Three years ago, Yorgos Lanthimos won the Golden Lion in Venice with ‘Poor Things’. Expectations were correspondingly high for his new film “Bugonia”, a remake of the South Korean film "Save the Green Planet!" by Jang Joon-hwan. While Lanthimos fans were enthusiastic, Italian critics spoke of a"‘total failure", with Paolo Mereghetti in Corriere della Sera even calling it a "cagata pazzesca", which is politely translated in the dictionary as "total nonsense". Michelle Fuller (Emma Stone), CEO of a pharmaceutical company, is kidnapped by conspiracy theorists Teddy (Jesse Plemons) and Don (Aidan Delbis) because they believe her to be an alien whose goal is to destroy the Earth. As the film progresses, it becomes clear that the main issue is Teddy's mother, who is in a coma due to incorrect medication, for which Fuller's company is, of course, to blame.
On the one hand, Bugonia is a severe case of Oedipal fixation; on the other, it is a macabre comedy for arthouse fans, which begins with Emma Stone having her hair shaved off so that she cannot contact her “mother ship” from Andromeda. But that is only the prelude to further distasteful events. In the background, there is the opioid crisis, in which more than 800,000 Americans have died from addictive painkillers. Lanthimos turns this mixture into a splatter story that goes to the limits of pain tolerance.
Andor is also obsessed with his mum in László Memes' ‘Orphan’. Budapest, 1957, a year after the anti-Soviet uprising. Twelve-year-old Andor has spent several years in an orphanage before his mother takes him in. He is searching for his father, who was interned in a camp during the war. He stubbornly insists on his Jewish name Hirsch, while his mother's new lover, a rude butcher named Berend, claims to be his father.
Laszlo Nemes, who won the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film with his debut ‘Son of Saul’, emphasises the connection between the Holocaust and the post-war communist regime, which consists exclusively of dull bureaucrats and brutal police officers. In doing so, the director draws on his father's experiences as a child. Despite a tiring length of 2½ hours, much remains unclear; for example, it is not clear until the very end whether the butcher is actually Andor's father. This may be intentional, but it makes the film difficult to access. Forty years ago, Marta Mészáros succeeded in capturing the post-war atmosphere in Hungary in a more nuanced way in her autobiographical diary trilogy (1984-1990), which also deals with the search for an absent father.
In Gus van Sant's "Dead Man's Wire" (Out of Competition), anger against the rich and powerful is also vented in a violent manner. Tony Kiritsis (Bill Skarsgård) is convinced that Meridian Finance has cheated him in a property deal and now wants to ruin him with instalment demands. One day, he enters the boardroom and kidnaps the junior boss Richard (Dacre Montgomery) by wrapping a wire around his neck that is connected to a rifle. He drives his victim to his apartment, which he has rigged with explosives and where he has prepared everything for the kidnapping. When the police is surrounding the building, he demands safe passage, compensation for his financial loss and an apology from the senior boss of Meridian Finance, played by Al Pacino as a harsh-tempered Florida pensioner.
As expected, the situation continues to escalate, an FBI profiler is called in, and the authorities appear to be responding to Tony's demands in order to overpower him at the first opportunity. Before that, he had once again vented his anger in a live press conference and becomes something of a folk hero. One cannot help but think of Brian Thompson, the CEO of UnitedHealthcare, who was murdered in New York in December 2024. The perpetrator, Luigi Mangione, was also celebrated as a hero on social media.
In the subsequent court proceedings, Tony is acquitted on grounds of insanity and sent to a psychiatric institution. As we learn in the closing credits, Richard becomes an alcoholic, Meridian Finance loses the trust of its customers and files for bankruptcy. After more than 60 hours of hostage-taking, neither the perpetrator nor the victim are able to return to a normal life.
The film is based on a real case that took place in Indianapolis in February 1977 and made headlines nationwide. Gus van Sant captures the violent act of the failed investor, who feels cheated out of his personal “American dream”, in sober images. One gets the feeling of witnessing the roots of the national outburst of anger that decades later swept Donald Trump into the White House.