capsule reviews
bugonia, donald westlake, sinners
Bugonia (Yorgos Lanthimos, 2025)
Ever since this movie came out there’s been a refrain I keep seeing that goes: why would Yorgos end a movie like this? Why would Yorgos do that? What is Yorgos trying to say by ending the movie this way? I thought I knew the answer but I also hadn’t seen the movie and didn’t really want to watch it. Still, I keep seeing this question about the ending, even in contexts where I would not expect to encounter this man or his movies. So I watched the movie so that I could give you my answer.
To be honest, I am writing most of this before I’ve watched the movie, though by the time you read it I will have watched it. That’s because I’m not reviewing the movie. I’m just giving you the answer to why this movie ends this way. I am pretty confident that I am right. Here it is, the answer:
Bugonia is a remake of a movie that ends that way.
![Bugonia is a 2025 black comedy thriller film[b] directed by Greek filmmaker and theatre director Yorgos Lanthimos and written by Will Tracy. An English-language remake of the 2003 South Korean film Save the Green Planet! by Jang Joon-hwan, the film follows two young men who kidnap a powerful CEO, suspecting that she is secretly an alien who wants to destroy Earth. A co-production of the United Kingdom, Ireland, South Korea, and the United States, the film stars Emma Stone, Jesse Plemons, Aidan Delbis, Stavros Halkias, and Alicia Silverstone. Development on the film began in 2020, with Jang attached to direct, Will Tracy adapting the screenplay, and Ari Aster boarding as producer. Jang later stepped down as director, citing health concerns, but remained attached as an executive producer. By February 2024, Lanthimos was hired to direct in Jang's place, while Stone joined the project both as an actress and producer.](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!6Kxl!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F3faa4f98-20e3-4325-9383-cb0ce02525dd_1248x682.png "Bugonia is a 2025 black comedy thriller film[b] directed by Greek filmmaker and theatre director Yorgos Lanthimos and written by Will Tracy. An English-language remake of the 2003 South Korean film Save the Green Planet! by Jang Joon-hwan, the film follows two young men who kidnap a powerful CEO, suspecting that she is secretly an alien who wants to destroy Earth. A co-production of the United Kingdom, Ireland, South Korea, and the United States, the film stars Emma Stone, Jesse Plemons, Aidan Delbis, Stavros Halkias, and Alicia Silverstone. Development on the film began in 2020, with Jang attached to direct, Will Tracy adapting the screenplay, and Ari Aster boarding as producer. Jang later stepped down as director, citing health concerns, but remained attached as an executive producer. By February 2024, Lanthimos was hired to direct in Jang's place, while Stone joined the project both as an actress and producer.")
Now, why Mr. Lanthimos didn’t change the ending, I couldn’t tell you.1 I would guess that the answer is that the ending is the most interesting thing in the movie and changing it would render any retelling pointless. Anyway, I think Will Tracy should win an Oscar. I have not seen the other movies nominated for Best Adapted Screenplay but that doesn’t affect my opinion.
The Ax (Donald Westlake, 1997)
I read this the day before watching Bugonia and they made a pretty good one–two.2 The Ax is about a middle-aged man named Burke Devore who has been working in the paper business for twenty years. But his company downsized and laid off all of its employees in the United States. That was two years ago. He still hasn’t been able to find another job.
Burke comes to the difficult realization that for every job there are a bunch of other laid-off guys and as qualified as him, desperately sending in resumes. There’s nothing really special enough about him, Burke, to mean he will be the pick among a group of equally qualified candidates. “There is always always always going to be somebody just that tiny bit closer to the ideal than I am,” he explains. “In this job market, they don’t have to take second best.… So I have to accept it, and I have to learn to work within it.”
What does that mean, accepting it and working within it? Well, Burke takes out an ad in a trade publication for a fake job. He sifts through the applicants and figures out the six men who represents his real competition. Then he starts killing them. Once he’s done killing them, he will murder the person who currently occupies his most desired job, for which he will now be the most desirable applicant. Simple. And of course Burke knows, as he tells us, that the seven men he’s planning to kill are not his enemies, and really they are all victims of the same enemy: the stockholders and executives who are gutting healthy industries. But that kind of thinking isn’t going to get him a job. Even killing CEOs isn’t going to get him a job:
Oh, I knew all that when I started, I knew who the enemy was. But what good does that do me? If I were to kill a thousand stockholders and get away with it clean, what would I gain? What’s in it for me? If I were to kill seven chief executives, each of whom had ordered the firing of at least two thousand good workers in healthy industries, what would I get out of it?
Nothing.
What it comes down to is, the CEOs, and the stockholders who put them there, are the enemy, but they are not the problem. They are society’s problem, but they are not my personal problem.
These six resumés. These are my personal problem.
While the thought that there are about two to three hundred desperate applicants for every writing and / or editing job haunts me whenever I try applying for one, and I found Burke’s situation uncomfortably familiar, the truth is that you couldn’t set this story in the world of current media because if you killed the person with the job you wanted, the publication would probably just stop having that job entirely. Like good luck taking out the theater critic. In any case, The Ax is a very funny book. Burke’s deranged practicality is the kind of joke I never get tired of reading. Recommended.
Sinners (Ryan Coogler, 2025)
If I’m going to watch one Best Picture nominee I guess I might as well watch two. You probably know what Sinners is about: a musical duel, set in Jim Crow Mississippi, between the Irish on the one hand and Black Americans on the other over who has been more screwed over by the English and the descendants of the English. Also, the Irish are vampires. The Irish lose this argument, not only in terms of “actual historical reality,” but also in the movie.
From start to vampire in Sinners is about forty minutes and I personally feel that we could have gotten to the vampires a little sooner. Horror movies do like to drag out the first encounter with the monster. I feel like we spend the first hour of The Exorcist just kind of following Regan around, which was astonishing to me when I watched it for the first time. Still, The Exorcist needs all that time to create the emotional world in which Regan’s demonic possession becomes possible. Sinners’s first act, in which the various members of the cast are assembled and the stage is set and so on, is just longer than it needs to be, and it’s not really building that kind of world so much as getting all the pieces in order. There is a tighter, under-two-hours version of this movie that starts at the juke and works in the various conflicts among the cast (fatherly disapproval, ex-lovers) via dialogue.
But once the movie gets going, it really gets going, and the bulk of the movie really works. The dueling musical set pieces are amazing—the scene where Sammy’s blues playing is so good that he unites the past present and future is an obvious standout, but the subsequent sequences were equally exceptional. The vampires were the right balance of terrifying and attractive: they were extremely gory but you got what they were offering, to the point where you could believe somebody might choose it. Coogler gives Remmick, the head vampire, lines offering freedom, power, and eternal life to people who lives are constantly menaced by violent racist hierarchy. They work because what Remmick is saying about the world is true. He’s just using those statements for an untrue purpose.
Unfortunately, when we reach the actual ending ending,3 the movie feels like it ends four separate times: evil is defeated (vampire version), then evil is defeated again (Klan version), then Sammy grows up to be a famous blues singer and meets some vampires again, then there’s a post-credits sequence.… Again, I felt there was a tighter movie inside this movie, one which preserved all the musical sequences but kept the action tied to the one location without flashing forward or backward, and which maybe incorporated the music into the late action sequences, and which ended when the sun came up. Sinners is a good movie with a great hour-plus stretch… but if I ever rewatch it I will probably fast-forward to the vampires.
The movie was good. I liked it.
The Ax was also recently adapted into a movie, which I have not seen.
Also there were too many montages in the last twenty-ish minutes. Did movies always have this many montages?
I liked the first act of Sinners, because as a white guy born in the last quarter of the 20th century, I haven't marinated in many stories portraying juke joints. It was neat to see an era of history that I've seen "a bunch of" (O Brother Where Art Thou, hard-boiled pulps, Lawless) from a confluence of perspectives (Black, Southern, rural) that I haven't seen much of. The balance of life being hard due to Jim Crow and sharecropping, but also joyful - it was neat.
The comparison for me is Godzilla Minus One. It was neat to see a well-done drama about postwar Japan, and I would've enjoyed that even if it hadn't also been a Godzilla movie.
Which is all to say that for me it wasn't just about establishing the characters and the stakes - it was an enjoyable forty minutes of cinema in its own right.
"You couldn’t set this story in the world of current media because if you killed the person with the job you wanted, the publication would probably just stop having that job entirely. Like good luck taking out the theater critic."
I laughed, but then I was like "Wait, isn't that the final twist in Tom Stoppard's The Real Inspector Hound"? But of course, that play is from the '60s.