I finally watched Bugonia, against my will. (Spoilers)

What I've always stood by is my belief that the choices Lanthimos makes for his films are painfully rudimentary. Whether it's the decisions of story, or the decisions of camera, I've found a lot of his work so far to be Pre-K versions of his contemporaries – unable to engage with complex topics or perspectives without reverting back to discourse and politics long since debunked, disproven, and thought experiments long since abandoned.

I'm afraid Bugonia did not beat these allegations.

First, what I liked: nice gowns, beautiful gowns (cinematography), Stavros' cameo was gorgeous, I love my boy... and that's it.

SPOILERS AHEAD.

Reader, you won't believe me, but I truly did go into this with an open mind, I promise. I had been spoiled slightly – I was told there was a twist, and honestly, that's the one part of the film, despite being completely incongruous, that I enjoyed visually. In another life, Lanthimos was a jobbing director on a Star Wars show, for sure.

However, the film stumbles on its own premise, obviously setting itself up for its own twist, so that by the time our alien reveals her full self, the metaphor has completely broken down. Our alien, who up until the twist has been portrayed as the American Corporate Elite – the leeches on society that they are, the harm they cause – is suddenly the mournful hero of the piece. Though our "mad" protagonist in Jesse Plemons' Teddy is proven right, he is not completely right – he didn't factor in how benevolent the aliens are.

Because, guys, omg – humans are the real virus.

Are you joking? Like, what year is it? I genuinely thought we might be heading into, at the very least, a ground-floor critique of the Corporate Elite that extract resources and colonise the world. Instead, it's the dirty, bad, genetically inferior "humans" that must all die because......

oh wait. Did Lanthimos, or rather, the writer of the piece, Will Tracy, ever sit and think why all of humanity had to be put down? Lanthimos' signature "shock value" tactic (Graduate DOP-itis) of showing a woman in distress or being hurt to provide a peak of emotion in a scene is still there, but now, mass death and a little bit of gore round out his approach, which I actually didn't mind, visually.

However, none of this is congruous – and this entire line of thinking, as a story and as a message, feels so old to me, and if we want to get deep, which we always do at OBSCURAE, feels like the latent remnants of eugenics – disgust response – that a lot of white men have at the concept of a broad humanity that exists across time, that they can't control, and that doesn't work in the rational ways they would prefer.

Corporate language gets roped in with woke language as the tactics aliens use to evade "real" conversation, and yet, at the end of the film, the pure, clean aliens, from their floating spaceship above, fire the death knell with mournful solemness and condemn us to death.

But we were asking for it, you guys! We're all unwashed violent conspiracy theorists caught in cycles of war! Baby's first history book, no? This line of rudimentary thinking, for a bunch of 50-year-old men, would make me laugh if it didn't freak me out. You learned about the atrocities of the world across time, and the best artistic expression you could muster up was "God should hit the reset button." 

Girl, grow up.

This was a well-made film, but it had a completely broken, badly structured story at its heart. I left myself saying, "OK", after watching, and worse, I am concerned that a film like this would get a Best Picture nomination over "The Testament of Ann Lee", because it signals to me there are yet more people in the Academy that saw this film as profound, or even just complete as a thesis and story. HOW? 

I daren't draw further lines, but this reminds me of the shock so many of my white counterparts both in the USA and the UK have about the current right-wing shift – the phrase I don't ever want to hear in 2026 is "I can't believe–". I bet you can't! If you can spend $ 55 million on a film like this and pat yourself on the back, then the next 5 years are going to feel like a horror film to you. Best of luck.

If I didn't have a compulsion to watch everything nominated this year, I would have saved myself the hours of my life wasted watching this nothing burger. Alas, I am a perfectionist.