Wednesday night’s event marked the launch of film festival season. The unique glamour of the Lido is unmatched — once a year, movie stars and independent filmmakers from across the globe dress in couture and arrive in water taxis to drink Aperol spritzes and begin to whisper the campaigns that’ll inevitably lay the foundation for Oscar buzz.
It’s just be the start, with Telluride, TIFF, Toronto and NYFF right behind it — but over the next 11 days, many of Hollywood’s biggest stars will premiere some of the most anticipated films of their careers.
Speaking of — Bugonia is the latest film from Greek auteur Yorgos Lanthimos, which premiered Thursday at the 82nd Venice Film Festival. The release of this comedy-thriller was of the most eagerly anticipated title on the Lido as it heralds yet another reunion of Lanthimos and his muse, Emma Stone. The two first stunned critics with their highly acclaimed 2023 film Poor Things, which earned four Academy awards, including Stone’s Second Best Actress Award. Since, Stone and Lanthimos worked together on the much more divisive film Kinds of Kindness, which debuted at the Cannes Film Festival and received far less praise at the box office.
Deadline’s Pete Hammond called the Bugonia a “wild ride,” and a “dizzying, batsh*t-crazy story that ranks right up there with the filmmaker’s best films: Poor Things, The Favourite, Dogtooth and The Lobster.”
Still of Emma Stone in Bugonia
Courtesy of Focus Features
The Venice premiere crowd reportedly alternated between moments of silent shock and collective laughter, throughout the film’s two-hour runtime — finally erupting in an almost seven-minute long standing ovation.
Little White Lies acknowledged Hollywood’s spotty record in remaking East Asian films in the English language, but admitted to being pleasantly surprised: “The droll, disturbing and unexpectedly moving Bugonia more than justifies its offshoot existence… Bugonia is far less oblique than Lanthimos’ previous works, particularly his collaborations with Efthymis Filippou, and at times [screenwriter Will] Tracy’s credentials as a former Succession writer and Editor-in-Chief of ‘The Onion’ are unmistakable.”
Bugonia features Stone starring alongside Aidan Delbis, Stavros Halkias and Alicia Silverstone, and is Langthimos’s English-language remake of Korean director Jang Joon Hwan’s 2001 cult classic Save the Green Planet! Its storyline follows two conspiracy theory-obsessed young men who kidnap the high-powered CEO of a major company, convinced that she’s an alien intent on destroying planet Earth.
The Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw, had a more mixed review giving it three out of five stars and praising the “macabre and amusing” film for Stone’s “predictably strong performance” Jerskin Fendrix’s “intestine-shreddingly clamorous orchestral score,” and “most importantly, a wonderful montage finale.”
However, he continued to say “frankly, it’s a very, very long run-up to that big jump.”
All in all, the critics seem to agree on one front — It’s outrageous, shocking, deadly serious with career-making performances. As Vulture put it, “Stone is remarkable (when is she not?), emotionally wriggling like a bug pinned to a wall, trying different tactics with this psycho… The characters in Lanthimos’s films don’t really go on traditional emotional journeys. We, the audience, do.”
