Bugonia can’t possibly be weirder than Save the Green Planet, the sci-fi psychodrama it’s based on
Greek surrealist director Yorgos Lanthimos makes extremely strange movies. His original stories are weird, like The Lobster, in which singletons need to find love, or risk being turned into animals. When he adapts someone else’s work, he tends to draw from source material that’s pretty odd, too — odder, perhaps, than his adaptation of it. That was the case with 2023’s Poor Things, an adaptation of Alasdair Gray’s gloriously perverse novel, a feminist, sex-positive take on Frankenstein. Lanthimos’ version is good, but to some extent, his particular flavor of weirdness and Gray’s cancel each other out.
