Yessentuki

Kurduvādi Science fiction is having a moment. Not because the writing got better. Because reality got stranger.

Which is why Bugonia stuns. It is unsettlingly close.

Yorgos Lanthimos built his film around two men who kidnap a pharmaceutical CEO. They think she is an alien. They might be the sanest people in the movie.

Emma Stone plays the CEO. Jesse Plemons plays the kidnapper. Neither gives you what you expect. The film earned four Oscar nominations, including Best Picture.

It deserved them.

But here is what stays with you after the credits: the premise does not feel like fiction. It feels like a summary of last week.

The numbers suggest audiences agree. The three most-watched original streaming series of 2025, according to Nielsen, were Stranger Things, Squid Game, and Wednesday.

All science fiction. All dystopian at their core. Stranger Things alone racked up nearly 40 billion viewing minutes in the United States last year. Fallout, Prime Video’s post-apocalyptic drama, finished fifth among all streaming originals.

The genre is no longer a niche. It is the mainstream.

Westworld gave us machines demanding rights before machines started demanding rights. Severance imagined workers consenting to have their memories split between their jobs and their lives. Pluribus went further: a population choosing custom realities, each one optimized, none of them shared. It recently surpassed Severance as Apple TV’s most-watched show ever.

Dream Scenario arrived quieter. Nicolas Cage plays a man who begins appearing uninvited in strangers’ dreams. Then the dreams turn violent. Then the internet finds out. He did nothing wrong. It does not matter. The film came out in 2023. It felt dated by the time it hit streaming.

These are not warnings anymore. They are dispatches.

Orwell did not predict the surveillance state. He described the logic of power to people who had stopped paying attention. Dick did not predict fractured reality. He described a mind trying to hold itself together inside one.

The difference now is the turnaround time. The metaphors arrive before the headlines finish writing themselves.

That is what Bugonia knows. Lanthimos is not interested in conspiracy theorists. He is interested in a world that made conspiracy feel like the reasonable response.

His CEO ran drug trials that put people in comas. His kidnapper is trying to save the planet. Neither one is wrong enough to dismiss.

Science fiction used to ask what if. Now it asks: you did notice, right?