No one goes to a Yorgos Lanthimos movie to see something quote-unquote “normal.” Discerning viewers flock to the Greek filmmaker’s parables about family dynamics and power struggles to marinate in his deadpan humor, his aloof and somewhat anthropological look at human behavior, and the sight of Emma Stone inevitably doing something odd. Weird is the man’s factory setting, and his brand. Even if you weren’t an early champion of Lanthimos’ work, going back to his 2009 breakthrough movie, Dogtooth, you can recognize how his thought-provoking, absurdist sensibility has managed to infiltrate the mainstream. The surprise was never that the director looked at life through the other side of the telescope lens. It’s that movie stars, Oscar voters, and what now passes for the Hollywood studio system adopted him with such unabashed gusto.
Bugonia keeps the freak flag flying at full mast, even if it’s one of his most accessible movies to date. Translation: There are far less fish-eye-lens shots than usual, no uncomfortable sex scenes (yet the usual amount of unflinching bits of violence), and Emma Stone doesn’t go seriously bugshit until near the end. But the same dry, wry, demented wit, as well as the pitiless looks at one of the rare species on Earth that walks on two legs and frets about their lattes being too hot, are present and accounted for. The same goes for Lanthimos’ ability to draw performances out of actors that suggest a freedom to indulge in eccentricity, the stranger the better. His genius is in making films that can accommodate their oft-kilter instincts. Every road leads you to an offbeat path.
And it’s fair to say that the story Lanthimos and his cast are working with is material designed to inflame and delight, along with confusing those who don’t recognize that bizarre is the new normal. Michelle Fuller (Stone) is the very model for a modern major corporate ladyboss, running a massive pharmaceutical company like a velvet glove cast in iron. She’s extremely fluent in C-suite doublespeak, and knows exactly how to sell not just drugs but also a faux-polite vision of workplace utopia. Of course people should feel free to leave at 5:30pm! But also we’re running a business here. Still, they need to be with their families! And naturally they shouldn’t find it compulsory to take off just because the clock says it’s the end of the day. Aim for work-life balance! Just make sure it favors the work part more. Do you notice I’m smiling as I say all of this? Have a nice day.
After Fuller drives home to her palatial estate, two strangers in masks emerge from the bushes. They attempt to abduct her in her driveway. She fights them off and flees. One of them manages to stick a syringe full of tranquilizers in her thigh. When Fuller awakes several hours later, her head has been shaved, she’s covered in antihistamine cream, and she’s tied up in a basement. The captors would like a word. They’re not after money, or fame, or indulging in sexual appetites. They do, however, have a fairly big ask of the business titan.
The alpha in this duo is Teddy Gatz (Jesse Plemons). He’s an extremely online young man with some now extremely common notions about secret societies, elite cabals, and deep-state shenanigans. Teddy works for Fuller’s company in the shipping department. He also has a personal grudge against her, given that his mother (Alicia Silverstone) was once part of a trial experiment involving a new drug and it did not go well. In his spare time, Teddy hangs out with his cousin, Donny (Aidan Delbis). He also keeps bees in the backyard of his house as a hobby, which is why he knows about the concept of Colony Collapse Disorder. That’s what he wants to talk to Fuller about.
Because Teddy believes that the woman sitting before him, freshly shorn and covered in pasty white lotion, is not of this Earth. He’s convinced that she’s an Andromedan, an alien race that has taken on human form and, over the years, completely infested our big blue marble. They’ve worked hard to turn Homo sapiens into a “hollow, harmless, hopeless” populace prepped for a hostile takeover. Thankfully, due to a lot of personal research, the connecting of many dots, and a strong Wi-Fi signal, Teddy has uncovered the truth. He’s established the “headquarters of the human resistance” in his modest household and recruited his somewhat reluctant cousin to the cause. In a few days, the extraterrstrials’ mothership will be in our orbit due to a lunar eclipse. Teddy needs Fuller to put them in contact with her overlords so he can broker a treaty and liberate humankind. He thinks he’s a savior. She thinks he’s fucking insane.
Some folks with adventurous world-cinema tastes may recognize that this is similar to the plot line of Save the Green Planet!, a South Korean thriller from 2003, and the admitted source material for writer Will Tracy’s script. And if Bugonia proves nothing else, it’s that this cult movie from the early part of the 21st century was virtually overripe for a remake in 2025. To say that the story plays differently in the era of QAnon, “Jewish space lasers,” and incel culture having squirmed and chomped its way into our communal psyche like some sort of secretary of Health and Human Services’ brain worm is a huge understatement. Paranoia and the faith in vast, labyrinthine conspiracy theories have become an official national pastime, and even the more outrageous ones now spread quicker than you can say “Chariots of the Gods.” The idea that globalist lizard people lord over our every facet of government, media, and other means of control is no longer a fringe idea. It’s an off-handed comment on an episode of Joe Rogan’s podcast.
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The way in which Lanthimos and friends are playing with notions of class, entitlement, the politics of media manipulation, the impact of internet echo chambers, and the sense of inequity between those in power and those who feel powerless — while waving lit matches around such hot-topic fuses — feels dangerous, though not as dangerous as it could have been. This may be one of the very few films in the prolific, Oscar-nominated provocateur’s catalog that you wish went even more off the rails. A mild bugaboo, considering the topic, a torture scene set to Green Day’s “When I Come Around,” and some of the wilder twists and turns, but still. The bar for WTF weirdness in his work has been set nosebleed high.
And yet! Bugonia benefits from two major pluses. One is the cast, which makes great use of its central trio’s talents. Stone, unsurprisingly, continues what may be the best actor-filmmaker collaboration of the past decade; she knows how to both translate Lanthimos’ peculiar notions of human behavior for the punters and enhance it. Plemons adds both menace and pathos to this poor thing of a protagonist. His stringy hair and sallow complexion speak of far too much time spent in rabbit holes and dodgier Reddit threads (he cops to trying out alt-right, leftist, and Marxist ideologies before settling on an all-purpose “Watch the skies!”), and his spirals speak to an even deeper reservoir of rage being tapped. But he’s always recognizably human — painfully so, in fact — and never an op-ed caricature. And Delbis, a newcomer who self-identifies as autistic, provides a perfect, harmonious counterpart to the chaos and cacophony.
The second is the idea that, amid all of the horrible stuff that Teddy is doing in the name of freedom, and the way that Fuller is trying to use everything in her power to get out of this situation, the movie consistently dangles the possibility of “What if?” There is the more straightforward version of that question, which would provide viewers with a clear idea of where their sympathies should lie. And then there’s the bigger-picture version, which asks audience members to think both outside the box and the multiplex. “Lies, truth, what’s the difference?” Fuller says at one point. “I can’t change your mind.” You’re never sure which truth is out there, exactly, in Lanthimos’ caustic, chilling, and occasionally chuckle-inducing poke in the eye. You just acknowledge that no one seems to find one we can all agree on.
From Rolling Stone US
