Lanthimos's "Bugonia" on Netflix tackles conspiracy culture in paranoid sci-fi

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Unfortunately, every civilization is built on “the blame game.” We’re barely an eighth of the way into Donald Trump’s second term, but his trademark brand of populism feels like it hit its apex decades ago. When millions of people are out of work, underpaid, and overall disgruntled, it’s easy for leaders—particularly those on the far-right—to redirect citizens’ anger towards a disenfranchised target: immigrants, racial minorities, anyone who isn’t cisgender and heterosexual. Why would people in power take accountability if it stopped lining their pockets? This leads us to the contemporary normalization of conspiracy-theorist and grifter culture, a not-so-fringe-anymore series of “movements” that Yorgos Lanthimos hyperbolizes in his Oscar-nominated latest, Bugonia .