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.

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.

'Butter,' an uneven comedy spread

This may be a week for small movies with something to offer. Not only does Liberal Arts open in Denver, but Butter also hits area screens. Butter doesn't always spread smoothly, but it definitely whips up laughs as it tells the improbable story of Laura Pickler (Jennifer Garner), a staunchly ambitious housewife who tries to replace her husband (Ty Burrell) as Iowa's butter-sculpting champion. Her husband Bob -- whose masterpiece was a life-sized butter sculpture of The Last Supper -- held the title for 15 years. The picture opens with the contest organizers asking the unbeatable Bob to retire so that someone else can have a shot at glory. Amiable Bob agrees, but Laura wants to keep the title in the family and decides to enter the race. First-time director Jim Field Smith -- working from a screenplay by Jason A. Micallef -- contrives to have Garner's Laura Pickler square off against an adorable and wise 10-year-old black girl (Yara Shahidi) who has been put into the care of foster parents played by Rob Corddry and Alicia Silverstone. Olivia Wilde turns up as stripper whose pole dancing awakens Bob's libido. Field's approach ranges from satire to straight-forward comedy, the latter finding representation in the work of Hugh Jackman in a small role as the owner of a car dealership who assists Laura in her devious ways. Garner, Shahidi and Corddry are responsible for the movie's high points -- of which there are more than a few. Put another way, Butter isn't fat with revelations, but it's blessed with a strong cast, and the movie's satirical sense gives it plenty of sharp edges, some of which cut it and some of which don't.