Where's my hair?

Continuing my trip up Empire's top 20 films of 2025

#14 :  Bugonia

The partnership between filmmaker Yorgos Lanthimos and star Emma Stone continues to bear bonkers fruit – their remake of Korean satire Save The Green Planet! is as odd a concoction as you’d expect from the team behind The Favourite and Poor Things, laced with dark deadpan humour, bursts of gore, and an aching sadness underneath it all. Stone lopped off all her hair – on camera and all – as kidnapped CEO Michelle Fuller, whose captors (an excellent Jesse Plemons and Aidan Delbis) are convinced she’s <spoiler>. The whole thing vibrates on an unusual frequency, as the power between Michelle and the conspiracy theorists shifts back and forth – all culminating in one of the most hilariously divisive finales of the year. Pure cinematic nectar.

I enjoyed Poor Things but it was completely bonkers - I'd be surprised if we're not in for more of the same, whilst also being completely different.

Yup - very much so. I don't feel the need to tell you anything more than I've let you see from Empire above. If you're likely to watch this film then you're probably already aware of the spoiler I've removed, but the less you know about this film, the better placed you are to luxuriate in the lunacy that is to come. And there are some very bizarre left turns in this, although the big one towards the end isn't such a surprise because I'd have been amazed if they'd not gone there (although I didn't guess where it was going to go after that!). 

Emma Stone is, of course, excellent in this, going above and beyond the normal course of duty - this is not a glamorous role in the slightest (although she does get to wear some very curious outfits). Jesse Plemons is also very good because he's always unflashily competent in whatever he does - in fact, he's so unflashy that I was surprised to see that this is the sixth film we've written up that he's in, which puts him level with Tom Burke at the top. Aidan Delbis is the only other person with a significant role in the film and I'd struggle to say he's a great actor but it's a neurodivergent role and Yorgos decided it made sense to have a neurodivergent, unprofessional actor so this is his first role - so everyone gets credit there as far as I'm concerned. 

Emma and Jesse's characters work very well together because neither of them are particularly likeable, but you find your sympathies moving all over the place as information is made available to us. In the Korean original, the kidnap victim was a man and making them female here works well - but it's fair to say she's no damsel in distress. 

As you'd expect from Mr Lanthimos, it's a very stylish looking film - even if half of it takes place in an unglamorous windowless cellar. Interestingly, Wikipedia tells us it's filmed using Vistavision which hasn't been used in a long time, with the notable recent exception of The Brutalist - one of the scenes which had to be done in one take was filmed using four cameras because of their tendency to fail. Two more fun facts for you - the title refers to an ancient folk ritual which involved sacrificing a cow with the belief that bees would be spontaneously generated in the carcass and the score was written by Jerskin Fendrix with the only input from Yorgas being three words - bees, cellar and spaceship.

I enjoyed this film, particularly for its central performances and the general sense of lunacy, but absolutely accept it's not for everyone - for a change, we have a guest reviewer with the lovely Mrs Reed having a lot less time for such nonsense, with her comment being "this is a very weird film". If you like an uncertain storyline with pleasingly ambiguous characters presented stylishly then I'd recommend this to you - it's lacks the sense of fun that Poor Things had but is slightly more relatable (everything's relative!)

#15 - Not a complete waste of time