The twisted filmography of Yorgos Lanthimos has by now trained us to expect darkly comic visions of contemporary life, both savage and mundane. His movies have perhaps inspired the most “What?!” reactions of the last decade, partly because they’ve tried so hard to do so.
His movies — farces, fables, experiments — reside in surreal worlds of their own. But his latest, Bugonia, is thrillingly, if tragically, tied to our reality. It might even be his best film. Though I’ve been apprehensive about the flamboyant severity of Lanthimos’ movies, I found Bugonia, a chamber-piece gut punch, hard to shake. For starters, it’s difficult to resist any movie with a line in it like: “There’s Andromedan code all over your Instagram.”
That’s one of the things that Teddy (Jesse Plemons), an incel eco-terr