In snide kidnapping comedy Bugonia, Emma Stone and Jesse Plemons are victims of their Yorgos Lanthimos affinity
Bugonia
Directed by Yorgos Lanthimos
Written by Will Tracy, based on the film Save the Green Planet! by Jang Joon-hwan
Starring Jesse Plemons, Emma Stone and Aidan Delbis
Classification 14A; 118 minutes
Opens in theatres Oct. 24
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Emma Stone as Michelle, Aidan Delbis as Don and Jesse Plemons as Teddy in Bugonia, directed by Yorgos Lanthimos.Atsushi Nishijima/Focus Features/Supplied
In Jang Joon-hwan’s cult 2003 South Korean comedy Save the Green Planet!, a factory worker kidnaps a pharmaceutical executive, who he believes is in fact a high-ranking extraterrestrial with plans to destroy Earth. The hero is presented as equal parts deluded and committed – the abduction is a benevolent act designed to avoid calamity. And after suffering through Bugonia, an English-language remake of Jang’s film courtesy of Greek provocateur Yorgos Lanthimos, someone might want to stage a kidnapping of their own. The mission: save stars Emma Stone and Jesse Plemons from their seeming state of Stockholm Syndrome, so strong is the grip of their director-slash-tormentor Lanthimos.
What began as a dark and amusingly dirty collaboration between Lanthimos and Stone with 2018’s The Favourite has now metastasized into a four-film reign of terror (five, if we’re counting the short film Bleat), which has both pockmarked Stone’s otherwise impeccable career and produced some of the most egregiously annoying faux-prestige films in recent years.
Review: The Favourite finally proves there’s a method to Yorgos Lanthimos’s madness
While Stone won a Best Actress Oscar for 2023’s Poor Things, a film that has its admirers – despite its Barbie-but-rated-R elevator pitch regularly gagging on its heaping piles of Swiftian satire – she was undeniably the best part, perhaps the only substantive part, of that film. Not so much when it came to last year’s unbearable triptych comedy Kinds of Kindness, which boasted no redeeming qualities whatsoever, while also roping in poor Jesse Plemons. And now, two of the most undeniably talented actors of their generation are once again pulled into Lanthimos’s ain’t-I-a-stinker orbit with Bugonia.
Plemons takes over the role of the crazed pseudo-hero, playing Teddy, a conspiracy nut who believes that Stone’s Michelle, the chief executive of a nefarious drug company, is an even more nefarious alien invader. Together with his slow-witted cousin Don (Aidan Delbis, whose every line reading grates), Teddy drags Michelle to his basement, shaves her head (to avoid the aliens from follically tracking her location), and demands that she call off the intergalactic invasion. What follows is nearly two hours of humiliation and contempt, for both the characters and Lanthimos’s audience.
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Bugonia, which opens in theatres on Oct. 24, is based on the film Save the Green Planet! by Jang Joon-hwan.Atsushi Nishijima/Focus Features/Supplied
Whereas Jang’s original film was driven by a funky visual inventiveness that embraced wacky comedy over repellent and snide creepiness, Lanthimos’s version merely doubles down on the filmmakers’ most annoying tendencies: obvious observations about power dynamics, ostensibly outrageous acts of violence that underline a juvenile affinity for shock humour, and an overall contemptuous view of humanity that is played for easy, repetitive yuks.
Unless they have somehow remanded custody of their managers to Lanthimos’s team of enablers, Stone and Plemons will emerge from Bugonia fine enough. (And Stone gets a few good moments when her character tries to corporate-speak her way out of the circumstances).
But the longer that Lanthimos is able to get away with such antics – up to and including the film’s ending, which, while faithful to the original, cannot help but feel like a big, wet finger poked directly into the audience’s collective eyeball – the poorer the entire cinematic ecosystem becomes. Save the planet? Let’s start small and simply save our time.
