The world is dying, and Yorgos Lanthimos would like to hasten its end. His blunt instruments in “Bugonia,” a casually sardonic black comedy which might constitute his most approachable film to date, are a paranoid beekeeper and a craven biomedical CEO. The apiarist, a sweaty, dirty, and smutty Teddy (Jesse Plemons), teams with his impressionable cousin Donny (Aidan Delbis) to kidnap Michelle Fuller (Emma Stone), believing she’s an alien from the Andromeda species intent on destroying humanity. Their theory comes from conspiracy podcasts, crackpot online sources, and Teddy’s own experimentation. The pair’s plan will require them, in the words of Teddy, to cleanse themselves of their “psychic compulsions.” The success of the film requires the audience to make a similar sacrifice.
“Bugonia” begins with immeasurable intensity. Lanthimos intercuts between Teddy and Donny training in their cozy but worn-down house while Michelle exercises in her sterile modernist home. Teddy and Donny stretch and perform high steps and chemically castrate themselves. Michelle hits the treadmill and downs a handful of vitamins. The rich, they’re just like us. Their worlds collide outside of Michelle’s home when Teddy and Donny, wearing filthy silver tracksuits and cheap masks, abduct her. They shave her head (long hair is how she communicates with her kind), strip her, cover her in lotion, and chain her to a bed in their basement. The majority of the film will be Teddy’s interrogation of her.
From the jump, Lanthimos makes a fascinating visual decision. Whenever Teddy grills Michelle, Lanthimos captures Plemons from a low angle and Stone from a high perspective. With a bald head and wide eyes, Stone’s visage often recalls Renée Jeanne Falconetti in “The Passion of Joan of Arc.” Why use the visual language of the persecuted on a big pharma CEO? Lanthimos spends much of “Bugonia,” an unlikely adaptation of Jang Joon-hwan’s “Save the Green Planet!,” questioning who the monsters and tyrants are and what is the tangibly human and emotionally alien. His film, produced by Ari Aster, invites obvious parallels with “Eddington” as a critique of the pandemic and the aftershocks it’s still doling out. Despite the easy comparison point, Lanthimos’ film feels safer than Aster’s, which, for all its faults, took big bites and left some indelible marks.
In the verbal tit for tat between Teddy and Michelle, Lanthimos’s signature sly humor holds our attention. It helps that Plemons and Stone can visually sell a slight or stinger with a twitch of their face, and that cinematographer Robbie Ryan gives both actors the entirety of the frame to work their brilliance. Michelle often talks in corporate-speak, with a passive-aggressive tone that not only feels alien to Teddy but also sets him off. Teddy devolves from a self-confident judge and jury to nervously brandishing a shotgun with Donny like Pacino and Cazale in “Dog Day Afternoon.” Delbis, an autistic actor, adds well-paced changeups to Plemons and Stone’s ferocious volleys. With a similar relationship to the camera, he can maintain a bit through a fast expression or a protective posture. There aren’t many other moving parts to this spare ensemble, other than Casey (Stavros Halkias), a dim-witted local sheriff who might’ve destroyed a life before it ever happened.
“Bugonia” is an enraged picture. It’s mad at the world; it’s mad at humanity. Nevertheless, the structuring to reveal the full scope of that anger is surprisingly deliberate. Teddy believes he and Donny need to break Michelle before the next lunar eclipse, which is in three days, if they hope to beam up to her mothership and negotiate for her species to leave Earth alone. Each day, therefore, is a single act, with a countdown card showing the earth becoming flatter and flatter. In black and white flashbacks, we see how Michelle connects to Teddy’s mother, Sandy (Alicia Silverstone), who undertook a drug trial that backfired. Teddy rants about the corporate class’s domination of our decision-making through techno enslavement and the poisoning of our world, particularly the destruction of bees.
Lanthimos’s visuals are significantly tamer here than usual, relying on evocative lighting to signal the hellishness of Teddy’s basement. That aesthetic approach allows the booming score to pick up the showy baton, providing an abrasiveness to this class-based thriller—physical spaces further his critiques, capturing the glib modernist aesthetic of corporate architecture in frightening detail.
Yet by the end, one can’t shake the picture’s self-righteous ambiguity. Is Lanthimos poking fun at Teddy and Donny? If so, then there’s one scene that might be the cruellest of the director’s career. Or maybe these class warriors are the heroes we’ve been waiting for? He does, after all, keep the mystery of whether Michelle is an alien going on for long enough that Teddy’s zealotry and understandably indignant anger almost overwhelm the senses. There’s also a distinct possibility that Lanthimos identifies with Michelle. But if that’s the case, then what does the ending say about the role of Big Pharma?
We can, of course, read these characters through several lenses. There’s the anti-science approach to COVID, the erasure of rural folks, corporate greed, and culture war skirmishes happening. These are moments of slippage that remain safely controlled from Lanthimos’s own moral vantage point, making one wish he took the same risk as Aster with “Eddington” by fully playing devil’s advocate.
It all comes back to cleansing oneself of “psychic compulsions,” a phrase with Freudian psychosexual undertones but also one that demands we not give in to easy impulses. It’s telling that a film about aliens judging the rottenness of our species comes from a Greek filmmaker using America as a setting. That outsiderism intimates an acknowledgment of all sides while making the case that no force is as destructive as human selfishness. And if we cannot cast away that egotism, then perhaps we, as a species, simply deserve to peter out.
This review was filed from the premiere at the Telluride Film Festival. It opens on October 24th.
