**Release Date:** 31 October 2025 (UK)
**Running Time:** 2 hours
**Director:** Yorgos Lanthimos
**Writer:** Jang Joon-hwan
**Producers:** Ari Aster, Ed Guiney, Lars Knudsen
**Starring:** Emma Stone, Jesse Plemons, Aidan Delbis, Stavros Halkias, Alicia Silverstone
**Distributed by:** Universal Pictures, Focus Features, CJ ENM

After the bro-fest that was Springsteen, we were looking forward to an Emma Stone fest - despite the fact that I still can’t spell the title of this film for the crazy font, nor the name of the director, which I keep saying as Lansinoh (a popular boob stuff brand. This is what having a baby does to you.) So yes, he were are at Boobonia, directed by Yorgos Lansinoh, who just happens to make really useful breast pads that you can both cool in the freezer and heat in the microwave. Pretty sure it’s the same guy.

You know it’s been a good film when the reviews afterwards swing from ‘absolutely amazing’ to ‘a horrible film for horrible people.’ I think I’ve ended up somewhere in the middle, skewing slightly more towards the ‘absolutely amazing’ crowd. Because it’s a fun ride, and you never know where it’s going next. (To be fair, Springsteen also had this quality, thanks to a total lack of plot - it’s not always a virtue). Anyway, constantly being surprised is something that’s increasingly unusual in a mainstream blockbuster (does this count as a blockbuster? I think the Emma Stone of it all means it does?) and I’m here for it.

There’s a clever scene at the start where Jesse Plemons’ character, a conspiracy theorist methodically planning the kidnap of Emma Stone’s pharmaceutical boss, explains to Aidan Delbis, his sidekick, that they’ll have to undergo chemical castration. Yes this is fairly horrifying, but I think it’s actually there to make things less horrifying. Now that we know, we don’t have to watch the ensuing scenes, where Emma Stone is tied up in a basement covered head to toe in antihistamine cream (I can relate, apart from the trapped in a basement part) worrying that her kidnapper’s motivation is the obvious. It saves us from a particular kind of dread, and makes room for another.

You know when you end up talking to customer services and they just talk in bland scripts? Or when a friend has done a bit too much of a particular kind of therapy and it feels a bit like you’re talking to a robot when anything difficult comes up? This film is about aliens - the conspiracy theory taking over the planet from outerspace kind, and the corporate culture kind. And the hidden in plain sight kind, who seem like totally regular people but secretly have women tied up in their basements covered in antihistamine cream.

The scene where Emma Stone wakes up after her kidnap is shocking not so much for the situation but the way she responds to it. Instead of the obvious screamfest, which we’ve seen women act out so many times it begins to feel uncomfortably exploitative, she calmly and dispassionately explains why kidnapping her is a very stupid thing to do, and what she expects will happen next. I loved this scene for its weirdness, for her character’s bizarre hutzpah, for how it sort of confirms for her kidnappers their theory that she is an alien. No human being with human feelings would respond like this! Or is she just a weird sort of corporate alien, so removed from her own emotions by years of inhuman language that this is her natural response to being powerless?

It’s also a film about conspiracy theories - how they can swallow a person up and lead them to do some quite insane things. Jesse Plemons deeply, truly believes that Emma Stone is an alien from outer space, whose species is trying to take over the earth. He believes it so much he has to shave her head to stop her getting in touch with her ship. It will turn out later on that he has done much, much worse than this.

Should we laugh at people who believe in nonsense conspiracies or should we be terrified of them? Is it so crazy to think corporate bosses might be aliens when they talk in such nonsensical, emotionless platitudes? Emma Stone’s creepily calm attempt to ‘establish a dialogue’ with her captors is weirdly believable, as is, in a post pizza gate world, the idea that someone might take their convictions as far as this, in a desperate need for the world to have more layers than this one.

By the time things come to a head, there are essentially two possible outcomes, and I found myself hoping that the film would hedge and leave either as a possibility. If this was a novel, I think that’s what would happen - what we imagine is always creepier than what we’re shown. But a choice is made, and played out in a full blown, ridiculous fashion, and so things end both more bizarre and less unsettling than they might have done.

It’s taken me roughly two weeks to write this review - I began these with a lovely concept that I would scribble them down within hours of the end of the film, and they would form a sort of real time diary of the whole business of having a baby, and I suppose their lateness does kind of achieve that, too. We are over scheduled, which helps us in the important job of not going mad. I’ve achieved the same day film review probably around twice.

It’s currently our six months eve, and I’m staring at a little row of plastic spoons, ready whenever we are to be loaded with pureed avocado that’s no doubt going to end up in my face. We’ve already aged out of our first baby class, and I imagine our baby cinema days are numbered too. I can’t begin to remember what we were feeling two weeks ago when we sat down to watch this film, except we’d just been to a class called ‘starting solids’ and I was worrying about whether that’s ok when the baby isn’t quite sitting up yet. Some time in the future, I’ll be consigned to toddler cinema club, and the next phase will begin, and I’ll probably look back at these reviews and wonder why I worried so much about writing them. You’re ok, future me. You’re doing great. Watch out for flying avocado xxx

Good things: It’s so weird, and we’re all about weird right now

Bad things: It depends how you feel about decapitated heads flying through the air

My review: I like being surprised

Lily’s review: 0 poos

Next week: The Choral. I’ve already seen it and not yet written the review. Obviously.

Bugonia

The Choral

Springsteen: Deliver me from Nowhere