There has been a surge of middle-aged directors, who had their breakthroughs in the 2010s and have felt the need this year to reflect on the current state of our world. Leaving the exhilarating freedom of their genre-bending worlds and sweaty, character-focused niches in favor of the debilitating messiness of today’s zeitgeist. I would be inclined to call it a fun coincidence – an outlier within a cinematic landscape that usually approaches our reality through sweeping metaphors and subjective experiences – if the world wasn’t spiraling into self-terminating chaos with such urgency. No wonder Ari Aster, Giorgos Lanthimos and Luca Guadagnino didn’t feel comfortable anymore having their mid-budget indie darlings comment on that chaos only through individual perspectives and (at times gloriously explicit) innuendos. After all, the struggles staring into our faces and waiting for us on the horizon are escalating fast, and there is only so deep into societal problems that Beau, Bella Baxter and Tashi Duncan can take you within their abstracted worlds. At some point, metaphor stops being enough.
Which is why their latest films are so unexpectedly literal. Aster’s Eddington is firmly situated in a fictitious small town in New Mexico just as the Covid-pandemic hits, Guadagnino’s After the Hunt takes place in Yale in (pre-Covid) 2020. Lanthimos may not be quite as eager to anchor his equally transcendent and uncompromisingly human storytelling in some specific earthly place. But the two protagonists of Bugonia – Emma Stone’s calculating pharmacy-exec Michelle Fuller and Jesse Plemons’ Teddy Gatz, who desperately clings to his conspiracy theories – firmly exist in our political climate, at least until the film reaches its third act. Our reality has long turned into a stranger and more absurd world than fiction could ever hope to replicate.
Transporting a film so ruthlessly into this current day and age also gives it access to collectively recognized symbolism other directors can at best allude to. In Eddington, seeing the journey of a teenager turned political activist end with an Instagram-pic of him and Marjorie Taylor Greene manages to express the final destination of his arc with disgusting specificity. Conversely, the framed picture showing Michelle Fuller next to Michelle Obama not only introduces the pinkwashing businesswoman as a person that has won neoliberal capitalism, it makes you wonder whether their shared first names are more than mere coincidence. Such moments are often jarring. They mercilessly swing a sledgehammer at the notion of cinema as a protected safe space where the outside world can at best seep in through allusion; they feel like some kind of fourth wall is being broken. Only for you to remember that these films have placed their fourth wall far deeper in this reality than we have become accustomed to. The films want to shock you out of your comfortable state of unaffected spectatorship.
Guadagnino goes even another step further and weaves an expectedly disheartening real-world news segment from 2025 into the epilogue of his film. Just as Alma, a philosophy professor at Yale, leaves to meet a former student of hers, we are reminded by a bodyless voice of Meta’s termination of its D.E.I.- and third-party fact-checking programs in the US. Guadagnino firmly embeds the film’s discussions about the generational divide within academia into the current abolitions of past political achievements in that field. Denying us the catharsis of thinking we’re living in some timeline of continuous progress. Instead, progress is a constant back-and-forth, full of unexpected side-tangents and devastating setbacks. As if to underscore the point of reality not adhering to any cinematic tales of steady improvement, Guadagnino ends his film by shouting “Cut!” from behind the camera. Clearly denoting his film as a work of fiction. He and the film’s screenwriter Nora Garrett struggle with the ambivalence of wanting to comment on a number of complex issues, while also being acutely aware of their own limitations, as well as those of the medium they are working in.
The other two directors find different approaches to circumvent this problem. Aster simply refuses to acknowledge its existence, reveling for 2.5 hours in the symptoms of a crisis he doesn’t seem to actually care about. He delights in the surface-level absurdities of a time where these absurdities masked depths of unparalleled despair and pain, which he barely cares to integrate into his vision. There are traces of a film that actually examines the images it presents, where the disjunct socio-political bubbles being forced to coexist within Eddington comment on each other in some way – or are serving a larger narrative about the continued polarization within our political climate. But Aster never comes close enough to a fruitful discourse to have to acknowledge his limited perspective.
Lanthimos, on the other hand, finds comfort in his heightened characterizations. The lives of Michelle Fuller and Teddy Gatz, who works in a warehouse of Fuller’s company, exist in such oppositional spheres – socially as well as psychologically – that pitting them against each other is bursting with conflict-potential. They are so far removed from their counterparts’ lives, they might as well be speaking separate languages. So, while seeing their differing perspectives clash is definitely entertaining, they don’t really have much to say to one another. This massive gap between the two offers the film a lot of freedom in choosing the themes it (doesn’t) want to focus on. In a similar way as Eddington does, Bugonia offers glimpses at what fuels the struggles of its characters – particularly with Teddy and his search for meaning within his (self-built) world of conspiracy theories. But not even Emma Stone can save Michelle from being little more than a symbol, a stand-in for an all-too-well-known evil that the film doesn’t have many fresh ideas on what to do with. Will Tracy’s script dodges most of the interesting questions the premise offers by hiding behind Lanthimos’ absurdity, ending with an equally funny and nihilistic bit that neither has much emotional nor thematic staying power.
This is not to say that After the Hunt fares much better with the numerous issues it raises. The film throws (burningly) hot topics into its story with the same casualness as other films do action scenes, while only exploiting them for their contentiousness. Its inciting incident is a sexual assault allegation, the truthfulness of which the film stops pretending to care about soon after. The cinematographer Malik Hassan Sayeedmay have the film’s camera interrogate the characters visually, with mirrored walls and frontal close-ups letting them make their case directly to the audience, but the film delivers so little in the vein of context or payoff that these moments remain gimmicks. Same goes for the questions about wealth as an academic advantage (a subplot that merely consists of a few offhand remarks) and female struggles within a male-dominated system that the film hints at raising, without ever going through with it. But while Eddington exploits its real-world issues for what it thinks counts as satire, After the Hunt uses them to frame the topics it actually cares about, deriving no joy from their hurtful twistedness. It is an often-uneven mess, one at least as frustrating as it is insightful, but also one that is regularly genuinely interested in investigating itself.
When the philosphy professor Alma lashes out at one of her students (Maggie), accusing her of being an untalented cheat who is only with her trans*-partner Alex to make herself feel interesting, the (deeply sad) joke is clearly on Alma. She projects her jealousy of those who had it easier than her on Maggie, her view of what is required to be successful in her field as a woman gets questioned and revealed as outdated. The time bomb that is her suppressed trauma, the ticking of which could already be heard in the film’s first scene, detonates. The film examines the generational gap between Alma’s and Maggie’s view of academic structures, forcing them to lay open their differences – and, especially in Alma’s case, their presumptions buried underneath her philosophical abstractions – by pushing their ideologies to new extremes. After the Hunt doesn’t care who’s in the right, if there even is such a thing. Maggie ultimately breaks up with Alex and the sexual abuse she accuses a professor of neither gets confirmed nor proven false. The film, for the most part,doesn’t want to pick a side. It accepts grave uncertainties and painful paradoxes as a part of time and life and lets its – very flawed – characters suffer through them.
It is a frustrating throughline that connects the three films and made me want to write this text. For how eager they all are to embed themselves in our current timeline, they don’t engage with it in opinionated or inspiring ways. They don’t pick a side. Eddington is undoubtedly the worst offender, trying to get an audience to laugh about the surface-level absurdities of a time all of them have suffered through. It throws people and movements from all over the political spectrum – ranging from right-wing conspiracy theorists and conservative corona “sceptics” to a militant antifa and teenagers trying to reflect on the stolen privileges of their race – into the same blender, whirling them around to its heart’s contempt and proceeding to laugh at the mess it has made. But Bugonia, while not nearly as cowardly vile, is also content to merely scratch surfaces. Like a well-told joke we already know the punchline to, it is fun to dabble in the world it creates, yet it deflates once you realize there is nothing new to be gained from this repeated excursion. We already know how desperation, poverty, depression and loneliness feed off each other, and pronouncing humanity a failed experiment doesn’t get us anywhere.
I appreciate Bugonia and After the Hunt for their transcendental moments and fun deconstructions of self-congratulating philosophical abstractions respectively. The scene in which Alma gets called out by a student that her rhetorical “other” is always a real, feeling person is particularly great; as is how Guadagnino contrasts intellectual discussions with close-ups of hands reaching out, clawing to a person’s back or evading one another. Yet we should be able to demand more from this medium. In a time when politicians use openly racist rhetoric to blame immigrants for their own (numerous) failings, while ignoring the quickly escalating climate crisis because saving our species apparently isn’t financially lucrative short term, film should be a part of the resistance. I obviously don’t place the responsibility of lighting the revolutionary flame on any individual film – despite my many gripes with either of them, I appreciate Bugonia and like After the Hunt. But it is disappointing that neither of the three directors dare to inspire, to enrage in a productive way, to have their film be a brick in the wall in the political and societal fight.
Over the past weeks and months, I have been watching quite a handful of documentaries that expose – or reiterate – the consequences of populist, racist and hateful political agendas on the lives of humans in need. They are disgusting. They don’t have the emotional safety net that fiction provides – the more you try to shield your conscious from their horrors, the harder the truthfulness of the images eats at your soul. But, by virtue of their format, they will never reach the audience that fiction films by recognizable names do. Such films are inherently powerful. For better or worse, Eisenstein knew this, using his affective montage to propagandize a revolutionary spirit, and so did Riefenstahl, using equally revolting and effective visuals to shape our images of Hitler in a lasting way. Paul Thomas Anderson has risen up to the occasion with One Battle After Another, giving us an empathetic battle-cry with a contagious energy. But Aster, Lanthimos and Guadagnino have gotten too lost in the current mess to help deal with it. Eddington made me want to meet some friends at a bar and drunkenly complain about the state of the world, Bugonia made me want to get high and embrace the failure of our species, After the Hunt left me more lost than I was before. One Battle After Another made me want to organize a protest.