Stone dazzles in this timely, heartbreaking comic satire

The director and star of 'Poor Things' and 'The Favourite' reunite for 'Bugonia', a funny and deeply topical film that mirrors the crazy times we live in

- Clarisse Loughrey

Bugonia is one of the best films in recent memory to capture what it feels like to be alive right now. Because of that, it is Yorgos Lanthimos's darkest and most timely work. Here he's joined forces with new collaborator Will Tracy, the former editor-in-chief of satire site The Onion and a writer on the similarly cutthroat series Succession. Tracy, then, lives at the centre of the American circus show, and when passed through Lanthimos’s cool-toned, deadpan-tragic camera, we’re delivered a true alchemical wonder: violent, absurd, current, fantastical, shrewd, and unexpectedly heartbreaking.

The film it’s adapted from, Jang Joon-hwan’s Save the Green Planet! (2003), was always meant to feel at least a little outrageous. Yet it doesn’t take much from Tracy and Lanthimos to make its premise - a conspiracy theorist kidnaps a CEO, convinced they’re an alien - uncomfortably plausible in our current landscape of internet rabbit holes, loneliness epidemics, and AI-induced psychosis.