster deranged echo chambers. Bugonia’s avatar of the incel-leaning conspiracy lunatic is Teddy (a scraggly, calmly maniacal Jesse Plemons), who is convinced the powerful CEO of a pharmaceutical company (an electrifying Emma Stone, head shaved like Joan of Arc) is a malicious alien. Lanthimos forcefully challenges our sympathies in the dynamic between the conspiracy-theorist kidnappers and their wealthy Big Pharma captive. Clearly the kidnappers are psychos, but Teddy is also erudite and eloquent and loves his cousin; most importantly, he’s dealing with a personal tragedy that adds justice to his pursuit. Bugonia arguably goes too hard in its efforts to make this man empathetic and intelligent, and conversely to paint the CEO as the monster Teddy claims she is. Are we to take any of this at face value, or merely as a parody of delusion intended to make us question a baseline of human sanity as endangered as ever? Lanthimos generates palm-sweating suspense and visceral unease throughout, filming with rich colors and pin-sharp closeups so vivid they burn. For all its outlandishness and maybe glibness, Bugonia ends with a montage of soul-shaking plangency, a lament for humanity summed up in a lyric from the evergreen closing song: “When will they ever learn…?”

Kontinental '25

Part of my coverage of the 61st Chicago International Film Festival

KONTINENTAL '25   ***

Radu Jude

2025

IDEA:  A bailiff in the Romanian city of Cluj faces a moral crisis after a homeless squatter she evicts kills himself.

BLURB:  In Roberto Rossellini’s Europe ’51, a complacent socialite in postwar Italy has her social conscience awoken following the death of her young son, causing her to devote her life to charity for the poor. Radu Jude’s Kontinental ’25 caustically reworks Rossellini’s humanist masterwork for the fractured, globalized late-capitalist present. The selfless altruism and rectitude epitomized by the beatific Ingrid Bergman are nowhere to be seen here; instead, we have Eszter Tompa’s crumpled, self-pitying Orsolya, whose feelings of crushing guilt related to the suicide of a homeless man lead not to sociopolitical action and solidarity but to an endless ruminative loop of egocentric rhetorical debates. Shot, like most of the film, on a locked-down, autofocusing iPhone 15, these long-take dialogues invariably go like so: Orsolya describes the precise process of the homeless man’s suicide to an interlocutor and desperately seeks absolution, and the interlocutor tries to console her by invoking the perspective of history, current events, or parables. Sometimes, Jude wryly sticks a piece of consumer technology at the edge of the screen, or has club music playing in the background, ribbing a society of distraction in which the here-and-now of systemic inequities are never meaningfully addressed. Disregarding Jude’s exciting penchant for dense intertextuality, we have seen this sort of critique of bourgeois acedia before in contemporary European cinema, and there can be the sense, as in many of those critiques, that Jude is complicit in the liberal guilt he bemoans. On the other hand, he is an artist, not a politician or humanitarian, and Kontinental ’25 is another of his probing, prickly opuses. 

If I Had Legs I'd Kick You

Part of my coverage of the 61st Chicago International Film Festival

IF I HAD LEGS I'D KICK YOU   ***1/2

Mary Bronstein

2025

IDEA:  While dealing with the everyday struggles of raising a chronically-ill daughter, Linda is forced to contend with a massive hole in her ceiling and various other misfortunes. 

BLURB:  Harrowing, bitingly funny, and acutely synced to its protagonist’s spiraling subjectivity, If I Had Legs I’d Kick You sounds a protracted primal scream from a mother at the end of her rope. Rose Byrne’s Linda is a messy cinematic mom of the highest order, a complex figure of maternal ambivalence who at once embodies archaic tropes of monstrous motherhood and feminine volatility and turns them on their heads to expose the psychology underneath. If this mom is going crazy, she’s clearly well within reason, and as her mishaps escalate, Bronstein sharply conveys the social pressures imposed upon women, especially mothers, to serve as caretakers with seemingly unlimited attention and affection to give. But how does one give when they’re constantly being taken from, in a mental death by a thousand cuts? If I Had Legs I’d Kick You renders a woman’s exhausting emotional labor as a madcap nightmare of dissociation, of frayed nerves and attenuated focus and exasperated phone calls to men who can’t understand. In a surrealistic motif, Linda’s psychic unraveling is tied to the gaping hole in her ceiling, a familiar metaphor that grows more layered as Bronstein visually plays with its form and connotations of abjection. Yet the most indelible image in the film is Byrne’s face, almost always shot in febrile closeup as she stares down her gauntlet of trials. Unlike her character, the actress is firing on all cylinders and then some in a performance of searing affective intensity and rich behavioral detail, whether she’s futilely fishing for answers from a stolid Conan O’Brien or failing to take her own advice she gives to a client who is effectively her double. If I Had Legs I’d Kick You feels stretched pretty thin by the time it pays off an iffy visual conceit at its conclusion, but it’s also in that relentless stretch that it evokes the Sisyphean work of maternity. For Bronstein, if there is a kind of monstrousness in motherhood it is par for the course.

One Battle After Another

ONE BATTLE AFTER ANOTHER   **1/2

Paul Thomas Anderson

2025

IDEA:  A burned-out former revolutionary tries to protect his daughter when his old nemesis mobilizes his forces to track her down. 

BLURB:  It’s perhaps inevitable that a Hollywood film about a cell of revolutionaries would be, well, less than revolutionary. But it’s ironic that such a film should be the most prosaic work yet from Paul Thomas Anderson. In a filmography replete with richly drawn, idiosyncratic characters, unorthodox plotting and tone, and a tactile sense for era-specific milieux, One Battle After Another can’t help but feel conventional, hewing to generic structure and tropes at the expense of spontaneity or depth. So we get the opening heist montage that obliquely introduces the main players; the stickup gone wrong; the flash-forward to a life in abeyance after the fallout; and the call to action in a cat-and-mouse thriller that you know the ending to at least an hour before the 162-minute film concludes. To be fair, Anderson executes all of this with the formal command and energy one expects from him, if not consistently the visual panache. And One Battle After Another is certainly enriched by its political content, however unsubtle, excoriating the deathless twinned American evils of military fascism and white nationalism. The ideology may be impossible to argue with, but it doesn’t exactly make for the most thought-provoking cinema, especially when it’s embodied by characters who are more schematic types than psychologically nuanced people you can engage with. If the final result is solid but perhaps too easily digestible — action-packed, emotionally cathartic — maybe it’s okay if it means stirring some desperately needed revolutionary fervor in the proletariat.

Weapons

WEAPONS   **1/2

Zach Cregger

2025

IDEA:  A Pennsylvania town reels after the mysterious disappearance of a classroom of children - with just one left behind.

*LIGHT SPOILERS AHEAD*

BLURB:  Weapons begins with an intriguing, metaphor-rich premise and ends having skirted it in the muddiest ways possible. Somewhere along the way, amid the digressive chapters of its hyperlink narrative structure, the film becomes estranged from not only its fertile subtextual possibilities, but from the very driving force of its setup. It’s not hard to discern where Cregger is trying to go with many of his ideas. Beyond the central allegory of a school shooting (clumsily underscored in some half-baked dream imagery), Weapons is dealing with grief, tribalism, scapegoating, addiction, parasitism, and the institutional apathy of adults toward the suffering of children. The last of these, which is arguably at the heart of the film, is more stated than shown, and the other themes, similarly under-explored, rarely find lasting purchase in the plot or the relationships of the thinly-sketched characters. By the time Weapons goes full-blown supernatural, any coherent allegorical reading has been made virtually impossible. As a Grand Guignol genre exercise, though, the film is a lot of fun. The nonlinear storytelling and visceral use of subjective camerawork keep you on your toes, and Cregger has some clever misdirects up his sleeve (the introduction of a possessed, ravenous Marcus preceding Paul’s injury by a hypodermic needle is particularly suggestive). Even though her character only obscures whatever it is the movie is trying to say, Amy Madigan is transfixing as Aunt Gladys, adding an uncanny primitive whimsy to the trope of the sadistic child-hating crone. And maybe it’s worth seeing alone for the image of 17 children bursting through the windows of a house in monomaniacal pursuit of her. But for such a potent image, and in a film putatively on their side, why does Weapons so rarely think of the children?

Lurker

LURKER   ***

Alex Russell

2025

IDEA:  Retail worker Matthew goes to extreme lengths to worm his way into the life and career of burgeoning British pop star Oliver.

BLURB:  With taut storytelling and caustic humor, Lurker conveys the sense of a reality warped by the twin influences of celebrity culture and social media. In this simulacral world, ego and social currency are contingent on likes and follows, visibility is tantamount to fame, and user engagement becomes reified as personal connection. It’s neither healthy for the stans nor the stars, as writer-director Alex Russell makes searingly evident in the toxic symbiosis between Matthew and Oliver. The pair may initially be divergent in terms of status, but it soon becomes clear that they are two sides of the same coin: insecure, emotionally needy young men united by a hunger for attention and external validation that both can supply. Their increasingly codependent relationship blurs the boundaries between fan and celebrity, consumer and creator, pursuer and object, generating a potent ambiguity as well as a pathos that suggests both are victims of the same deranging media ecosystem. What do authenticity, originality, and talent look like in such a performative and homogenized culture? Lurker asks this of its protagonists, and is thornily inconclusive. Russell makes us as dubious about Oliver's artistry as Matthew's feelings toward it, and raises questions about the nature of tastemaking in an industry ruled by trends. Théodore Pellerin and Archie Madekwe add entrancingly to the semantic uncertainty. In mercurial performances that limn the dark undercurrents of homosociality, their line deliveries about true callings sit somewhere between awkward expressions of earnest sentiment and parodies of rote marketing-speak. If you can’t tell the difference online, how can you be expected to in real life?