Justin Chang

The more Michelle talks, the more she backs Teddy into a corner, exposing layers of grief, trauma, bitterness, and disillusionment, especially concerning politics.

Teddy has been all over the ideological spectrum, alt-right, leftist, Marxist, but now shuns all labels, dismissing them as performative garbage.

Michelle seems to share his cynicism.

Or maybe she's just saying that to mess with him, in the same way that Lanthimos is messing with us.

Scene by scene, Begonia keeps us guessing.

Which of these two characters should we be more afraid of?

Is Teddy just another crackpot conspiracy theorist?

Or might he be onto something?

Plemons' tense, heartbreaking performance allows for both possibilities, and his psychological duet with Stone is riveting to watch.

There are also haunting grace notes from newcomer Aidan Delbus, who is autistic and is playing an autistic person, Dawn, the one character here who seems completely guileless.

Like many Lanthimos movies, Begonia teems with startling tonal shifts and sudden eruptions of violence.

Yet it also feels like a more accessible object than he's made before.

More of a clever product, perhaps, than a sui generis vision.

It's a remake, after all, and a fairly faithful one at that.

Where it differs most from its source material is in the way it looks.

Where Save the Green Planet felt grotty and claustrophobic, Begonia, shot by the gifted cinematographer Robbie Ryan, is almost distractingly gorgeous.

The final sequence in particular has a spooky apocalyptic grandeur that left me in a state of near awe.

Lanthimos may be something of an arthouse prankster, but even in his impish gaze, our endangered planet can still be a thing of beauty.

When the Iranian director Jafar Panahi showed up at the Cannes Film Festival earlier this year, it struck some of us as something close to a miracle.

For most of the past 15 years, since he was arrested in 2010 and charged with making anti-government propaganda, Panahi had been forbidden to travel outside Iran.