Bugonia

lanthimos fleshes out the most undercooked story from KINDS OF KINDNESS into something that works much better dramatically, with plemons increasingly gesturing toward a vague approximation of philip seymour hoffman's screen presence dareisay, perfectly playing this insular and frustrating redpilled conspiracy theorist with undercurrents of pain and self-loathing. it's still fairly rare to see working class incel characters like this in a lead role and presented as the product of hardship and systemic exploitation, and one of the film's better running jokes is the way his outlandish claims keep ending up being completely on-point.

unfortunately, this is a lanthimos movie, and so neither he nor his vulnerable cousin are vessels for our sympathy here. instead, they're the butt of a cruel joke (astonishingly cruel in the cousin's case), which implies that their mistake wasn't identifying the neoliberals as aliens, but rather projecting malice onto said aliens' intentions. he mistakenly believes bee colonies are dumb because they do as they're told unquestioningly, when actually they would've been smart to trust their overlords as it's for their own good.

now, i don't think this is lanthimos' viewpoint. POOR THINGS was a story of glorious liberation from the patriarchy, after all. rather, lanthimos doesn't have a viewpoint, which is why he's always so desperately cosplaying as someone who does. i've known this for a while but i let him get away with it because up to SACRED DEER he had mastered a mode of deadpan i find extremely funny, but now that he's sacrificed some of his signature tone in favour of something more festival-ready, he's started to become unbearable in the way that haneke at his worst is unbearable. he's so uninvested in the human beings in his films, smugly disposing of them from his moral high ground in order to scold us for our failings, that here it essentially feels like the film was made by the committee of aliens with emma stone as his own personal stand-in, which is about as gross as it gets. he's still good enough at tone, dialogue, arcs of tension etc that this isn't without its surface pleasures, but i wish i could watch plemons sweatily flying around on his bike lecturing the sheeple in a context where he's not gonna have his personhood crudely undercut in service of edgy, condescending, fash-adjacent irony.