BUGONIA

Skill and substance are two different questions, and this film separates them cleanly. Yorgos Lanthimos and his cast do real work here — the film is well made and well acted. That's the whole case for it.

Everything else argues the other way. Four scenes of extreme violence (a self-inflicted gunshot with blood spattering the room, a shovel beating, escalating torture by electric shock, an accidental explosion), nearly 50 strong obscenities, and two profanities using Christ's name pile up around a story that ultimately reveals itself as shallow anti-capitalist, anti-human propaganda. The source calls it abhorrent, and even the plot's resolution doesn't hold together on its own terms — the conspiracy theorist and the CEO's final choices contradict themselves.

A well-crafted film can still be one you shouldn't spend your evening on. This is that film. Skip it.

Two cousins — Terry, a conspiracy theorist, and his gentler younger cousin, Don — become convinced that Michelle, the CEO of a drug company, is secretly part of an alien race manipulating humanity toward genocide. Michelle, meanwhile, talks a good game about diversity and employee well-being while showing little real commitment to either. When Terry and Don kidnap her and chain her in their farmhouse basement, the confrontation that follows sets the story's wild turns in motion. We'll leave it there.

Three stars means the filmmaking impresses even where the film itself doesn't earn your trust. Lanthimos directs a well-made, well-acted picture — the performances and craft are not in question. Where it falters is in coherence: the story's resolution, built around the standoff between the conspiracy theorist and the corporate CEO, doesn't hold up on its own logic, and the characters' final actions contradict what's come before. Add to that a tone the source calls simply too bizarre, too violent, and too obscenity-laced, and you have a technically accomplished film that doesn't know what to do with its own premise once it gets there.

This film has something to say, and what it says is corrosive. It presents a very strong humanist, environmentalist, anti-capitalist worldview — one that turns antihuman, framing "natural" and alien-driven evolution as a corrective to humanity itself. That's not incidental texture; it's the film's actual argument.

The film does land a real punch along the way: it mocks the corporate diversity movement, and in doing so exposes something true — that companies and the wealthy often use diversity language to manage and control workers rather than to serve them. Scripture shares that anger at exploitation. The prophets condemn employers who withhold wages and use power to grind down the vulnerable (James 5:4). But where the Bible answers exploitation with a call to justice and repentance among people, this film answers it with contempt for people as a species — a despair no biblical writer shares.

The ache underneath the story is real: a hunger to see corporate cruelty exposed and judged. But the film has no category for redemption, only for elimination. Scripture offers what this film cannot: "He has told you, O man, what is good; and what does the LORD require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?" (Micah 6:8).

Lanthimos and his cast clearly know how to make a movie — the craft here is real. But craft in service of a mindless, anti-human message isn't a reason to spend two hours and a great deal of patience on it. Our answer stands: skip it. Looking for something to watch with your family instead? Start here:.