Emma Stone in Bugonia
BUGONIA
Eventually, the bubble will no doubt burst, as one does quite memorably toward the end of his latest film. But barring the unrelieved misery wallow that is 2017's The Killing of a Sacred Deer, no one's movies over the past 10 years have tickled and astonished me quite like Yorgos Lanthimos', with the director's new, wickedly entertaining oddity Bugonia much like his others, and also not at all.
The Lobster, Poor Things, the triptych of Kinds of Kindness vignettes, even the reality-based period piece The Favourite – all of them (as well as 2010's unsettling Greek farce Dogtooth) take place in fundamentally unrecognizable universes operating on their own singular codes of behavior, augmented by intentionally stilted conversation that maximizes the weirdness and adds comical italics to most everything said. The mere premise of Bugonia – beekeepers kidnap a CEO thinking she's from outer space! – would seem to place this tragicomic thriller squarely in “That's our Yorgos!” territory, and yes, there are more than a few scenes of squirmy physical altercation and shocking slapstick violence to drop your jaw. Yet screenwriter Will Tracy's dialogue, while also being beautifully written, boasts naturalistic phrasing and rhythms that help make the movie feel more approachable, more human, than Lanthimos' previous provocations. And when you add the deeply truthful performances, familiar milieu, and scenario that, horrifyingly, isn't wholly implausible in our conspiracy-theorist times, you realize that Bugonia just might be the least fantastical of Lanthimos' six English-language releases – which also, inevitably, makes it the most heartbreaking.
The aforementioned beekeepers are Gatz cousins Teddy (Jesse Plemons) and Don (Aidan Delbis), who share a rambling farmhouse in the Pacific Northwest. Teddy's frequent tumbles down Internet rabbit holes have convinced him that nearby pharmaceutical corporation Auxolith is an evil empire hiding in plain sight, the company designed to control and ultimately annihilate the human race. It's Teddy's belief that Auxolith CEO Michelle Fuller (Emma Stone) is not only the ringleader of this nefarious operation, but an extraterrestrial being – an Andromedan – taking orders from her alien commander with whom she communicates through her hair follicles. (Okay, that's a pretty outlandish setup … though given where we're at as a society, maybe not outlandish enough.) With the sweet, probably neurodivergent Don blindly following along, Teddy initiates a plan to kidnap Michelle outside her home – an abduction almost foiled by the woman's quick thinking and martial-arts training. Yet kidnap her the Gatz cousins do, sequestering Michelle in their farmhouse cellar, tying her to a chair, and shaving her head so fellow Andromedans can't make contact. After she wakes, understandably confused yet eerily calm, Teddy explains Michelle's predicament: She has four days, until the forthcoming lunar eclipse, to arrange a meeting between her emperor and Teddy, at which point he'll convince the aliens to forevermore leave Earth alone.
Unless you're acquainted with the Lanthimos oeuvre, it might sound insane that Bugonia could possibly be, as I've posited, his least out-there work of the past decade. Yet from the start, with Teddy, in voice-over, sharing his fears about the gradual vanishing of Earth's bee population (which, it should go without saying, is a real-world concern), it's clear that the man's paranoia is coming from a genuine sense of terror. As the film progresses, and the pieces of Teddy's psychological puzzle begin to fit, we realize it's also coming from a life of unrelenting sadness. He's been required to care for Don from a young age. His father was never in the picture. His beloved mother (Alicia Silverstone) was an opioid addict whose “life-saving” medication – one produced by Auxolith – put her in a coma. And his town's chief police officer (Stavros Halkios) was his former babysitter who, to Teddy's eternal discomfort, can't stop telling Teddy how bad he feels about sexually molesting him as a child. As horrifying as Teddy's subsequent actions are, embracing conspiracy theories about alien insurrection almost seems a reasonable reaction to a life of such hardship on Earth. Someone, from somewhere, has to be responsible for all this suffering, and Michelle seems as likely a candidate as any.
With screenwriter Tracy giving him a number of unexpectedly cogent speeches and Lanthimos not calling undue attention to the filmmaking (which is pretty unusual for him), Plemons is extraordinary here. While Teddy is unpredictably volatile and sometimes terrifying in his moral justifications, Plemons never loses touch with the hurting, broken kid inside the adult, nor the suggestion that one utterance is all it might take for Teddy to either break down in sobs or go for your throat. It's this delicate emotional instability that Michelle appears to recognize at once, which is what makes Stone's performance so thunderously exciting.
At first, her portrayal feels like little more than Big Pharma Boss play-acting – all crisp line readings and pandering smiles and barely veiled passive-aggression. (Michelle's insistence to her Auxolith employees that they can leave work at 5:30 p.m. with no repercussions comes with unmissable subtext: “ … but you'd better not.”) It's after she's kidnapped and Michelle starts reading the room that Stone begins to pull out the stops. At no point does the CEO tearfully beg for her life. Instead, surmising Teddy's imbalance and Don's forlorn neediness, Michelle embarks on a series of quiet tactical efforts. She reasons. She coaxes. She offers compromises. She makes promises. And eventually, she simply runs with it, telling Teddy and Don that yep, they've got her, she's an alien – so what do they do now? Although most of Bugonia takes place in and directly outside that farmhouse, the movie is never tedious, largely because of the electric snap of watching Michelle's brain at work as she tries to determine, quickly, the best course of action for every given moment. Stone appeared nude in Lanthimos' last three films, but it's her subtle desperation and ever-evolving thought processes that are on naked display this time around, and she and Plemons achieve perfectly in-sync combative chemistry – two trapeze artists walking the same tightrope.
Unlike with most Lanthimos titles, I didn't laugh much at Bugonia, even when I'm pretty sure we were meant to. (One scene of unexpected, explosive violence is so gory it may as well have been directly air-lifted in from The Toxic Avenger.) Yet losing the traditionally awkward Yorgos yuks is a small price to pay for storytelling this captivating, narrative turns this surprising, performances this rich – newcomer Delbis completely holds his own opposite his more seasoned co-stars – and, in the end, lingering effects this trenchant. Bees may start the movie and bees may end it, but in between, it's all one giant A.
IF I HAD LEGS I'D KICK YOU
Actors have long been hailed as “brave” for playing unsympathetic characters, and playing gay characters, and appearing nude, and either forgoing makeup or being buried under it. (Charlize Theron won a fait accompli Oscar for landing the quadfecta in 2003's Monster.) But I don't think I've seen a more noteworthy example of cinematic bravery this year than what Rose Byrne does in If I Had Legs I'd Kick You, considering that writer/director Mary Bronstein's camera routinely stays so oppressively close to the actor's face that you can count her pores – and given the long takes in which she's required to emote, you certainly have time to. Byrne, of course, is stunningly beautiful, yet somehow even more so here with Bronstein and cinematographer Christopher Messina not hiding the pimples and stray hairs and forehead veins bulging from anxiety and stress. Our proximity to Byrne's protagonist Linda is so suffocatingly tight that we don't feel we know her so much as we are her, and as the actor's incandescent and, yes, intensely brave portrayal reveals, that's an unsettling person to be.
As is quickly made clear in If I Had Legs I'd Kick You, which is currently playing at Iowa City's FilmScene, Linda is having a hard time. (The “I” in the title evidently refers to life itself.) Her daughter, who's never named in the movie (and played by a barely seen Delaney Quinn), is suffering from a mysterious eating disorder – this girl of about eight weighs less than 50 pounds – that requires nutrients to be pumped into her system through a feeding tube just above her navel. Linda's husband Charles (the similarly barely-seen Christian Slater) is away on week three of an eight-week work assignment. A plumbing disaster has left a gaping hole in the ceiling of Linda's rental home, forcing her and to daughter to stay at a dive motel manned by an inhospitable clerk (Ivy Wolk). Contractors, hospital workers, and parking-lot attendants appear staggeringly uncaring about Linda's circumstances. Her own therapist (a fantastically dismissive Conan O'Brien) treats the woman as a nuisance. And to top it off, Linda, as we learn belatedly and amusingly, is a therapist herself, her patients including a young man (Daniel Zolghadri) who only wants to discuss Linda's appearances in his dreams, and, more frighteningly, a new mother (the superb Danielle Macdonald) who's certain some irreparable harm will come to her newborn. In short, Linda is ready to snap, and Bronstein ensures that we don't miss a single minute, instant, or facial pore of her nervous breakdown.
Would it surprise you to learn that, for consideration with the impending Golden Globe Awards, If I Had Legs is being submitted as a comedy? Because after seeing the film, it certainly surprised me. That's not to say I didn't laugh. O'Brien's simmering hostility is seriously funny, and Byrne, as polished a comic actor as we currently have, is frequently hilarious in Linda's indignation, whether expressing disdain with her patients through microscopic changes in expression and vocal timbre or, as more often happens, shrieking with rage over every personal injustice no matter the size. (The scene with the hamster is an in-the-making classic.) It's just that, beyond the obvious plays for laughter, Bronstein's material is so sad.
Roughly halfway through the film, Linda's car is rear-ended while she's driving with her daughter, and the devastatingly loud noise and the child's screams suggest this as a traffic accident of monumental proportion. When, however, Linda gets out of the car to castigate the driver (instantly recognizable character actor Josh Pais), it turns out the guy is friendly and apologetic, and the car suffered no visible damage. Linda goes ballistic on him anyway – shrewdly, Bronstein deprives us our own look at the fender – and the event forces us to re-think everything we've seen of Linda's traumas thus far. Was her daughter's hospital caregiver (played by Bronstein herself) really being a pushy bitch by demanding, after weeks of badgering, that Linda set a date to discuss the child's treatment? Was the parking-lot attendant (Mark Stolzenberg) really being cruel in his insistence that Linda not double-park – at a hospital? Is Charles really being vacantly unfeeling by demanding that Linda send him photos of their home's ceiling problem even if he's not there to fix things himself? And how much of Linda's account, by which I mean If I Had Legs' presentational account, can honestly be trusted when the woman leaves her bedridden daughter every night to get drunk and smoke weed outside the motel grounds, at one point convincing the motel super (the utterly delightful A$AP Rocky) to help her procure cocaine, too?
Despite these horrific lapses in judgment, Linda probably isn't the worst mother in the world; she does tend to her daughter's food-source needs with strict discipline, and no matter her frustration levels, she's never outright harsh with the child. She feels, however, like an abject failure as a mom, and Bronstein's film most succeeds as a feature-length panic attack, delivering the sensation that the world is crumbling around you – or, via the metaphor of that crumbling ceiling, on top of you – and no one is around to help. What makes the movie so heart-wrenching is that people are around to help: hospital workers and therapists and support groups, and even unexpected sweethearts including that motel super who suffers a crippling injury, through Linda's doing, for being a genuinely nice guy … and still shows up to help at a time of intense need.
So yeah, I didn't find If I Had Legs I'd Kick You much of a comedy, and its ending left me almost traumatically depressed … until I later read interviews with the director implying that my take on the finale was wrong. (I still think I'm right, by the way.) But I did love the film for its gorgeously thoughtful and complex exploration of overwhelmed motherhood, and particularly for its career-best turn from Rose Byrne, who, portraying a character deserving of her massive talent, is finally allowed to give what can justifiably be called a signature performance. I know the actor breathed during the course of her film's 114 minutes, because we were right there in her face to witness it. I'm still not sure that I did.
HEDDA
Playwright Henrik Ibsen's 19th-century masterpiece Hedda Gabler is so luscious and malleable that it could probably survive any sort of updating so long as adapters left its basic structure alone. That said, I'm not sure I ever envisioned a rendition as delectably nasty as writer/director Nia DaCosta's Hedda, which is newly streaming on (Amazon) Prime Video, and which gives the great Tessa Thompson a deserved crack at one of theatre history's most fearsome anti-heroines. Not everything here works, at least in terms of DaCosta's freshly imagined approach jiving with Ibsen's. Yet the movie is consistently enjoyable and occasionally riveting, and if you're familiar with the play, you may find yourself wondering whether the arguably cosmetic changes – A Black Hedda! Lesbian lovers! The 1950s! – don't actually alter the material for the better. Or at least the juicier.
For those who've yet to meet her in any iteration, Hedda Gabler is perhaps the worst and most dangerous kind of sociopath: a bored one. In Ibsen's 1891 stage piece, its title character is the gun-loving daughter of a revered general, newly married to a husband she hates, George Tesman, and still pining for the poet lover she abandoned, Eilert Lövborg. A woman whom Hedda bullied at school, the divorce-seeking Thea Elvsted, soon appears, as does the unscrupulous Judge Brack, who has an unseemly interest in Hedda. Eilert shows up in this quintessential living-room play, too, and with the restless new housewife Hedda treating those in her orbit as playthings serving only her replellant amusement, it all leads to cruelty, emotional blackmail, professional sabotage, and more than one death. As snooty theatre classics go, Hedda Gabler is awesome, practically the domestic-drama equivalent of Shakespeare's Macbeth or Titus Andronicus. And the grandest treat of DaCosta's adaptation is that she doesn't treat Ibsen's work as an unassailable relic she should be loath to tinker with. Rather, she attacks it head-on with a bawdy and lustful spirit, giving us a Hedda with more than a dash of Emerald Fennell's Saltburn and Damien Chazelle's Babylon – though, thankfully, the less intolerable aspects of both.
With the action unfurling almost entirely during one raucous London party at the Tesman manse in the '50s, Hedda now being Black is almost superfluous. The woman does make mention of her race being an impediment to being taken seriously, and an anonymous party-goer remarks that Tesman's new wife is “duskier” than she was expecting. But Judge Brack (Nicholas Pinnock) is himself Black, as is Hedda's invented-by-DaCosta bestie Jane Ji (Saffron Hocking), and regardless, the soirée's guests are too full of food and booze and illicit substances to care about such things. The real foundational shake-up of Ibsen's text comes with the introduction of Eilert Lövborg surrogate Eileen Lövborg (Nina Hoss), who makes her first entrance, and stays in the same costume throughout, in what I will hesitantly but accurately call a boob shirt. Picture a stereotypical milkmaid from the Alps, but as an adult in a porno, and you'll get the idea. (The image below will likely help.) Even those of us who, by nature, may not feel compelled to stare at Nina Hoss' bosom for two hours might find it impossible not to, and Eileen's brazen sexuality has no choice but to turn up the heat on Hedda's encounters with frenemy Thea (Imogen Poots), sad-suck husband George (Tom Bateman), and Brack, who, here, has been designed as generically loathsome for no particular reason.
While the lesbian angle admittedly leads to events becoming saucier and more potentially ruinous for Hedda, not all of DaCosta's new imaginings keep the material coherent. A late-breaking act of complicity between Hedda and George makes the man's eventual partnership with Thea rather senseless, and I'm still not sure what's to be gained by the last-minute resuscitation of one of Ibsen's original suicide victims. Yet whether or not you're beholden to the playwright's script, starting with Kathryn Hunter's novel take on the Tesmans' long-suffering housekeeper (this one has a delightfully forthright attitude and filthy mouth), Hedda is sensational.
It certainly looks and sounds exquisite, Cara Brower's extravagant production design matched by Lindsay Pugh's mouth-watering costumes and composer Hildur Guõnadóttir's nerve-jangling score. And with Poots, Bateman, and the truly exceptional Hoss soaking their roles in pulsating blood, Thompson, as she should be, is as icy and brittle as a January morning, her clipped British dialect beyond reproach and her willingness to display Hedda at her absolute worst – which is always – resulting in no end of vicious schadenfreude fun. Yet Thompson is also supremely soulful, even unexpectedly moving, in this impassioned take on Ibsen, and to whichever investors may be reading, by all means give LaCosta a shot at An Enemy of the People and A Doll's House and The Wild Duck and Ghosts. If stage oldies are to endure on-screen, they should definitely do so with this kind of adventurous, compassionate caregiver.
THE BALLAD OF THE SMALL PLAYER
Is Tilda Swinton the only one associated with The Ballad of the Small Player (newly streaming on Netflix) who recognizes the movie as something to laugh at – or, if you're feeling generous, laugh with?
Playing Cynthia Blithe, emissary for an unseen, ultra-rich patron to whom Colin Farrell's degenerate gambler Brendan Reilly owes many thousands of dollars, Swinton is in Full Tilda mode here – meaning she's absolutely hysterical. She has a goofy walk. She wears unflattering eyeglasses. Her hair is a mop of curly orange frizz weirdly mismatched with her blasé house dresses. (She looks like a mashup of Little Orphan Annie and Miss Hannigan.) One of her bottom teeth is either missing or blackened to the point of superfluousness. And while nothing about Swinton's vocal cadences or line deliveries are entirely out of the ordinary, at least for her, my God – the faces she makes while talking! When reprimanding Reilly that his recently assumed identity as aristocrat “Lord Doyle” is ridiculous because “Doyle isn't even a posh name!”, Swinton's face scrunches up as though she's just bitten into something rotten. With The Ballad of the Small Player, she has. Cynthia Blithe isn't in any world believable as someone hired as an incognito spy; her first act of “secret” fact gathering is so telegraphed that even Farrell's sloshed casino hound sees through the ruse in three seconds. Yet all of Swinton's demented doings would have been perfect for the movie had director Edward Berger and screenwriter Rowan Joffé realized that their script really only could've worked as a comedy, preferably one that understood how badly we're aching to see its protagonist humiliated.
Well before Swinton confronts Farrell, we're given the conceit that should sustain Berger's film through its 100-minute run time: Brendan Reilly/”Lord Byron” has been gambling his way through Europe and Asia with nothing left to his name; his debts increasingly amassed before arriving in the Chinese region of Macau (think a gaudier Vegas), where his lordly act has now ensured a considerable line of credit; and he's convinced that one lucky streak playing baccarat is all it'll take to pay off his debts and start his life anew. In short: This handsome charlatan is aching to be taken down a peg or two. Fortunately for Reilly, though less fortunately for us, he finds a sponsor in credit broker Dao-Ming (Fala Chen), who appears to take pity on the pathetic Irishman posing as an Englishman because … . Well, I suspect because he looks an awful lot like Colin Farrell. While the pair unconvincingly fall in love, Reilly prospers from Dao-Ming's generosity, she suffers for it, and The Ballad of a Small Player emerges as what you'd get if someone decided that Puccini's Madama Butterfly would've worked much better with far gaudier surroundings and without all that pesky music.
Aside from several hundred million others, has anyone endured a worse past few months than Colin Farrell? First, the guy loses the Emmy – after previously winning Golden Globe and SAG Awards – for The Penguin, forcing him to smile as Adolescence's Stephen Graham accepts the trophy and co-star Cristin Millioti receives The Penguin's only televised prize. Then he appears opposite Margot Robbie in A Big Bold Beautiful Journey, that deserved box-office dud whose noun is its title's only honest word. Now, he's headlining a film by Edward Berger – whose last two releases, All Quiet on the Western Front and Conclave, netted five Oscars between them – and even the theoretically simple stuff goes wrong.
Because Reilly, like Farrell himself, is an Irish bloke, it makes sense that his imposed British dialect sounds all wrong from the start. And it's certainly not the star's fault that the film's midsection, in which Dao-Ming rescues her newfound beloved by taking him to a Chinese seaside retreat where he can safely lounge around in pajama pants, is excruciatingly contrived and dull. Yet despite Farrell's natural empathy, and even while unleashing faux sweat for days, Joffé never gives us reason to care about this purportedly lost soul. As an actor, Farrell seems way too smart to be convincing as this simpleton who doesn't realize his hidden tells are all that anyone – except poor, pitiable Dao-Ming – can see. I'm gonna blame this on Berger, as Farrell was phenomenally believable playing simpletons for Martin McDonagh in In Bruges, Seven Psychopaths, and The Banshees of Inisherin. And I'm also choosing to blame Berger for Farrell routinely overacting with painful broadness, whether Reilly is cosplaying Important Dude dress-up in his hotel room or mildly threatening perceived rivals or noshing on room-service lobster like Leo DiCaprio eating fresh fish in The Revenant. (When at the table, Riley also bends his baccarat cards in such an unseemly way, practically leaving a crease, that you imagine the casino being forced to refresh the deck with each new hand. Maybe that's typical. It sure doesn't feel like it.)
Farrell is clearly working his ass off. Yet the star is still unintentionally awful in Berger's latest, which puts him in line with the film's other similarly overwrought aspects. I can't ding James Friend's cinematography; the movie looks gorgeous, with the nighttime images of Macau especially stunning. I am, however, starting to wish that composer Volker Bertelmann would give it a rest. His Oscar-winning score for Berger's All Quiet worked for its bombastic incongruousness, and the music in Conclave pumped up the campy juice. But Bertelmann's overall effect (in A House of Dynamite, Dead of Winter, The Amateur … ) is growing exhausting, his scores, which are generally overblown for the emotion they're accompanying, becoming as familiar as John Williams' – and that's not meant as a compliment. Yet even without Bertelmann, the tone of The Ballad of a Small Player seems unnecessarily over-amped for such a simple tale, Berger and Joffé seeming to aim for grandeur when grubby humanism was almost unquestionably more called for. Only Tilda Swinton appears immune to the collective wrongdoing. She's co-starring in a loony, sprightly comedy when everyone around her is in misguided dead-serious mode, and it's hard to imagine Netflix viewers not wishing that her movie were the movie.
KPOP DEMON HUNTERS
Despite the streaming service's notorious disinterest in screening original films for cineplex patrons, Netflix re-released a sing-along version of its monster hit KPop Demon Hunters this past weekend, potentially adding more eyeballs to what had already been a 650-million-eyeball event. (I'm presuming a two-eyeball count for the movie's reported 325-million-viewers event.) As a 57-year-old who doesn't visit Netflix often, I honestly had no idea that the movie even existed until a couple months ago, and consequently avoided the movie just like I avoided other animated releases that have made big bucks in 2025: animes with the unwieldy (and punctuationally bizarre) titles Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba – The Movie – Infinity Catle and Chainsaw Man – The Movie: Reze Arc; the Jesus-is-born (again) saga The King of Kings: the you-can't-force-me-to-see-this-even-with-Kristen-Wiig-in-it product placement of Gabby's Dollhouse: The Movie.
Yet because, through the regularly untrustworthy Oscars Web sites I visit, I keep reading that Netflix's Sony Pictures Animation release is the apparent front-runner for Best Animated Feature (in a depressingly weak year) and Best Original Song (in a very competitive year), I thought I should probably, finally, give the movie a shot. So I did. And granted, I initially misinterpreted the presumed Oscars champ “Golden”'s lyrical phrase “like I'm born to be” as “like a butter bean” all 75-or-so times we heard it. But I'm not about to blame the movie, or a singer's shaky enunciation, for my mistake when I can blame encroaching Gen X hearing loss instead. I am, however, certainly willing, even eager, to blame the film for its tireless, exceedingly obnoxious avowal that everything our heroines do is out of love for their fans, a statement that's reiterated maybe five times as often as that butter-bean lyric. Yes, kids: The KPop stars love you. You keep them rich and famous. You love them for making you feel seen. I'm not sure we need a visually and aurally aggressive, yet unreasonably bland, Netflix entertainment to make those truths valid.
For what it's worth, let me say that of all the adult humans I've spoken with about directors Maggie Kang's and Chris Appelhans' feature – and I conducted an unusually wide survey – only one friend has admitted to having seen this animated action/adventure/musical/comedy/fantasy that's the first movie soundtrack on the Billboard Hot 100 to boast four songs in its top 10. He told me not to bother with the film. The other folks I communicated with either responded with variants on “What's KPop Demon Hunters?” or “Yeah, that's apparently huge – what is it?” For the unenlightened, it's about a vocal trio that's following centuries-long tradition of eradicating monsters while crooning fan-favorite tunes – the sort of thing the Andrews Sisters might've been up to had they been born in South Korea. One of the members of our heroic trio Huntr/x was born half-demon, which causes her no end of shame. One of the members of rival band the Saja Boys is also demonic, though a swoony kind of demonic in the manner of Edward Cullen or Jacob Black. There are crises of conscience. There are feverishly edited battle sequences. There are bland bangers for days. KPop Demon Hunters has obviously made it many, many fans very, very happy.
For my part, I laughed out loud precisely once, when the adorable sidekick tiger with a mouth of fearsome teeth accidentally knocked over a potted plant and, the accident having been rectified, knocked it over again. (His six-eyed bird with the top hat was equally cute.) I also smiled every time Huntr/x chanteuse/warrior Mira went gaga over the sight of a Saja Boys' abs and vowed revenge for his unwitting provocation of her lust. I admired the admittedly sensational Sony animation that, also admittedly, was more impressive when paired with a screenplay of the Spider-Verse caliber. I mourned the filmmakers' lack of irony when zombified fans attended a Korean Idol-type competition, admiring a vacuous act, and were eventually pulled out of their hypnosis by a legit K-Pop sensation – an unacknowledged form of hypnosis. (This movie apparently sees no difference between legit devotion and imposed devotion.) The genre clichés were abundant. The earworm songs were acceptably basic. The Life Lessons, though right for the demographic, were wholly expected. I get why KPop Demon Hunters is such a massive hit. It's just not a hit for me. Which is why, four months after its debut, I've decided there's no point in reviewing it.
