Here’s all you need to know about the newly released—Bugonia, Diés Iraé and Eden

Halloween, the season of spooks! Mexican filmmaker, author and artist Guillermo del Toro once said in an interview that in most of his movies, “man is the real monster”. It’s an idea many horror-filmmakers have tried to explore. There may be ghosts and creatures in many horror stories, but the scariest of them is human.

Maybe that’s why I have never found supernatural horror scary. I can count on one hand the number of horror films I genuinely like, and none — except The Shining — that I would ever revisit.  American filmmaker and photographer Stanley Kubrick said the horror in The Shining comes out of “the disintegration of the man’s soul”. And it just helps that American actor and filmmaker Jack Nicholson is convincingly scary even in films that aren’t necessarily horror.

Horror is a genre storytellers can have the most fun with — especially since the audience has submitted to be surprised and jolted out of their seats in the dark confines of a hall. This week, my least-favourite genre — horror — came looking for me. And honestly, it wasn’t all bad. Let’s start with the good.

Alien propaganda?

Maverick storyteller Yorgos Lanthimos and his muse Emma Stone are back with yet another gem of a mad movie: Bugonia (2025).  Emma plays a capitalist CEO who is kidnapped by a conspiracy theorist (Jesse Plemons) and his cousin who believe that she is in fact an alien. The hostage drama unfolds with clever writing and scares as we see shades of psycho-play out in the dialogue. “Dialogue? What is this? Death of a Salesman,” asks Plemons when Emma wants to talk it out.

Emma Stone in Bugonia
| Photo Credit:
Special arrangement

And you realise Bugonia is sort of a modern-day update on Death of a Salesman but more tragic because now with late-stage capitalism, things are so sad that they’re funny. Add to it the theories floating around the internet and echo-chambers of propaganda and online cults that believe alternate realities, and the deteriorating mental health of a society — and you get the deliciously wicked Bugonia. Best enjoyed in theatres with suppressed chuckles. For best results, allow yourself to go a little crazy and indulge in that bonkers ending that I’m gonna love discussing at every opportunity.

Ghost goes psycho

Immediately after Bugonia, I caught actor Pranav Mohanlal in Diés Iraé (2025) by Rahul Sadasivan in a full house in Andheri — rare in Mumbai. 

A still from Diés Iraé 
| Photo Credit:
Special arrangement

And I could see why. It was confident, assured slow-burn storytelling. The scares never come from characters screaming but from their frozen inability to say a word while watching it unfold. Pranav plays a commitment-phobic player and the story kicks off when a former lover of his commits suicide. He believes she’s haunting him, playing with his hair every night — so he cuts his hair short, as if ghosts are scared of bald pates?

Pranav Mohanlal in Diés Iraé  
| Photo Credit:
Special arrangement

Diés Iraé takes us along with him on a ride to solve the mystery behind her death before the slow-burn horror and jump-scares escalate in his fancy house. The subversion of Psycho gives the film some familiar-but-new scares and there’s never a dull or predictable moment — until the mandatory sequel-setting stretch that literally made me yawn.

The missed opportunity

Finally, the one that had so much potential: a survival thriller based on true events, directed by Ron Howard and featuring Jude Law, Ana de Armas, Sydney Sweeney, Daniel Brühl and Vanessa Kirby. The film is Eden, inspired by a true story of European settlers on a remote Galápagos island. 

A still from Eden
| Photo Credit:
Special arrangement

Maybe it was the savage humid setting, and the cast probably could never settle into the extreme conditions in the Galápagos, or it was the mismatch of their diverse ethnicities and varying European accents of spoken English in the period setting. The cast tries hard, the plot is intriguing enough — a bunch of settlers on a remote island try to survive each other as supplies run out — but the tone is uneven all through, the nudity and sex seem like contractual obligations and everything is too literal and on the nose.

I’ll leave you with a telling example: “I curse you with my dying breath,” a character curses with his dying breath.

I’m horrified indeed, the eye-roll variety.

From the hottest shows to hidden gems, overlooked classics to guilty pleasures, FOMO Fix is a fortnightly compass through the chaos of content.