By Michael Marano

There’s a profound catharsis in watching Bugonia, one that echoes the catharsis articulated by those who attended the ‘No Kings’ protests on the 18th.

Bugonia, directed by Yorgos Lanthimos. Screening in cinemas around New England

Yorgos Lanthimos’ Bugonia is a remake of the 2003 South Korean movie Save the Green Planet!, which, for the sake of journalistic integrity, I gotta admit I haven’t seen. So, while I can’t talk about the connections of Bugonia to Green Planet!, I can comment on its connections to the whole subgenre of “Women Held Captive by Nut Jobs” movies.

And to the captivity we’re all enduring, right now.

Bugonia concerns two dumbfuck cousins (Jesse Plemons and Aidan Delbis), who’ve had whatever scant IQ points they had at birth lobotomized out of them by QAnon-type online conspiracies. The oddly loveable and shaggy nitwits kidnap a high-powered pharmaceutical company CEO (Emma Stone), convinced she’s an alien using the levers of capitalism to destroy the planet. The pair demand an audience with Stone’s Andromedan superiors to negotiate for the survival of Homo Sapiens.

The vibe here, especially in the context of the cousins’ ever-nuttier conspiracy theories and the gender issues present, echoes William Wyler’s 1965 adaptation of John Fowles’ The Collector. A vibe maybe amplified by the recent deaths of the two stars of The Collector,  Terence Stamp and Samantha Eggar? The Collector, which nabbed the premise of Beauty and the Beast, added the motif of the captor being crazy, making the beautiful woman prisoner not just a captive held in her kidnapper’s physical space, but his broken mental reality as well. Think of the physical and mental imprisonments of Split, 10 Cloverfield Lane, Boxing Helena, Room, the made-for-tv classics, Sweet Hostage and Bad Ronald, and the gender-swapped Misery.

There’s another dimension to this the post-Collector riff on the Beauty and the Beast captivity motif…  the site of captivity becomes a microcosm of larger, current societal issues. The mental illness of the captor echoes the mental illness of the culture. Where does the insanity of the captor end, and the insanity of society at large begin?

And here’s where Bugonia gets really interesting. Our whole culture enables and encourages billionaire plutocrats to kill the planet. When it comes to the delusions of Plemons and Delbis in Bugonia, does it matter whether or not Musk, Peter Theil, and company are hostile aliens — if what they’re doing to our species and the Earth is exactly what hostile aliens would do? Ever see the Twilight Zone episode “The Monsters are Due on Maple Street,” in which aliens pave the way for their invasion by fomenting paranoia and distrust among Earth communities? How’s that different from what mutant, slug-boy dodgeball victim Mark Zuckerberg does with 3 billion Facebook users a month? Stone’s character allegedly approves the use of unauthorized and untested methods and procedures on unsuspecting subjects and consumers. How’s that different from what Elizabeth Holmes did to trusting schmucks via her scumbag Theranos grifts?

By making the alleged crimes of Stone’s CEO plausible, Bugonia dodges the issue that hampered Evan Peters’ tech bro villain in Tron: Ares and the last two movie iterations of Lex Luthor. No supervillain tech bro can compete with the insanity and malignancy of the real things. Stone plays a person of real villainy… not someone trying to get their hands on a hunk of kryptonite.

So, if society nurtures these corporate aliens (and it doesn’t matter a whit that they’re not extraterrestrial aliens) to spread destruction that would be the envy of H.G. Wells’s Martians, who’s to say these dim bulb cousins are nuts? Yeah, they’re acting crazy. But the world is crazy, so maybe their responses aren’t? The actions of oligarchs and corporate assholes are making their lives unlivable. And desperate times do call for desperate measures.

This ambiguity creates a kind of Stockholm Syndrome among the kidnapping cousins and the abductee and the audience. For most of its runtime, Bugonia is a work of theater. The story is mostly contained in a couple of rooms. Outside that theatrical space, real-life tech bros are making our lives just as unlivable as are the lives of those kidnapping cousins. If Bugonia is a play, then current events lend it a Brechtian Alienation Effect. The fourth wall is broken and on some level, the audience of Bugonia is made to think as they watch the film, to consider the insane ideas and issues being raised — and to weigh whether or not they really are crazy.

Everyone’s a hostage in Bugonia… the dum-dum cousins, Stone’s pharmaceutical CEO, and the audience. It’s an Absurdist movie, and the absurdity it envisions isn’t the goofy absurdity of Alfred Jarry’s Ubu Roi. It’s the sadistic predicament of millions of people whose lives have been imperiled (in some cases ended) by a self-proclaimed DOGE master, a transphobic, apartheid, sci-fi obsessed nepo baby with a breeding kink who wants to die on Mars, whose obscene wealth is based on slave labor imposed in a jade mine owned by his incest-obsessed daddy.

All these weighty and thought-provoking factors feed into the utterly twisted black humor that makes Bugonia such a delightfully warped night at the movies. There’s not a lot of hyperbole in Bugonia (for the most part). Stone hilariously fakes empathy for her employees while telling them they can leave work at 5:30 while at the same time telling them they really shouldn’t rings painfully true for anybody who’s had to deal with a shitty job and a sociopathic boss (which is everyone).  There’s a profound catharsis in watching Bugonia, one that echoes the catharsis articulated by those who attended the ‘No Kings’ protests on the 18th. In part, the attendees responded to not feeling alone in their horror and dismay at what Trump is doing. I got the vibe that the people at the screening of Bugonia I attended felt the same way watching the twistedness of the movie reflect the twistedness of the world outside the movie theater.

The sharing of that kind of catharsis is a very human empathy, of a type that the CEO (and/or alien?) that Stone plays is incapable. Rush out and see Bugonia and share that empathy, before the tech bros and oligarchs make you pay a subscription fee for the oxygen you’ll burn nervously laughing at the cruel inanity it depicts, and that we are all living in.

Novelist, editor, writing coach and personal trainer Mike Marano has a new story called “Land of the Glass Pinecones” in the GenX-themed anthology 120 Murders: Dark Fiction Inspired by the Alternative Era.

Love is complicated for Allison Williams and Dave Franco in ‘Regretting You,’ adapted from Colleen Hoover’s book.

• “Regretting You,” adapted from Colleen Hoover’s best-selling book, arrives in movie theaters Oct. 24.
• Allison Williams and Dave Franco are thrown together after their significant others die in a car crash.
• Young stars Mckenna Grace and Mason Thames are the movie’s highlight in every way.

Like many Nicholas Sparks movies before her, here comes Colleen Hoover’s film, attempting to leave no tear unjerked.

While “It Ends With Us” was a hot mess in every way, at least the new romantic drama “Regretting You” (★★½ out of four; rated PG-13; in theaters Oct. 24) makes sure all its drama is on the screen. And the flick, based on Hoover’s bestselling novel, lays it on thick alongside a lacking narrative and cringey dialogue. On the plus side, the young acting talent and a welcome lightheartedness will keep the eye-rolling to a minimum.

The story follows two couples of high school sweethearts in a small North Carolina town. Morgan (Allison Williams) got pregnant at the end of senior year and married jock boyfriend Chris (Scott Eastwood), and they’re raising 17-year-old aspiring actress Clara (Mckenna Grace), who butts heads regularly with her overprotective mom.

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The other pair is Morgan’s sister Jenny (Willa Fitzgerald) and Jonah (Dave Franco), who ghosted his old pals after graduation for several years before coming back to town – now these two have a newborn son and are thinking about a wedding.

Luca Guadagnino’s campus drama, After the Hunt, starts with a clue as to where its heart truly lies. The film’s opening credits uses Windsor typeface, aka the Woody Allen font—a sly homage to the disgraced auteur.

But the film itself seems a bit more ambivalent than those credits would suggest. On the one hand, it’s clear that Guadagnino, along with screenwriter Nora Garrett, believes that today’s college students are hopelessly coddled, ever searching for safe spaces, or a “warm bath” as Julia Robert’s Alma, a philosophy professor at Yale, derisively puts it. The general sentiment of Alma and many of her colleagues is, toughen up. Be more like we were when we were young—handling life’s indignities and cruelties with a stiff upper lip (and a stiff drink, if necessary).

But the film also seems to recognize that this younger generation might be onto something. Why should they put up with abusive adults? Why shouldn’t they demand accountability for bad behavior? And if you ignore or suppress a painful incident it just might haunt you for life.

The painful incident in question is this: After a graduate student, Maggie (Ayo Edebiri), attends a party at Alma’s apartment—the professors like to have a handful of grad students in attendance as a kind of worshipful audience—she gets a ride home with the garrulous Hank (Andrew Garfield), also a philosophy professor. They are both a bit drunk as they stumble from the party, giggling companionably.

The next day, Maggie tells Alma that Hank went up to her apartment and assaulted her.

This is complicated in a few ways: Alma has a very close relationship with Hank—one might suspect it was romantic were they not flaunting it in front of Alma’s husband, Frederik (Michael Stuhlbarg) at the party. They wouldn’t be that obvious if they were actually lovers, would they?

Also, Maggie, who is a lesbian, is hopelessly devoted to Alma—she even dresses like her. Frederik teases Alma for how much she loves to bask in Maggie’s adoration. And the relationship between them has become a bit parasocial, even obsessive, on Maggie’s part. (For the record, I love Edebiri in The Bear, but I do feel she’s a bit miscast here. Maggie is restrained, serious, so Edebiri’s wonderfully off-kilter charm is not put to use.)

Alma would prefer not to get involved in the incident, but she doesn’t really have that option. Maggie is her student, Hank is her friend, and the alleged incident took place after her party.

After the Hunt is the kind of film that reminds one how difficult is to pull off this kind of “he said, she said” mystery. We’re not supposed to know if Maggie is lying—she has a few reasons to dislike Hank—until the very end. And Alma’s behavior is also elliptical. She has the occasional crippling stomach pain that, for reasons unknown, she doesn’t get treated and she keeps a mysterious photo of a man and a news clipping in an envelope taped under her bathroom sink.

But all of this crypticness ultimately hurts the film. We feel like we are watching these characters through frosted glass—it’s hard to get to know or care about any of them when their motivations are so opaque. This is even true of Stuhlbarg’s Frederik, who has a habit of playing extremely loud music to get on Alma’s nerves (shades of Anatomy of a Fall, a far better film about a domestic mystery) but who also seems to be devoted to his wife.

Flaws and all, After the Hunt is sort of my jam. I love Guadagnino and his sensual, well-appointed films for grown-ups. I love films and books set on college campuses (indeed, I just finished reading Emily Adrian’s Seduction Theory, a novel that is uncannily similar to After the Hunt but in a much more satisfying way). And I love Julia Roberts. It’s great to see her in a role like this, playing the sort of uptight, brilliant, alluring character that Nicole Kidman and Cate Blanchett seem to have cornered the market on. (Yes, it’s also impossible not to see shades of Tár in After the Hunt. It doesn’t help the film that it draws comparisons to so many better works of art.) Roberts is more than up to the task—perfectly capturing Alma’s dueling self-loathing and self-regard.

I hate to use the word pseudointellectual—it’s a meaningless word, a la pretentious. But it does seem to apply here. The film is ostensibly about thorny moral and societal questions but it equivocates and doesn’t grapple with them in a penetrating way. And the film’s intellectuals don’t really talk like intellectuals—philosophy professors don’t actually sit around debating which famous philosophers were the biggest assholes; they talk about the plum tart recipe in the Times they made last weekend or the latest Netflix movie.

I’m never going to say no to seeing Julia Roberts—and the rest of this strong cast—in a Guadagnino film, I just wish it were a better Guadagnino film.