Justin Chang

This idea is not exactly the stuff of Revelation, and the movie basically rubber-stamps it without developing or dramatizing it anew.

A big part of the story involves the beloved family house where Nora and Agnes grew up, and which Gustav wants to use as the shooting location for his new film.

We're meant to see that our homes become repositories of memory, filled with the ghosts of generations past.

But there's something a little precious about these themes, just as there's something pat and predictable about the way the drama resolves.

In building toward a redemptive ending, sentimental value lets everyone off the hook too easily, especially Gustav.

You can't blame Skarsgård, who plays the role with his typically irresistible, irascible charm.

But it's hard not to feel that Trier, in indulging this character, is favoring the priorities of art over the tougher questions of life.

As an admirer of the Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos, it gave me no pleasure to report that his 2024 film, Kinds of Kindness, was all kinds of lousy.

A trio of stories about human cruelty, each one more wearying than the last.

You couldn't fault the actors, though.

Not Emma Stone, a brilliant Lanthimos regular who won an Oscar for her role in his film Poor Things.

And not Jesse Plemons, a versatile addition to the director's regular company.

Now Stone and Plemons have reunited in Lanthimos' wickedly funny new psychological thriller, Begonia, which at times plays like a discarded fourth story from Kinds of Kindness that was expanded into its own feature.

Begonia is actually a remake of another film, Chang Joon Hwan's low-budget thriller from 2003, Save the Green Planet, which is now regarded by many as one of the most significant Korean movies of this century.

Although begonia is a bigger, more lavish production than Save the Green Planet, it does preserve many of the same plot details.

Jesse Plemons plays Teddy, a part-time beekeeper who also works in a warehouse owned by a major corporation that makes drugs and pesticides.

He blames the company and its CEO, Michelle Fuller, that's Emma Stone, girlbossing to the max, for their role in endangering bee colonies around the world.

But Teddy's rage goes further.

He claims that Michelle is an alien from the Andromeda galaxy, bent on destroying planet Earth.

And so, with the help of his cousin, Don, played by Aidan Delbus, Teddy ambushes Michelle outside her home and knocks her out.