Bugonia’s Wild Ride—Plus Five Other Thrill-Filled Films

In Yorgos Lanthimos’ Bugonia, Emma Stone plays Michelle Fuller, the CEO of a major pharmaceutical company who is kidnapped by two conspiracy-obsessed men (Jesse Plemons and Aidan Delbis) convinced she’s an alien intent on destroying Earth. A take on Jang Joon-hwan’s South Korean sci-fi thriller Save the Green Planet, Bugonia takes viewers on a wild ride down the rabbit hole as Fuller and her captors battle over whose version of reality is real. “I wanted to challenge the viewer about the things that we’re very certain about—the judgment calls you make about certain kinds of people,” Lanthimos says in the film’s production notes. Variety writes, “Bugonia turns into a wild and galvanizing suspense thriller of action and ideas.”

In the spirit of Bugonia, we’re highlighting other thrill-filled films whose wild rides take you places you’d never expect.

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Promising Young Woman

Emerald Fennell’s Promising Young Woman was nominated for five Academy Awards®, ultimately winning for Best Original Screenplay, for its eye-opening tale of Cassie (Carey Mulligan), a former medical student out to avenge a victimized friend. By day she works as a barista, but at night she brings abusive men to justice in increasingly complex scenarios. When she reconnects with a former classmate (Bo Burnham), she embarks on her most daring mission yet. Completely in sync with Fennell’s vision, Mulligan told Variety that film is “a sort of beautifully wrapped candy, and when you eat it you realize it’s poisonous.” Empire calls the film, “An ambitious, original and surprisingly emotional calling card from Emerald Fennell, with a ferociously great Carey Mulligan performance and a theme that couldn’t belong more to this cultural moment.” 

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Last Night in Soho

Edgar Wright delivers a terrifyingly wild adventure with Last Night in Soho. Eloise (Thomasin McKenzie), a young fashion student fascinated by the Swinging Sixties, mysteriously finds herself transported to that era when she moves into a new London apartment. After psychically connecting with Sandie (Anya Taylor-Joy), an aspiring singer from the time, Eloise’s glamorous fantasy dissolves into a nightmare as a dark neighborhood secret comes to light. With Matt Smith, Terence Stamp, and Diana Rigg (in her final role), the film keeps you guessing until the end. The Hollywood Reporter writes, “Last Night in Soho…delights in playing with genre, morphing from time-travel fantasy to dark fairy tale, from mystery to nightmarish horror in a climax that owes as much to ’60s Brit fright fare as to more contemporary mind-benders.”

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The Phoenician Scheme

Wes Anderson’s The Phoenician Scheme follows one of the richest men in Europe, Zsa-zsa Korda (Benicio del Toro), as he travels with his daughter, Liesl (Mia Threapleton), and her tutor (Michael Cera), through different dangerous realms, impenetrable jungles, terrorist bomb plots, and even heaven itself to realize his greatest project, The Phoenician Scheme. With a stellar cast that includes Riz Ahmed, Tom Hanks, Bryan Cranston, Mathieu Amalric, Richard Ayoade, Jeffrey Wright, Scarlett Johansson, and Benedict Cumberbatch, Anderson’s fantastic world is, writes The Wrap, “a place we all would be lucky to find ourselves. A little silly, a little profound, a little lovely, a little dingy. A vast mosaic revealed through countless individual tiles.”

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Hanna

Joe Wright’s Hanna propels viewers on a nonstop chase from the snowy woods of Finland to the deserts of Morocco to the labyrinthine streets of Berlin. Part fairy tale, part action thriller, and part sci-fi mystery, it follows Hanna (Saoirse Ronan), a young girl trained by her father (Eric Bana) to become an unbeatable assassin while being hunted by a ruthless CIA operative (Cate Blanchett). IGN writes that Ronan is “utterly believable as both an assassin as well as a vulnerable innocent.” As she runs towards her inevitable fate, Hanna slowly discovers what is really driving her." Rolling Stone writes, “Hanna is a fairy tale of lightning speed, gritty action and shocking gravity.”

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Burn After Reading

In the Coen brothers’ star-studded spy comedy, Burn After Reading, George Clooney, Brad Pitt, Frances McDormand, John Malkovich, Tilda Swinton, and Richard Jenkins star as hapless participants in a world fueled by political intrigue, personal secrets, and plastic surgery. When the bombastic memoir of a CIA analyst is taken by a gym trainer to be a top-secret classified document, the intelligence community goes on high alert. When a CIA department head tells an operative, “Report back to me when it makes sense,” we know we’ll never see him again. Newsweek calls the resulting comedy of errors “populated with a cast of delusional dunces who are a wonder to behold.”

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