The lates from Lanthimos imagines a CEO as a threat to humanity, but what’s the the weird part?
If you like your Yorgos Lanthimos films outré and boundary-pushing like “Poor Things” (2023) as opposed to something more rooted in the simmering edginess of the day-to-day – say, “The Killing of a Sacred Deer” (2017) or last year’s underappreciated “Kinds of Kindness” – “Bugonia” is your cup of crazy chai.
Lanthimos’ muse for his past four features, Emma Stone (she won gold for her portrait of a female Frankenstein’s monster discovering the power and pleasure of sex in “Poor Things”) stars as Michelle, the chief executive of Auxolith, a boffo biotech company outside Atlanta. We first meet Michelle making corporate messaging videos about diversity and workers’ rights. After one fumbled miscue and a retake, it’s abundantly clear that Michelle’s not a woke woman trying to raise others up, but doing a performative ass-covering for lawsuit prevention – “you can go home at 5:30 if you want,” she tells one employee, and then another, “but if you still have work to do …”
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