CIFF 2025: Bugonia, Frankenstein

The 61st Chicago International Film Festival starts strong.

With the 61st Chicago International Film Festival in full swing, DoomRocket is here to highlight its choicest selections. In review: Yorgos Lanthimos’ Bugonia and Guillermo Del Toro’s Frankenstein.

BUGONIA

For Teddy (Jesse Plemons), it feels like the world has run its course. But as a person of conscience — a human being, dammit! — he must do something to correct this grim trajectory, advocate for the countless sick and dying, cleanse the poisoned air and water, and set things right. So, alongside his furtive cousin Don (Aidan Delbis), Teddy sets out to do just that in Yorgos Lanthimos’ Bugonia, making Earth’s last, primal plea for its survival.

Michelle (Emma Stone) is the key to Teddy’s grand design. A corporate bigwig at a local conglomerate, Michelle has the poise and cadence of a privileged someone who hasn’t spoken to people like human beings in years. She’s at home gracing magazine covers and touting her company’s diversity initiatives, fulfilling what corporations believe are their sacred duties — creating jobs, sustaining the economy, making themselves indispensable to humanity’s very existence. Teddy has determined, through excruciating online research, that Michelle is, in fact, an alien — one of the Andromedean infiltrators responsible for the incremental diminishment of Earth’s primary species and the bees he loves so well. After a chaotic abduction, where Michelle kicks off her heels and makes Teddy earn his moral crusade, Bugonia relocates to Teddy’s basement, where he takes his captive’s hair but never her composure.

What follows is a war of attrition between Stone and Plemons, who deftly bicker within the unkempt confines of Teddy’s deteriorating home. Stone wields her icy glare to lethal effect under such hospitality — albeit shorn and lotioned to prevent contact with the Andromedean mothership — and her smoky elocution lays down the corpo-speak Michelle believes will outmaneuver her captor’s tortured, terminally online logic. Teddy, however, parries her rhetoric with true-believer zeal (he will not “have a dialogue” about her predicament), which compels Michelle to pivot her charms to poor, dim, good-hearted Don.

From there, Bugonia spirals through a series of twists involving Teddy’s repentant bully turned local deputy (Stavros Halkias), Teddy’s ailing mother (Alicia Silverstone), and a countdown to the lunar eclipse that Teddy thinks will vindicate his mission, punish the alien occupiers, and save the human race. Lanthimos tightens the knots by zeroing in on the frustration of speaking and not being heard, stripping bare the absurdity of our disconnected modern life in a domestic prison that feels like the ruins of a happier life long since lost. Naturally, things take a dire turn. Considering Teddy’s conviction, it’s all a bit silly until it’s suddenly not. Then, Bugonia turns again, soaring this time, with the director’s famously corrosive wit steering it toward a conclusion that’s as vicious as it is perversely, improbably, satisfying.

8.5 / 10

Bugonia premieres on October 16 at the Music Box Theatre. For more info, click this.

Directed by Yorgos Lanthimos.
Written by Will Tracy.
Starring Emma Stone, Jesse Plemons, Aidan Delbis, Stavros Halkias, and Alicia Silverstone.

118 mins. / Rated R. Teddy does sloppy work as a kidnapper.

FRANKENSTEIN

Take an inventory of all the splurting blood, fathomless shadows, and gothic detritus scattered through Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein, and rejoice that this skilled master of monsters, long plagued by too many unrealized passion projects, has finally made his masterpiece. Netflix has wisely given the director of Crimson Peak and Pan’s Labyrinth free rein on its platform, though I must stress that if you can see Frankenstein on the largest screen in your area, do. Rarely does a period-set terror tale feel so enormous in scope, sorrow, and grandeur. To watch it on your TV is to shortchange del Toro and, frankly, yourself. (Though I’m sure it’d make Netflix happy enough.)

Imperfect and captivatingly earnest, Frankenstein is the total horror package, bleeding with the gothic compositions of Bernie Wrightson, the cobwebs and camp of Hammer, and the bitter ironies of EC’s Vault of Horror. Del Toro lays bare his affection for these influences like a raw, exposed nerve (in his enthusiasm, he even shouts out Dan O’Bannon’s Return of the Living Dead), but this devotion pales in comparison to his reverence for the epic melancholy of Mary Shelley’s enduring text.

Naturally, del Toro is at his most sweaty during the nervy, cluttered first chapter that introduces Victor Frankenstein (Oscar Isaac), a medical student ousted for his extreme experiments, which, as you know, endeavor to thwart death itself. Here, we meet the characters who contribute to his growing zealotry: Henrich Harlander (Christoph Waltz), Victor’s overly enthusiastic benefactor, and William (Felix Kammerer), his brother, soon to marry Elizabeth (Mia Goth), a distant, sad figure who introduces humanity to the monstrousness that Victor inevitably brings to life.

Namely, The Creature, played by Jacob Elordi, who makes a strangely compelling monster: his frame is enormous, yet he’s improbably beautiful despite his maker’s rampant stitching. In earlier scenes, his waxen flesh recalls the Engineers from Prometheus; later, his unkempt mane and mournful eyes evoke Ron Perlman from Beauty and the Beast. Yet it’s through Elordi that the director taps into Shelley’s haunting, tragic rhythms. In the back half, where the Creature and Victor violently pursue one another in a twisted hunt between creator and creation, del Toro moves in for the kill. He executes his lofty, gothic sweep and propels Isaac and Elordi to their ultimate reckoning, resulting in a final shot that is at once haunting and heartbreaking. Del Toro might be pulling from his vaunted passions, but his affection for the monsters that have shaped his career makes the beauty and horror of Frankenstein entirely his own.

9 / 10

Frankenstein premieres on October 17 at the Music Box Theatre. For more info, click this.

Written and directed by Guillermo Del Toro.
Starring Oscar Isaac, Christoph Waltz, Mia Goth, and Jacob Elordi.

150 mins. / Rated R. The dead are made to do what they shouldn’t.

Our CIFF 2025 coverage continues later this week.