Emma Stone thrills in timely satire Bugonia, Kiss Of The Spider Woman remake still weaves a spell

Bugonia (NC16)

118 minutes, opens on Nov 6
★★★★☆

The story: Two conspiracy-obsessed men, Teddy (Jesse Plemons) and Don (Aidan Delbis), kidnap Michelle (Emma Stone), the head of a large corporation. They are convinced she is an alien seeking to destroy humanity.

Strange times call for strange films, and few auteurs are as qualified as Greek film-maker Yorgos Lanthimos (Kinds Of Kindness, 2024; Poor Things, 2023). He creates stories that speak to the weirdness of the current reality, one filled with otherwise normal folks who believe that vaccines cause autism and Nasa faked the moon landings.

In this black comedy, the Oscar-nominated director takes on another popular belief – that a shadow government controls the world. This belief shaped the South Korean comedy Save The Green Planet! (2003), on which Bugonia is based.

Today, social media has nudged the idea of secret overlords into the mainstream, making this remake more relevant than ever.

Teddy and Don, unlike most fringe theorists, have acted on their thoughts, leading to the chief executive of one of the United States’ most powerful corporations becoming tied up in their basement.

Screenwriter Will Tracy (The Menu, 2022; The Regime, 2024) and Lanthimos have stripped away the original film’s goofier moments to present a more sober – and arguably more powerful – exploration of the way myths provide comfort, but are also used for social control.

Plemons and Stone give thrilling performances as antagonists. For Teddy, stories about aliens give his life meaning. For Michelle, who represents the depressingly familiar sort of camera-friendly leader, stories are tools for manipulating others.

Much of the film takes place in the basement. It is where Michelle, whose girl-boss public image hides the personality of a slave driver and raging egotist, tries to save herself with the language of corporate negotiation.

Tracy, who also worked on the HBO comedy-drama Succession (2018 to 2023), makes the dialogue crackle, but more importantly, makes it clear that wacky conspiracies and corporate narratives are the same; it is all a matter of presentation.

Hot take: Lanthimos’ latest work asks who is selling the bigger lie – the bigwig with her polished spin or the tinfoil-hat believers convinced she is from outer space.

Kiss Of The Spider Woman (R21)

128 minutes, opens on Nov 6
★★★☆☆

The story: In 1983 Argentina during a brutal military dictatorship, two cellmates in a Buenos Aires prison – one a queer window dresser (Tonatiuh) charged with public indecency, the other a dissident (Diego Luna) – retreat into cinematic fantasies.

Kiss Of The Spider Woman, this 2025 iteration by American director Bill Condon, is the second film of the 1992 Tony Award-lauded Broadway musical based on Argentine author Manuel Puig’s 1976 novel of the same title.

William Hurt won the Best Actor Oscar in 1986 for the role of transgender Luis Molina.

Non-binary Latinx newcomer Tonatiuh, an exciting discovery, now makes his own this flamboyant chatterbox, who persists in recounting a 1950s Hollywood musical melodrama to Luna’s glum revolutionary Valentin Arregui.

Valentin wishes Luis would shut up so he can read his Marxist manifestos. “I hate musicals,” he sniffs.

Nonetheless, both become actors in the movie-within-a-movie inside Luis’ head, singing and hoofing with a maximalist, glamorous Jennifer Lopez as Luis’ favourite screen diva.

The Technicolored razzle-dazzle is their escapism from the daily horrors of torture and captivity: Condon is on familiar ground here, having similarly brought Dreamgirls (2006) and Beauty And The Beast (2017) from stage to screen.

Keeping it all real is the hard-forged intimacy between the conflicting leads. Valentin experiences a sexual awakening, while Luis, who is an informant betraying him to the prison authorities, grows a political conscience.

The fine performances do not entirely dispel the mustiness of the 30-year-old source material. But the sheer durability attests to how moving the story continues to be in its exploration of love, sacrifice and imagination’s liberating powers.

Hot take: A literary and cultural landmark returns in yet another incarnation, still weaving a densely layered spell. – Whang Yee Ling