Dystopian futures and Gaza tragedy in focus at Venice

The Venice Film Festival this year offered up films wrestling with the most pressing political and social issues of our times — from war in the Middle East to the rising threat of AI — while finding a way to make existential despair feel entertaining. Dystopia has never looked so good.

Laughing at the apocalypse

Two of the films with the bleakest messages for humanity were also the funniest. "Bugonia," from "Poor Things" director Yorgos Lanthimos, casts Emma Stone as a high-powered CEO who is kidnapped by two conspiracy theorists convinced she's an alien out to destroy planet Earth.

Adapted from an equally-offbeat South Korean film from 2003 ("Save the Green Planet!"), "Bugonia" is a wacky black comedy — with sci-fi and paranoid thriller elements — that reflects on humanity's apparent inability to stop the environmental catastrophe we all see coming.

"Unfortunately, not much of the dystopia in this film is very fictional, a lot of it is very reflective of the real world," said Lanthimos in Venice. "Humanity is facing a reckoning very soon. People need to choose the right path, otherwise, I don't know how much time [we have] left."

"No Other Choice," the new film from South Korean director Park Chan-wook  ("Oldboy", "The Handmaiden"), also wrings comedy out of the bleak realities of our post-industrial capitalist world.

The satirical thriller channels Alfred Hitchcock in its tale of a hardworking family man driven to desperate measures. For 25 years, Man-su (played by "Squid Game" star Lee Byung-hun) was a devoted employee in a paper manufacturing plant before a corporate takeover leaves him out on the street.

In danger of losing his house and hard-won identity as breadwinner, he decides he has "no other choice" than eliminate the competition for a new job. That sparks a series of hilariously-bungled attempts to off his rival candidates. Man-su may be a top paper man; but he's the world's worst assassin.

"Anyone who's out there trying to make a living in the current modern capitalist society. We all harbor that deep fear of employment insecurity," said Park, who spent the past 20 years trying to get "No Other Choice" made.

"During those two decades, I would tell the story to people around me, no matter where I went, no matter what country or culture. They would all relate to the story."

Netflix serves up catastrophe

If Lanthimos and Park found comedy in the chaos, Netflix leaned into catastrophe. The streamer set a new record at the Venice Film Festival with three competition titles. Alongside the forgettable "Jay Kelly" — with George Clooney as a George Clooney-type star we're meant to feel sorry for — Netflix unveiled two darker dramas, "A House of Dynamite" and "Frankenstein," both steeped in dread and dystopia.

"A House of Dynamite" is a real-time thriller set in the White House as a nuclear missile is launched at the United States. No one knows who did it. Military and civilian leaders scramble to make impossible decisions about who to save and how to respond.

The film is a return to form for Kathryn Bigelow, the Oscar-winning director of "The Hurt Locker" and "Zero Dark Thirty," who turns the countdown to catastrophe into a breathless spectacle of tension and terror.

"The film is an invitation to decide what to do about all these weapons,"  Bigelow said in Venice. "How is annihilating the world a good defensive measure?"

The other Netflix stand-out was "Frankenstein", a new adaptation of the classic monster movie from Mexican director Guillermo del Toro ("Pan's Labyrinth").

Starring Oscar Issac as Doctor Victor Frankenstein and rising star Jakob Elordi as the creature — a revelatory performance that should elevate Elordi from Hollywood hottie to A-list dramatic star —  the film remains true to the gothic Victorian roots of the original Mary Shelly story, yet finds a way to reinvigorate the oft-told tale.

Mia Goth and Christoph Waltz ably support Elordi and Issac — Waltz is delightful as the smarmy arms merchant who funds Victor's research.

"Frankenstein" questions the pursuit of technological advancement at the cost of humanity, and asks if monstrousness is something defined by appearance or action.

Speaking in Venice, del Toro drew a direct line between Victor Frankenstein's creation and the rise of technologies like AI. The counter to artificial intelligence, he said, is human intelligence.

"I'm not afraid of AI," noted del Toro. "I'm afraid of natural stupidity, which is much more abundant."

A child's voice from Gaza

"Frankenstein" and "A House of Dynamite", "Bugonia" and "No Other Choice" are frontrunners for Venice's top prize, the Golden Lion, which will be presented on Saturday night.

But the most powerful film in Venice this year may be one of the smallest. "The Voice of Hind Rajab", from Tunisian director Kaouther Ben Hania, tells the story of a six-year-old girl trapped in a car in Gaza after Israeli tank fire killed her family.

For more than an hour, Hind stayed on the line with emergency dispatchers, pleading to be rescued. The ambulance sent to reach her was itself destroyed, and the two medics on board were killed.

The incident occurred in January 2024 during Israel's invasion of the Gaza Strip following the October 7, 2023, attacks on Israel led by the terrorist group Hamas.

Using the actual recordings of Hind's call — fragments that spread online and were later confirmed by international media — Ben Hania brings us into her final moments.

In doing so, she cuts through the dehumanizing statistics of casualties and civilian deaths in Gaza to give us a single child's voice pleading for help. The film received a record 23-minute standing ovation after it screened on Wednesday night in Venice. 

"From a personal point of view, I just felt I had to do something, so I wasn't complicit," said Ben Hania. "I have no political power. I'm not an activist. All I have is this one tool that I have mastered a little bit — cinema. At least, with this film, I wasn't silenced."

With "The Voice of Hind Rajab," Ben Hania delivers the most urgent film of the 2025 Venice Film Festival, one that refuses to look away from the real-life horror of our world, with a child's plea that still echoes long after the screen goes dark.

Edited by: Stuart Braun