Bugonia, director Yorgos Lanthimos’s take on the 2003 Korean genre mashup Save the Green Planet!, focuses on two conspiracy-minded men who kidnap the head of a large and powerful pharmaceutical corporation. They believe she’s an alien intent on destroying Earth.
With Jesse Plemons and Emma Stone headlining, Bugonia continues what's beginning to look like a Lanthimos repertory company. Plemons worked with Lanthimos on the recent Kinds of Kindness, and Stone appeared in Lanthimos's The Favourite, Poor Things, and Kinds of Kindness.
Despite its outlandish premise, Bugonia might be the least obscure film in Lanthimos’s catalogue, a bizarre tale with cautionary overtones, humor, and sudden bursts of horror-level violence.
Plemons plays Teddy, a disheveled man who lives in an isolated rural home with his cousin Donny (Aidan Delbis). The brains of this duo, Teddy bosses Donny around, encouraging him to chemically castrate himself so that he’s not distracted from his mission by nagging desires. Teddy argues that sex makes men more malleable, which is why he already neutered himself. Dependent on Teddy, Donny goes along.
Stone portrays Michelle Fuller, the object of Teddy's obsessions. With help from Donny, he kidnaps Michelle at her upscale home. Teddy wants Michelle to transport him to her mothership so that he can negotiate the withdrawal of invaders from the Andromeda galaxy, hostiles who are responsible for all that's wrong with life on Earth.
I said the movie might be Lanthimos’s least obscure; I didn’t say that it wasn’t bizarre. This time, though, much of the strangeness is explained by Will Tracy’s screenplay, which finds its best moments as it follows the intricate logical gymnastics that led Teddy to his conspiratorial epiphanies.
Teddy approaches his preoccupations with a student's zeal. He purports to be an expert on Andromedan physiology, for example. In addition to shaving Michelle's head, supposedly to cut off communication with her alien superiors, Teddy and Donny try to impede her alien powers by coating her body with antihistamine cream.
Teddy's intelligent enough to give his rants a credible backdrop: He says he's arrived at is conclusions only after exhausting all other explanations for what's wrong with the world.
Smart and wily, Michelle tests a number of strategies to deal with the only two members of Earth’s resistance, self-appointed ambassadors in ill-fitting suits who try to behave as if they're interrogating a foreign dignitary.
Eventually, we learn that Teddy has another motivation, one involving his mother (Alicia Silvestone). Mom was left in coma after participating in an anti-opioid drug trial run by Michelle's company.
Most of the movie belongs to Plemons, who brings deranged seriousness to his role as an alien-hunting nutcase. That's not to say that Lanthimos doesn't toy with our perceptions. Crazy as Teddy may be, what if he's onto something? And isn’t Michelle a bit too severe, a bit too transparent in her calculating efforts?
The story ties itself to themes about endangered life on Earth, signaled here by references to a declining bee population. A beekeeper, Teddy looks to hives for inspiration. Bees work selflessly for the good of the group. That’s his rationale, as well.
Plemons and Stone make convincing adversaries, and Delbis adds pathos as a paunchy assistant who occasionally wrestles with his conscience. He's the guy who can't quite figure anything out.
Teddy’s meeting with the local sheriff (Stavros Halkias) creates another moment of weird deadpan comedy, this one capped off with bloodshed.
Cinematographer Robbie Ryan gives the movie's images plenty of edge, and the jolts in Jerskin Fendrix's score can arrive like slaps in the face.
Scenes of torture may prove too much for some viewers, and I thought the movie’s ending took some steam off Lanthimos's fastball. That may have been intended. The ending is meant to resonate in haunting ways, but I'm not sure the somber tonal shift was fully earned.
Bugonia won’t replace The Favourite or Poor Things on my list of superior Lanthimos movies; it’s better at being amusing than at being terrifying, and it's fairly limited in terms of the story it tells. At times, it resembles a demented sketch.
Still, the bold and unapologetic Bugonia commands attention, taking us deep inside a world in which insanity seems the norm.
And, yes, I had to look it up, too. Bugonia is an ancient Greek word referring to the sacrifice of a cow so that bees would emerge from its carcass. Spend as much time as you wish connecting this to Lanthimos's film.
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