A dive into a conspirator's world

  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.

A triptych from Yorgos Lanthimos

     I had an oddly mixed response to Yorgos Lanthimos's Kinds of Kindness, the director's follow-up to the well-received Poor Things, which won a best-actress Oscar for Emma Stone.  

 Was I confounded? At times. Did I find the movie revelatory? Not really. Did I wonder whether Lanthimos has become a prisoner of his own stylized weirdness? That, too.

    Yet Lanthimos held my attention, even as I made peace with the fact that this over-extended movie (two hours and 45 minutes) wasn’t accomplishing much more than providing a showcase for the strange flights of imagination that characterize Lanthimos's work.

     Among them: severed fingers, intentional car crashes, nudity sans eroticism, a pool full of water derived from tears, and a frantic sexual foursome. 

     Lanthimos divides his movie into three distinct stories in which the same actors play different roles. A recurring character named RMF crops up in each of the segments.  

      Reunited with regulars Stone and Willem Dafoe, Lanthimos maintains tension with a signature blend of discordant sound design, unsettling music, and images that tease the surreal, the bizarre presented as if it were normal.

   The cast, which also includes Jesse Plemons in a featured role, fully embraces Lanthimos’s approach. Safe to say that actors who appear in Lanthimos films have a taste for stretching the borders of realism.

  So what the hell is the movie about? In the first segment, a controlling boss (Dafoe) tries to coerce a servile employee (Plemons) into crashing a car into another car, an act of obedience that could result in the death of the other driver. 

   In the second film, Plemons plays a police officer whose marine researcher wife (Stone) is rescued after being stranded at sea. She returns but seems to be a facsimile of her “real” self, a synthetic doppleganger who is asked by her suspicious husband to cut off different body parts to prove how far she'll go to prove her love.

   Film three finds Stone playing a woman who leaves her husband and daughter to join a cult run by a leader (Dafoe) who expels her after deeming her impure. 

   None of these brief descriptions do justice to the three segments, which are full of intricacies and digressions and which make room for performances by Margaret Qualley, Hong Chau, Joe Alwyn, Mamaoudou Athie, and Yorgos Stefanakos. 

    I’m not a Lanthimos devotee, although I greatly admire The Favourite and Poor Things. Still, I’d say that Kinds of Kindness qualifies as a lesser work that suggests themes — abuse of power, submission to power, and insanity made commonplace — without exploring them deeply. The movie can be perplexing, funny in a deadpan way, and even off-putting. 

   Less lavish than Poor Things, Kinds of Kindness feels  like a sketchbook in which the director tests various ideas.  If you see the movie, you’ll notice that Lanthimos's close-ups have a cruel intensity, unless, of course, you’ve always wanted to examine every pore and blemish on Plemon’s face, to cite just one example.

   I felt no ill will toward Kinds of Kindness. Scorn might have been better than a giggle and a shrug accompanied by little desire to unpack the movie's mysteries any further. I'll offer this, though:

   At one point, Lanthimos makes use of the Eurythmics hit, Sweet Dreams. The song's lyrics, also featured in the movie’s trailer, provides a strong suggestion about what drives the movie’s characters:

   “Some of them want to use you 

   Some of them want to be used by you

   Some of them want to abuse

   Some of them want to be abused”

   As I said, not Lanthimos’s best work, but the director kept me watching with the mixture of attention and curiosity his work always demands.

'Poor Things:' Strange and lavishly creative

 

 What the hell is director Yorgos Lanthimos's Poor Things about?  If you know Lanthimos's work (Dogtooth, The Lobster, The Killing of the Sacred Deer, and The Favourite), you know the question is relevant because Lanthimos's movies tend to be odd, alluring and unsettling.

  Cineastes have tagged Lanthimos,  as part of the Greek Weird Wave, perhaps an appropriate designation.

    So, before we go further, let's clarify. Based on a 1992 novel by the late Alasdair Gray, Poor Things deals with the ways in which Victorian society tried but failed to repress female sexuality. The movie also draws creative fuel from the alarming dangers of scientific thinking that blanches emotion from decision-making, in this case the objectivity that produces new species and fiddles with old ones.

     Lanthimos creates a film that can evoke the work of Terry Gilliam and David Lynch. But Poor Things stands as Lanthimos's singular creation, a whacked-out visual cornucopia from which a coming-of-age tale topples.

    The story in a nutshell: Taking a novelistic approach, Lanthimos begins with a Frankenstein-like fantasy. Dr. Godwin Baxter (Willem Dafoe) extracts an infant's brain from the body of a pregnant woman who committed suicide by leaping off a bridge. Said brain is then transplanted into the body of the woman who jumped to her death. The body is reanimated.

   Baxter's creation -- called Bella Baxter and played by Emma Stone -- refers to her creator as God, a telling abbreviation of the doctor’s first name. A badly scarred face makes Dr. Baxter look like he might have been sewn together by a mad seamstress.

   Needing an assistant to chronicle his work with Bella, Baxter recruits one of his students (Ramy Youssef) to chart Bella's development. Youssef's Max McCandless soon becomes Bella's betrothed. 

   But wait. Dissatisfied with the cloistered existence Baxter imposes on her, Bella runs off with Duncan Wedderburn (Mark Ruffalo), a happily debauched fellow whose intentions are blatantly dishonorable. 

     To dwell on more of the plot would turn this review into a novel.  Lanthimos tales two hours and 21 minutes to watch Bella learn about the world's pleasures (pastries and sex) and its evils (exploitation and cruelty).  

        To give you an idea about Bella's introduction to sexual pleasure, note this: It features a masturbatory scene involving apples. I'll say no more. Bella refers to intercourse as "furious jumping." She approaches sexual exploration with vigor. Neither guilt nor shame shackle Bella's libido.

       Lanthimos divides the movie into sections that revolve around Bella's adventures with Wedderburn, a visit to Alexandria, a stint in a Paris house of ill repute, and a return to London where the story reaches its conclusion, which proves as strange as all that preceded it.

        For the movie to work, Stone had to commit to a role that required her to speak in a stilted (often funny style), appear nude, and emerge herself in the transformation from a naive innocent to a fully realized woman.  It's one hell of a performance and it's matched by the work of Ruffalo and Dafoe, not to mention a cast of supporting actors that incudes Jerrod Carmichael, Kathryn Hunter, and Hanna Schygulla.

        It falls to Youssef to portray the film's good-hearted innocent. Even a bizarre story needs some kind of anchor.

       Lanthimos has a made a movie in which the cinematography (in black-and-white and color), the production design (fantastical), the costumes (particularly Bella's dresses) can be delightful, ominous, and even a bit repulsive. 

          Perhaps he employs one too many fish-eye lenses and the movie could have been shorter, but nearly every frame offers something for the eye to investigate. Godwin's genetic mutations appear like props. They include chicken dogs, for example. A steam-driven carriage moves through the streets of London with a severed horses head attached. 

      I took them as visual jokes, the absurd consequences of scientific experimentation and hubris.

     Screenwriter Tony McNamara deserves credit for wrestling Gray's novel into a movie that Lanthimos fills with visual invention, twisted wit, and bizarre surprises. 

        

An intriguing start, but where's the payoff?

Another strange movie from the director of The Lobster.

A skilled surgeon and his anesthesiologist walk down a hospital hallway after performing open-heart surgery. Rather than talk about the operation they’ve just performed, they exchange banalities about their high-priced wristwatches. Later the surgeon, meets with a young man and gives him a gift, an expensive watch. The conversations in these two scenes are conducted without benefit of inflection or emphasis. For all the color the actors bring to their dialogue, they might as well be reciting grocery lists.

In these scenarios, relationships and motivations become blank slates, and we -- the audience -- labor to comprehend the meaning of everything we see.

Are these doctors so insensitive that they can talk about nothing more than the quality of their watches? And what is the relationship of the physician to the young man we've just seen? Could the young man be a son from some now-dissolved marriage? Is this meeting about something stranger than an awkward reunion?

All of this occurs in the opening moments of director Yorgos Lanthimos's The Killing of a Sacred Deer, a revenge saga played out in an atmosphere of provocative obfuscation. Lanthimos, who directed the much-admired but often cryptic The Lobster (2016), has proven himself a master at holding an audience in what might be called "active suspension," a state of heightened attentiveness in which much is suggested but little is clarified.

I'm a partisan of this approach to filmmaking, the kind in which images, music, and performance continually force us to look for meaning. But such filmmaking also can prove risky. Often, it can't be maintained for a two-hour running time. Eventually, the filmmaker must get down to business and create some sort of plot.

It's at this pivotal point that Lanthimos's effort begins to crumble, and we face the slow dawning of an unfortunate realization; the keenness of observation Lanthimos has demanded of us may not yield the hoped-for payoff.

Any actor who works with Lanthimos must adapt to the director's style, something in the way that actors who appear in a David Mamet production must submit to the loaded cadences in which Mamet's characters speak.

In that regard, the actors in The Killing of a Sacred Deer do admirable work. Colin Farrell plays Steven Murphy, heart surgeon and wristwatch enthusiast. Nicole Kidman portrays his wife, Anna, an eye doctor. The Murphy's have two children: Kim (Raffey Cassidy), a teenager, and Bob (Sunny Suljic), a long-haired boy with a near-angelic look.

The mysterious young man mentioned earlier (Barry Keoghan) mixes politeness and threat, a cross between Eddie Haskell, the obnoxiously polite kid on Leave it to Beaver, and serial killer Ted Bundy.

Alicia Silverstone shows up briefly as Martin's mother, a woman who hopes Steven will assuage her loneliness by becoming her lover. Martin eggs her on in this delusion.

Now, if you don't want to know anything more, I suggest you stop here. At the risk of introducing spoilers, I must tell you that Martin poses an increasingly grave danger to the Murphy family. It seems that Martin's father died after Steven operated on the ailing man. Martin blames Steven and aims to settle the score. He informs Steven that if the good doctor doesn't kill either his wife or one of his children, each will become ill and die. How Martin intends to fulfill this malignant promise remains a mystery.

Dipping into Greek mythology and who knows what else, Lanthimos deftly keeps us inside his bubble of suspense, sometimes nudging us toward the comic absurdity of Steven's situation. The security of an affluent family suddenly is threatened, which means -- of course -- that it had no real security in the first place.

Farrell's bushy beard seems to throw his face into a perpetual scowl. Kidman manages to be a credible denizen of Lanthimos's strangely concocted world. Before Steven and Anna make love, Anna sprawls across the bed in her underwear, lies perfectly still and invites Steven to proceed by uttering the least romantic words ever heard in a sex scene; i.e., "general anesthesia." Sex becomes an operation, and Anna seems to be saying, "Have at it. I won't feel a thing."

The movie's best performance belongs to Keoghan who has the capacity simultaneously to alarm and reassure; Martin's twisted sincerity makes it seem as if perfect logic supports the young man's insane plan.

If you want to enlarge your interpretation of the movie, you can view the story as a stage in which karmic forces clash: Steven must be punished for being a successful doctor who may once have been negligent. Or maybe he's being punished for living an affluent life in the movie's unnamed city or for cutting himself off from his emotions or ... You can fill in your own blanks.

Whatever Lanthimos wants to say falls prey to the fact that the movie becomes less intriguing as it goes on, so much so that the denouement of Lanthimos's drama feels abstract and remote rather than shockingly tragic.

Augmented by the cool tones of cinematographer Thimios Bakatakis's lighting, Killing of a Sacred Deer evokes depths it's unable to plumb. In the end, the movie may amount to little more than a complex expression of a familiar adage: Payback's a bitch.

Fair enough, but this could be a case in which a movie's cruelty doesn't hurt enough because its creators can't entirely solve the problem of making the conceptional battle between an arrogant doctor and the evil he arouses into something that comes screaming to life. Lanthimos may have been defeated by his own considerable artistic impulses: Putting a movie under “general anesthesia” risks not being able to rouse it again.

When the absurd becomes normal

The Lobster takes us to a strange hotel where the guests search for mates.

If you're looking for the kind of movie that dutifully works its way toward a conclusion you can see coming from several multiplexes away, you may want to skip The Lobster, a film from Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos. Lanthimos marches -- or in the case of The Lobster -- crawls to a different drummer, immersing us in worlds that slowly reveal their secrets.

The movie takes place in what looks like the near future. Newly divorced David (Colin Farrell) has taken his dog to a hotel that imposes strange rules on its guests. The main rule allots each guest 45 days to find a mate or be turned into an animal -- of his or her choosing, of course.

The pressure on hotel guests can be felt from the start because in this society, being single has been classified as a crime.

As near, as we can tell, the transformations from human to animal aren't meant to be taken on a strictly metaphorical level. At various times, we see animals wandering the hotel grounds. We, of course, realize that we're looking at former guests who didn't make the cut.

Somewhere near the hotel, there's a city, which Lanthimos later will visit. Life there proceeds in reasonably normal fashion, but only married people are allowed to live in the city.

At the hotel, David meets two additional male guests, equally miserable fellows played by Ben Whishaw and John C. Reilly.

When not thinking about finding a mate, the guests hunt with tranquilizer guns. Their prey: loners who live in the woods beyond the hotel, people who -- if shot -- give the successful hunter an important extra day to continue searching for a spouse. And, oh yes, mates must share at least one common trait, like being short-sighted, for example.

It may occur to you that The Lobster wants to be a weird commentary on mating and dating, which transpires in near-mechanistic fashion at the hotel; everything feels depersonalized.

There's more to the plot, but I won't reveal it here, except to say that at one point, David joins the loners who are led by a woman of severe temperament (Lea Seydoux). She tells them that loners may masturbate at will, but aren't allowed to touch one another. With awful punishments looming, no one wants to get crosswise with the leader.

Among the loners, short-sighted David meets a short-sighted woman played by Rachel Weisz; a romance begins to take shape.

Now, it may not sound like it, but deadpan humor runs through the movie; Lanthimos wrings emotion out of human interaction in ways that are both bizarre and funny.

When Reilly's character is caught masturbating, he's punished by being forced to insert his hand into a toaster. It's so weird that we chuckle, even as we wince. People actually submit to this?

Farrell does a fine job as David, going soft around the middle and maintaining an even -- if morose -- keel. If David doesn't find a mate and must be turned into an animal, he selects a lobster. He says they live long and remain fertile throughout their existence. Thus, the movie's title.

If you check the credits, you'll see that some of the characters have been named for their defining characteristics, as in Reilly's Lisping Man and Whishaw's Limping Man. Angelika Papouila raises the movie's fright level as one of the hotel's most successful hunters, a woman with no feelings. Her name: The Heartless One.

Olivia Colman shows up as the hotel's manager, a host whose crisp efficiencies suggest a cross between a school principal and a prison warden.

It's impossible to predict whether you'll enjoy The Lobster or be driven crazy by it. Lanthimos (Dogtooth) may not care into which group you fall.

The movie's insistent strangeness throws human relationships into a Kafaesque stew and stirs, letting us know what happens when humans (both the hotel guests and the rebel loners) are jammed into a world governed by absurd rules.

Comparisons to known realities probably are encouraged.