Bugonia

After nearly a month off the big screen thanks to shingles in my eye — and ordeal I wouldn't wish on my worst cinematic enemies — there was something darkly appropriate about returning to the very room where Kubrick shot the Ludovico Technique in A Clockwork Orange. Sitting there with my hourly eye drops, blinking like poor Alex DeLarge mid-rehab, felt almost too neat a parallel. And in its own twisted way, Bugonia was theperfect re-entry: a film about paranoia and pressure, watched in a space famous for forced viewing. Sometimes the cinema gods really do enjoy a theme.

There's a real confidence humming through this one — the sort of film that knows exactly where it is going even when its characters look lost. You feel the Save the Green Planet! bones beneath it, but Lanthimos bends them into something cleaner and stranger, threading modern paranoi through a story that keeps its wit close at a hand.

Emma Stone dives into the madness with real bite, while Jesse Plemons give the film its quiet, unsettling pulse. Together they set the tempo — sharp one minute, surprisingly tender the next. It works.

What makes Bugonia click is how lightly it wears it oddness. Instead fog the broad theatrics or knotted structures of Lanthimos' recent films, it opts for something leaner: a story that keeps turning sideways just when you think you've found your bearings. None of those shifts feel cheap: the film's grip is too steady for that.

By the end, it's anxious, funny, and oddly warm — a conspiracy tale that winds you tighter while letting you laugh at the tension. A strange little machine, humming beautifully.