Movie Reviews
‘Bugonia’ Movie Review: Wonderfully Weird and Disturbingly Smart
Bugonia Movie Review
Yorgos Lanthimos’ films are either something you love or you leave the theater asking WTF did you just watch. But for me, I love his work. It’s delightfully original and unpredictable (though I did predict the ending in this one—as there are some easter eggs for you to pay attention to throughout). With “Bugonia,” Lanthimos delivers a wonderfully weird film that does a superb job of conveying a powerful cultural message about corporate greed, environmental collapse, and the dangerous allure of conspiracy thinking.
This is Lanthimos at his most provocative, crafting a darkly comedic thriller that feels uncomfortably timely in our current age of misinformation and ecological crisis (not to mention all the talk and conspiracy around 3I Atlas this week and the question of whether or not we’re alone in the universe). The film asks thorny questions about power, exploitation, and whether humanity is worth saving at all… questions that linger long after the credits roll.
So, What’s Bugonia About?
Bugonia follows Teddy Gatz (Jesse Plemons), a sweaty, paranoid beekeeper and conspiracy theorist who believes Earth is under the control of aliens from the Andromeda galaxy. Working a menial job at a pharmaceutical warehouse while tending to his backyard bee farm, Teddy has fallen deep into the rabbit hole of online conspiracy theories. He’s convinced that Michelle Fuller (Emma Stone), the ruthless CEO of the company he works for, is actually an alien intent on destroying humanity through colony collapse disorder… the mysterious phenomenon killing off bee populations worldwide.
Enlisting his impressionable teenage cousin Don (Aidan Delbis), who is on the autism spectrum, Teddy kidnaps Michelle and confines her in their dilapidated basement. What follows is a claustrophobic psychological battle as Teddy attempts to torture a confession out of Michelle. At the same time, Michelle is using every manipulation tactic in her corporate playbook to try to escape. The film is loosely based on the 2003 South Korean cult classic Save the Green Planet! by Jang Joon-hwan, but screenwriter Will Tracy (Succession, The Menu) reimagines it for our current moment of conspiracy culture and corporate malfeasance.
The setup sounds bonkers… and it absolutely is… but Lanthimos grounds the absurdity in real anxieties about class exploitation, environmental destruction, and the sense that ordinary people have been abandoned by a system that doesn’t care about them. Teddy may be unhinged, but his rage isn’t entirely misplaced.
Bugonia Movie Trailer
Bugonia Movie Review: What I Liked and Didn’t Like
What I found most thrilling about Bugonia is how expertly Lanthimos keeps you off-balance throughout. For most of the runtime, we’re led to believe that Teddy is simply a dangerous, paranoid individual losing his grip on reality. Michelle’s denials seem entirely reasonable. However, Lanthimos plants subtle clues that prompt you to question everything. Is she playing him? Is she actually an alien? The film walks this tightrope with remarkable dexterity, and that ambiguity becomes the source of tremendous tension.
While Bugonia is largely successful, there are moments where it doesn’t quite work. Some of the supporting characters feel underdeveloped, particularly Stavros Halkias as a bumbling, inappropriately sexual cop investigating Teddy’s home. The character provides occasional comic relief but feels like a vestige from an earlier draft that doesn’t quite fit the film’s increasingly dark trajectory.
The film’s structure, which is divided into three acts marking the days until the lunar eclipse when Teddy believes Michelle’s mothership will arrive, sometimes makes the pacing feel uneven. Certain sequences in the basement drag on, though the psychological warfare between Stone and Plemons remains compelling throughout. There are also several plot threads that feel frustratingly unresolved, including aspects of the pharmaceutical company’s broader operations and some of the conspiracy theories Teddy references, but the film never fully explores.
The Script
Will Tracy’s screenplay is wickedly sharp, filled with darkly comic dialogue that cuts to the bone. The conversations between Teddy and Michelle function as ideological sparring matches. He’s convinced she represents alien overlords destroying the planet, while she insists she’s just a businesswoman making difficult decisions. What makes these exchanges so effective is that both characters have valid points buried beneath their rhetoric.
Tracy, whose work on Succession and The Menu demonstrated his talent for skewering the ultra-wealthy, brings that same satirical edge to this project. Michelle’s corporate doublespeak, offering employees the “option” to leave work at 5:30 pm while making it clear no one should actually take that option, rings painfully true. The script doesn’t let her off the hook for the exploitation her company engages in, even as it acknowledges Teddy’s response is unhinged.
The title itself carries layers of meaning that deepen the film’s themes. “Bugonia” refers to an ancient Greek belief that bees could spontaneously generate from the corpses of cattle… a ritual of death creating new life. It’s a perfect metaphor for the film’s central question: can something good emerge from something rotten? Can humanity be redeemed, or must it be sacrificed for Earth to survive?
Tracy’s script is most effective when exploring how conspiracy thinking emerges from legitimate grievances. Teddy isn’t wrong that pharmaceutical companies have caused immense harm, that wealth inequality has skyrocketed, or that bee populations are collapsing. Where he goes wrong is misidentifying the source… blaming aliens rather than recognizing the systemic forces actually responsible. It’s a pointed commentary on how conspiracy theories often start with real problems before spiraling into fantasy.
The dialogue crackles with tension and dark humor. When the chained-up Michelle pleads, “Can we have a dialogue, please?” and Teddy shoots back, “Don’t call it a dialogue. This isn’t Death of a Salesman,” it’s both genuinely funny and revealing about how each character views their predicament. Tracy’s ear for how people talk past each other, each trapped in their own worldview, gives the film much of its unsettling power.
The Acting
The performances are nothing short of extraordinary. Stone and Plemons, reuniting after they collaborated on last year’s Kinds of Kindness, create an electric dynamic that feels like watching two master chess players trying to outmaneuver each other. Stone turns in what might be a career-best performance, which is saying something for a two-time Oscar winner. Even with her head shaved and covered in antihistamine cream (Teddy believes this prevents her from communicating with other aliens), she commands every frame with fierce intelligence. Her take on Michelle alternates between haughty corporate speak, desperate bargaining, and calculating manipulation, and Stone makes each shift feel completely authentic.
Plemons delivers an absolutely towering performance as Teddy, making him simultaneously terrifying and heartbreakingly pitiable. He embodies the sweaty paranoia of someone who has lost themselves in conspiracy theories, yet Plemons never lets us forget the wounded soul underneath. When we eventually learn the personal tragedy that fuels Teddy’s vendetta – his mother (Alicia Silverstone in a brief but haunting appearance) fell into a coma after participating in one of Michelle’s company’s disastrous drug trials – his actions take on a devastating new dimension.
But the real heart of the film belongs to Aidan Delbis as Don, making his feature film debut at age 19. Playing a character who, like himself, is autistic, Delbis brings an understated innocence that serves as the film’s emotional anchor. Don loves his cousin Teddy. He’s the only family he has, but he’s deeply uncomfortable with the violence and increasingly questions whether what they’re doing is right. Delbis holds his own against two powerhouse actors, and his performance is so moving that Lanthimos reportedly teared up on set for the first time in his career.
The Visuals
The film’s visual approach, captured by cinematographer Robbie Ryan using the high-resolution VistaVision format, creates an intensity that perfectly matches the material. The stark contrast between Michelle’s sterile corporate world and the ramshackle decay of Teddy and Don’s home becomes a visual metaphor for the class divide at the film’s core. The basement torture sequences are lit with harsh, unforgiving brightness, making everything feel uncomfortably exposed, while the flashback sequences adopt a dreamlike black-and-white aesthetic.
Overall Thoughts
Bugonia is Lanthimos’ most accessible film, which is saying something for a movie about conspiracy theorists kidnapping a CEO they believe is an alien. Unlike the baroque excess of Poor Things or the anthology structure of Kinds of Kindness, this is a relatively straightforward three-character chamber piece. But don’t mistake accessibility for simplicity. This is still deeply weird, frequently disturbing, and builds to one of the boldest endings I’ve seen in recent cinema.
The film’s final act delivers the kind of gut-punch twist that recontextualizes everything that came before. Without spoiling specifics, I’ll say that if you’ve been paying attention to the clues Lanthimos plants… you might see the ending coming. I certainly did, and it made the ending land even harder because of how meticulously it’s been set up.
What makes the conclusion so effective is that it doesn’t offer easy answers or comfort. This isn’t a film about heroes triumphing over evil. It’s about systems of power, cycles of violence, and the question of whether humanity has become too corrupted to save. The final images, which I won’t describe here, are haunting and deeply pessimistic about our collective future. Some viewers will find it nihilistic; I found it bracingly honest about the state of the world.
Bugonia isn’t perfect. Some subplots feel underdeveloped, the pacing occasionally drags, and not every tonal shift lands perfectly. But when it works, which is most of the time, it’s thrilling, thought-provoking, and genuinely unpredictable. The performances are career-defining, the visual approach is striking, and the themes feel urgently relevant.
For longtime Lanthimos fans, this is a return to the harsher, more uncompromising style of his earlier Greek films after the relative accessibility of The Favourite and Poor Things. For newcomers, it’s probably his most approachable work, even if “approachable” is a relative term. Either way, it’s essential viewing for anyone interested in cinema that challenges and provokes rather than simply entertains.
Bugonia Movie Review Grade
Grade: B+
Movie Reviews
Mortal Kombat 2 Movie Review: Simon McQuoid’s Latest Is A Breezy, Bloody, Sometimes Baffling Time
Warner Bros. has a new movie to put in the ring. Mortal Kombat II, the sequel to the action-filled 2021 video game adaptation that at the very least got the gore right, is here. It’s a breezy, bloody entry that leans heavily on video game characters and logic, a move that should satisfy franchise fans, even if the actual narrative is too weak to win over new converts.
We’re in an era of regular, variably solid video game adaptations. Series like The Last of Us and Fallout, and films such as Sonic the Hedgehog and Werewolves Within, are exemplary, with stories that capture much of what works about the games. On the other hand, adaptations like Borderlands show that it’s still possible to get one wrong. The stakes remain high.
When director Simon McQuoid’s Mortal Kombat graced the screens and HBO Max, it was received with a sizable difference between fans (currently 85% on Rotten Tomatoes with over 5,000 verified ratings) and critics (55% with 299 factored in). It was refreshing to have fights that didn’t skimp on the game series’ violence, but some muddled plotting, a failure to fully capture the game’s feel, and centering the film on an original character (rather than a fan-favorite from the games) were ill-received.
Mortal Kombat II is a bigger and more faithful adaptation in many ways. The tournament actually feels deadly, and many of the fight sequences are sufficiently bloody to accurately reflect the games. The actual narrative falls apart somewhat when you think too hard about it, but it largely works, and certain characters (Kano, Johnny Cage) steal every scene they’re in. If you like your movies bloody with a side of silly, you’re in luck.
Mortal Kombat 2 Has Stellar New Additions
Mortal Kombat II doesn’t waste time in setting the stakes, with an opening fight between Eternia’s King Jerrod and Shao Kahn (Martyn Ford). The helmeted tyrant Kahn’s violent victory allows him to raise Jerrod’s daughter, Kitana, as he comes to rule Eternia thanks to his tournament victories. That backstory sets up the complex journey of adult Kitana (Adeline Rudolph), who fights for Kahn alongside longtime friend Jade (Tati Gabrielle), but has understandable reservations.
Another major element of this iteration is the addition of washed-up action star Johnny Cage (Karl Urban), who is recruited to fight for Earthrealm despite lacking powers. Cage has to fight under the tutelage of Lord Raiden (Tadanobu Asano), alongside mainstays including Sonya Blade (Jessica McNamee), Jax (Mehcad Brooks), Cole Young (Lewis Tan), and Liu Kang (Ludi Lin). Our heroes have to defeat Shao Khan’s warriors to save Earth, all the while preventing him from acquiring an amulet that would render him immortal.
Urban is a stellar addition to the series, with a huge and charismatic personality that fits Johnny Cage and is fun to watch onscreen. Josh Lawson’s dirtbag mercenary Kano gets some fantastic scenes here, and the two add a lot of charm that some other characters may lack. Adeline Rudolph is empathetic and believably tactical as Kitana. Gabrielle’s Jade isn’t given enough key scenes to shine, but there’s clear potential for the character in future iterations.
Baraka (CJ Bloomfield) isn’t the deepest character, but Bloomfield makes him memorable, and his relationship with Johnny Cage is always a fun watch. While Tan’s Cole Young has something to do in Mortal Kombat II, he’s much less of a focus here, as are returning favorites like Hiroyuki Sanada and Joe Taslim’s Bi-Han.
There are new characters, many moving parts, and a narrative that’s more a string of battles than a traditional Hollywood tale, leaving some favorites underutilized. Because of the need to introduce new characters, most of the existing ones are relatively one-note. Kitana and Johnny Cage get ample screen time, even character arcs, and Kano, Baraka, and some others do get standout moments. Most characters, however, remain one-note figures.
Mortal Kombat II Doesn’t Fully Make Sense, but It Mostly Hits Hard
While Mortal Kombat 2 doesn’t have the biggest fights you’ll see this year (that would be The Furious), it does have quite a few memorable ones with great finishers. The final fight with Shao Kahn has a solid ending, and many get standout moments as the movie proceeds. Kitana, Baraka, Liu Kang, Hanzo Hasashi/Scorpion, and Kung Lao all get particularly unforgettable moments.
A more faithful structure also makes this round’s fights feel a bit more like one is playing an actual Mortal Kombat game, which is welcome. Most are well-paced, though a few could use tighter editing. Unfortunately, the story is more than a little muddled. Shao Kahn wants a Maguffin to be unkillable, sure, but if the tournament rules allow an invasion of Earthrealm if and only if Earth’s champions defeat Outworld’s five times, isn’t an immortality-granting amulet the equivalent of steroid use? Where are the referees?
Some characters (like Jade) change allegiances almost at random, with no consistency. There are several moments when characters make choices that don’t make sense, or at least we don’t have enough information to understand them.
Altogether, Mortal Kombat II learned from quite a few of the issues the first film had. It swapped out protagonists for one with a flashier personality, better replicated the game’s elements and structure, and had kills to boot. That’s largely enough to succeed for the kind of film it is, but it still has issues.
There are too many characters to develop in any interesting way, the tournament rules and character plans don’t make total sense, and the pacing is quick in some moments and slow in others. Nonetheless, it’s a delightful outing and feels just like a big ol’ violent video game (complimentary).
Final Rating: 7/10
Mortal Kombat 2 is playing in theaters.
Movie Reviews
1986 Movie Reviews – Dangerously Close, Fire with Fire, Last Resort, and Short Circuit | The Nerdy
Welcome to an exciting year-long project here at The Nerdy. 1986 was an exciting year for films giving us a lot of films that would go on to be beloved favorites and cult classics. It was also the start to a major shift in cultural and societal norms, and some of those still reverberate to this day.
We’re going to pick and choose which movies we hit, but right now the list stands at nearly four dozen.
Yes, we’re insane, but 1986 was that great of a year for film.
The articles will come out – in most cases – on the same day the films hit theaters in 1986 so that it is their true 40th anniversary. All films are also watched again for the purposes of these reviews and are not being done from memory. In some cases, it truly will be the first time we’ve seen them.
This time around, it’s May 9, 1986, and we’re off to see Dangerously Close, Fire with Fire, Last Resort, and Short Circuit.
Dangerously Close
I would love to tell you what the point of this film was, but I’m not sure it knew.
An elite school has turned into a magnet school, attracting some “undesirables,” so a group of students known as The Sentinels take up policing their school, but will they go too far?
The basic plot of the film is simple enough, but there is an oddball “twist” toward the end tht served no real purpose and somehow turns the whole thing into a murder-mystery. Mysteries only work when you know you’re supposed to be solving them, and not when you’re alerted to one existing with 15 minutes left.
Decent 80s music, some stylistic shots, absolutely no substance.
Fire with Fire
Oh wait… I may want to go back and watch Dangerously Close again over this one.
Joe Fisk (Craig Sheffer) is being held at a juvenile delinquent facility close a high-end all-girls Catholic school. One day while running through the forest as part of an exercise he spots Catholic schoolgirl Lisa Taylor (Virginia Madsen) and the two fall immediately in love because… reasons.
This film is just so incredibly lazy. The ‘love story’ really can just be chalked up to ‘hormones.’
Last Resort
Once again I am baffled how Charles Grodin kept getting work so much through out the 1980s.
George Lollar (Grodin) is a salesman in Chicago in need of a vacation. He loads up the family and takes them to Club Sand, which turns out to be a swingers resort as well as surrounded by barbed wire to keep rebels out.
There are a lot of talented people in this movie such as Phil Hartman and Megan Mullally, but the film lets them down at every turn with half-baked ideas of jokes. Supposedly, Grodin rewrote nearly the entire script and I think that explains a lot about how this film feels like unfinished ideas. It’s a Frankenstein monster of a script with half-complete ideas that feel like they are from completely different movies.
Short Circuit
Lets just get this out of the way: What in the world was Fisher Stevens doing?
NOVA Laboratory has come up with a new series of military robots called S.A.I.N.T. (Strategic Artificially Intelligent Nuclear Transport). Following a successful demonstration for the military, Five is struck by an electrical surge and finds itself needing ‘input.’ After inadvertently escaping the lab, it wands into the life of Stephanie Speck (Ally Sheedy), who cares for animals and takes Five in. Dr. Newton Crosby (Steve Guttenberg) is trying to get five back, while the security team wants to destroy it.
Overall, the film is thin, but harmless. The 80s did seem to love a ‘technology being used for the wrong reasons’ theme, and this falls into that camp. What is mind-blowing, however, is Stevens as Ben Jabituya, Crosby’s assistant. Not only is he wearing brown face, but he’s doing a horrible Indian accent and later reveals he was born and raised in the U.S.
His whole character is mystifying.
Honestly, a couple of decades ago I may have recommended this movie, but it’s a definite pass now just for being offensive.
1986 Movie Reviews will continue on May 16, 2026, with Sweet Liberty and Top Gun.
By ABBIE BERNSTEIN / Staff Writer
Posted: May 8th, 2026 / 08:34 PM
AFFECTION movie poster | ©2026 Brainstorm Media
Rating: Not Rated
Stars: Jessica Rothe, Joseph Cross, Julianna Layne
Writer: BT Meza
Director: BT Meza
Distributor: Brainstorm Media
Release Date: May 8, 2026
AFFECTION is an odd title for this tale. While it is about a number of topics and emotions, fondness isn’t one of them. Obsession, definitely. Love, possibly. The kind of general warm fellow feelings associated with “affection”? No.
There have been a lot of movies lately in which characters – mostly women – are grappling with false identities and/or false memories imposed upon them, mostly by men.
Let us stipulate that the protagonist (Jessica Rothe) in AFFECTION is not an android or in an artificial reality. However, we can tell something is way off from the opening sequence. A car is stalled on a tree-bordered highway. Rothe’s character is lying face down on the asphalt beside it, possibly dead.
But then the young woman rises, dragging a broken ankle. She experiences a full-body seizure. Fighting to recover, she sees oncoming headlights and tries to run, only to be hit by a car.
The woman wakes up in a bed she doesn’t recognize, next to a man (Joseph Cross) she likewise is sure she’s never seen before. One big confrontation later, the man says his name is Bruce – and that the woman is his wife, Ellie.
Ellie insists that her name is Sarah Thompson, and she is married to someone else, with a son. When she sees her reflection in a mirror, she doesn’t relate to the face looking back at her.
Bruce counters that Ellie has a rare neurological condition that causes her to block out her waking life and believe her dreams are real. This is why they agreed, together, to move to this isolated house, without the kinds of interruptions that can hinder Ellie’s recovery.
The set-up is presented in a way where we share Ellie’s skepticism. But Ellie and Bruce’s little daughter Alice (Julianna Layne) immediately identifies Ellie as “Mommy!” Alice appears to be too young to be in on any kind of deception, so what is going on here?
AFFECTION eventually explains this via a helpful videotape, though it’s so convoluted that viewers watching on streaming may want to replay the sequence to make sure they understand the exposition.
Writer/director BT Meza musters a sense of menace and lurking weirdness, as well as making great use of his location.
We still have a lot of questions, many of which are still unanswered by the film’s end. It may not matter to the points AFFECTION is trying to make, but a better sense of exactly how all this started might help our investment.
As it is, despite a heroically versatile performance by Rothe, a credible and anguished turn by Cross and appealing work from Layne, we’re so busy trying to piece together what’s important and what’s not and how we’re supposed to feel about all of it that it can be hard to keep track of the action as it unfolds.
Agree or not, Meza’s arguments are lucid and illustrated clearly by AFFECTION’s events. However, the movie is structured in a way that becomes more frustrating as it goes. We comprehend it intellectually but can’t engage viscerally.
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