In just a span of seven years, Yorgos Lanthimos and Emma Stone have paved their own path on the Oscar circuit, with the Oscar-nominated director bringing his signature absurdity and darkness to the silver screen and with Stone serving as his ever-able conduit. Their latest cinematic endeavor, Bugonia, has just opened in cinemas worldwide, but it has already entered the Oscar conversation long before its opening date.
To honor the arrival of Bugonia in Philippine cinemas, we looked back on all four of Lanthimos and Stone’s cinematic collaborations and ranked them, from our least favorite to best.
4. ‘Kinds of Kindness’
This dark comedy-slash-anthology follows three varying storylines (a triptych, if you will). First, we follow a man (Jesse Plemons) whose life is dominated by his boss/lover (Willem Dafoe). The second story follows Plemons again, this time as a police officer whose wife (Emma Stone) goes missing at sea, only to return as a seemingly different woman. The final act features Plemons and Stone as cult members, with Dafoe and Hong Chau as their cult leaders.
Out of the four Lanthimos and Stone (or LathiStone? Stonethimos?) collabs to date, Kinds of Kindness might be the trickiest one to get into for casual moviegoers. I say this, but if you were a fan of Lanthimos’ earlier, and perhaps more upsetting works, such as The Lobster, The Killing of a Sacred Deer, and Dogtooth, all of which he co-wrote with Efthimis Filippou, then you may think that Kinds of Kindness (which Filippou collaborated on) is the director’s return to form after making two films without Filippou as his screenwriter.
At the heart of Kindness of Kindness, once you get through all its strange narrative threads and three-hour runtime is this question of control. Characters either dominate or get dominated by others, and with a cast that includes Plemons, Stone, Dafoe, Chau, as well as Margaret Qualley, Hunter Schafer, Joe Alwyn, and more, the acting is definitely not the movie’s main issue. But, as IndieWire aptly put it, “The three stories are all too similar in their obsessive look at control and self-determination to reveal much new when placed alongside each other, and the nearly three-hour runtime results in a film that bores more than it shocks.”
3. ‘Bugonia’
While not nearly as inaccessible as Kinds of Kindness, Bugonia definitely requires viewers to go in completely game with what’s about to happen onscreen. The dark comedy sees Stone take on the role of Michelle Fuller, a cold, sharp-tongued CEO who gets kidnapped by two conspiracy-obsessed cousins, Teddy (Plemons) and Don (Aidan Delbis). Teddy’s convinced that Michelle is an alien (or Andromedan) sent by her emperor to destroy the planet, and he must be the savior who makes contact with their ship and shoos them away.
Once again, the issue here is not the acting: having already acted together in Kinds of Kindness, Stone and Plemons know how to let each other either breathe or take the spotlight in their scenes together as a terrified CEO and an equally terrified kidnapper, respectively. But there are perhaps one too many themes to unpack in Bugonia, and this is what does a disservice to Stone’s and Plemon’s masterful, deranged performances. What’s more, as is Lanthimos’ way, nothing is quite what it seems in Bugonia: so when we finally get into the thick of things, don’t be surprised when it all takes a turn towards the bizarre.
2. ‘The Favourite’
I must confess: The Favourite will always hold a special place in my heart, because when will we ever get a sapphic love triangle between a sickly, needy Queen Anne (Olivia Colman), her scheming confidante-slash-lover Sarah Churchill (Rachel Weisz), and the latest ambitious addition to the court, Abigail Hill(Emma Stone)? There is intrigue, power play, and rabbits galore in The Favourite, and Lanthimos excels in his exploration of women caught in a dance of lust, domination, and, dare I say, loneliness. Audiences must simply wait and see if Abigail has what it takes to win the affection of the ailing Queen’s heart, or will she eventually lose to the dark, cold tactics of her longtime advisor?
1. ‘Poor Things’
Poor Things, Stone’s second collaboration with Lanthimos, and their first as co-producers (and, as of writing, her most lucrative: it surpassed the $100 million mark at the box office), is best enjoyed if you go in blind. This is because its plot is perhaps even harder to put into words than the other movies on this list: Poor Things sees Stone as Bella, a dead woman brought back to life by mad scientist Dr. Baxter (Dafoe), except she is reborn with the intelligence of a rambling, babbling infant. Thankfully, she is a quick learner, running off with the horny Duncan Wedderburn (Mark Ruffalo) on a psychedelic adventure of the senses. In Poor Things, Stone becomes her most unhinged self, transforming into a warped version of Frankenstein’s Monster called Alice lost in Neverland. Poor Things is funny, gruesome, and perhaps the easiest of Lanthimos’ cinematic pills to swallow.
