Merchant of misery Yorgos Lanthimos is back to ruin your day again, this time with Bugonia (now streaming on VOD platforms like Amazon Prime Video), his third film in as many years. No surprise No. 1: Emma Stone stars, her fourth go-round in a Lanthimos film (one of which, Poor Things, landed her an Oscar), alongside Jesse Plemons, working with the director a second time. No surprise No. 2: It’s a brutally dark comedy, a remake of Jang Joon-hwans 2003 South Korean cult fave Save the Green Planet! All this is to say that the nasty Lanthimos brand remains fully intact – but whether his relentless misanthropia is wearing thin due to his recent bump in productivity is the question.
BUGONIA: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?
The Gist: Bees. Teddy Gatz (Plemons) keeps them, on his rural property. He’s got the gloves, the hood, the hives, the honey. He sees their demise at the hands of industry and humanity as parallel to our own demise at the hands of aliens. As in, “from space.” Specifically, the Andromedans, who he believes have been poisoning the bees in order to take out the humans. This doesn’t seem particularly efficient on the aliens’ part, but don’t argue with Teddy. He’s just one of those guys. He’s got his own facts. You know the type, probably all too well. They’ve been kinda loud and prominent in recent years. And Teddy has a plan to counteract it, with the help of his autistic cousin Don (Aidan Delbis), who’s a kind of Igor to Teddy’s Dr. Frankenstein. They hit the hardware store and stock up on supplies, then go home and chemically castrate themselves so they can maintain focus. They’re serious. Obviously.
Next we meet Michelle Fuller (Stone), the CEO of Auxolith, a massive pharmaceutical company. Which is a way of saying she’s a heartless robot. Obviously. There she is, in photos with this world leader and that world leader. She has a whole spiel about saying the word “diverse” too many times in a video about corporate diversity. She has another whole spiel about mandating that all her employees leave work by 5:30 p.m. – but only if they’re comfortable with that, and have their work done, and please, go ahead and read between the lines here. Every morning she goes through a fitness/nutrition/beauty regime that involves brutal kickboxing and bizarre technology of the kind only people with nine figures in the bank would ever contemplate. The kickboxing might come in handy if anyone should jump out of the bushes to kidnap her – like, say, Teddy and Don.
Which is to say, Michelle gets in a few licks before these cretins overpower her. They sedate her and bring her back to their house and tie her to a bed in the basement. They shave her head and cover her body with over-the-counter anti-itch cream so she can’t communicate with the mothership. Yeah: They think she’s an alien. Teddy and Don want her to negotiate a deal with the emperor of the Andromedans to save the lives of all the Earthlings. Michelle immediately falls back on a bad habit, in that she tries to project authority over these guys that she doesn’t have. Obviously. Teddy responds by threatening, in so many words, to remove her inner organs. Eventually, he tortures Michelle with electroshock zapperoo while classic Green Day plays, while we wonder if there’s any way she’ll find a way out of this nightmare. We also wonder if there’s a single person in this movie who isn’t a horrible human being. That’s Lanthimos for you, I guess.
Photo: Universal Pictures
What Movies Will It Remind You Of? Relevant to the the moment, Lanthimos speaks to it by invoking the prominence of incels and internet-poisoned conspiracists, and such topicality isn’t too far removed from his peers: Luca Guadagnino’s cancel-culture piece After the Hunt, Ari Aster’s (he’s a producer on Bugonia) Covid nightmare Eddington and Paul Thomas Anderson’s invocation of anti-immigration jerks and racist underground cabals in One Battle After Another. Gotta say, it’s been a real fun year in movies! But if you’re not up for Thinking About Things, you can also read Bugonia as a conglomeration of Parasite, Under the Skin and The Beekeeper.
Performance Worth Watching: Stone’s steely, hardened persona (further proof of her versatility) vs. Plemons’ sweatiest, grubbiest, quietly craziest side (he does have another, nicer side, and it isn’t nearly as fun) is a rather enjoyable experience, even when we struggle to find a real purpose for it.
Sex And Skin: Nothing remotely in the same universe as sexy here – and the movie seems pretty proud of it.
Photo: Everett Collection
Our Take: Lanthimos is as unforgiving as ever in his exploration of misery in its various forms. Assuming we’re spiraling down down down the drain, the director has made a career out of the notion that we should just rip the band-aid off and get our demise as a species over with. His every finely honed, exquisitely artful unpleasantry is on display here: Extreme violence, characters you’d never want to hang out with or even be on the same planet with, a discordant score that constantly needles us, no sympathy, no empathy, no love, no happy bunnies hopping through the glen, no hope. Bugonia is a real treat.
And yet. There’s no denying Lanthimos’ ability to hold us in thrall with his ability to coax razor-sharp performances from his cast, and maintain a grim, pitch-black tone that’ll be humorless for some and hilarious for others. I lean toward the latter because his films burst with style just like heads burst with blood in this film. His manner of grotesquerie is an acquired taste, but it’s distinct and funneled through a rigorous directorial eye. And to be honest, a sliver of human atonement exists in the Don character, so of course, he sure doesn’t seem long for this Earth.
The film certainly is driven by a vision, although admittedly, I’m not sure what Bugonia is trying to accomplish beyond telling another Lanthimosian story of ferocious annihilation – except this time, with less subtext, because his assertion that humans are far beyond redemption is right there on the screen in front of us, straight-up, no apologies. You have to admire the boldness of it all, even if the director’s ability to truly shock us has waned a bit. I personally prefer to interpret the text as a warning for humanity to shape the f— up lest we continue straight into the void, if only so I can get a decent night’s sleep once in a while.
Our Call: Say what you will about Lanthimos’ assertions about the absurd pointlessness of human existence, but he’s still one hell of a filmmaker. We’re all doomed anyway, might as well STREAM IT.
John Serba is a freelance film critic from Grand Rapids, Michigan. Werner Herzog hugged him once.
