‘Bugonia’ Review

We live in a surprising, delightful world where the films of director Yorgos Lanthimos are as commercially and critically successful as they have been. With their ornate production design, bold subject matter and distinct directorial flair, movies like ‘The Favourite’ and ‘Poor Things’ were perhaps always going to find a critical audience, but to be embraced as they were at the box office is truly stunning.

In ‘Bugonia’, Yorgos Lanthimos foregoes the fairytale like worlds he is perhaps most known for without sacrificing any of the strangeness, telling a story that matches anything he’s done before in its ability to marry unconventional genre elements with pointed social commentary. The off kilter style and sci-fi aspirations are the spoonful of bizarre, fantastical sugar to help the sociopolitical medicine go down.

The film opens with Teddy Gatz (Jesse Plemons) and his cousin Don (Aidan Delbis) as they tend to their apiary. Through voiceover and montage, we watch as Teddy trains and educates his cousin to the threat from elites who are the sole cause of all the devastation that has affected their family and their rural community. As the story progresses, we learn that Teddy doesn’t believe these elites are just high powered CEOs. They are also aliens, intent on destroying all of mankind. To save humanity, Teddy and Don kidnap Michelle Fuller (Emma Stone), a Big Pharma CEO, with the intention of forcing a confession as to her true alien form and a meeting with her emperor to discuss terms of surrender, so that all aliens can be expelled from Earth and humanity can return to prosperity.

‘Bugonia’ feels of a piece with Ari Aster’s ‘Eddington’, exploring as it does the contemporary milieu of rural America, with a tendency toward conspiracy thought and violence brought on by deep feelings of injustice and exacerbated by social media rabbit holes. Unlike that earlier film, though, Yorgos Lanthimos avoids going overtly political, instead opting to layer on his unique deep strangeness atop an otherwise horrifying tale of how ordinary people, with the best of intentions, are capable of great harm.

When you strip away the alien conceit, ‘Bugonia’ feels urgent and contemporary in its worldview and themes. At its core, this is the story of an ordinary man whose family, whose community has fallen on hard times while techno-elites have flourished, often by exploiting the suffering and desperation of rural communities who feel powerless to resist. Even as Lanthimos avoids overt political commentary, and even as Teddy insists that his philosophy is ideologically agnostic, having sped through both far right and far left radicalism in his online life, the principle conspiracy theory of the film is pointedly similar to contemporary fringe movements that believe those in power are secretly lizard people looking to bring about the downfall of humanity. With that belief system, Teddy becomes the kind of apolitical nobody whose actions can nonetheless alter the course of human history. In our current era of increased political violence, carried out not by high powered political rivals but everyday people, this message is poignant even as it is wrapped in a sci-fi conspiracy comedy.

Just as in any of Yorgos Lanthimos’s surreal worlds, the film is elevated by incredible, committed performances by its small cast. The bulk of ‘Bugonia’ is a two hander between Emma Stone and Jesse Plemons, the captive and her captor. I’m not saying Jesse Plemons is the best actor in the world necessarily, but he’s the best at what he does, creating a singular character capable of generating empathy and uneasiness in equal measure. As Teddy, Plemons plays an earnest weirdo, capable of violence, but also great tenderness towards his cousin. He communicates so much pain and anger without speaking, carrying himself with an admirable confidence even as he engages in a war of words with a much more polished, educated, powerful CEO in Stone’s Michelle.

As Michelle, Stone seems to take inspiration from any number of tech CEOs omnipresent in the news landscape, using big words and talking in circles such that characters begin to doubt their own reality, their own pain. Stone starts the film brimming with confidence and power, but as she grapples with her captivity, her performance shifts as the character tries to gain her freedom, alternating between threats, pleading, and cold logic. Stone is an equal match to Plemons’ mastermind, and their adversarial chemistry drives the entertainment as it bounds from comedy to thriller and back again.

Lanthimos is a dynamic filmmaker, capable of evocative imagery that alternates between understating and exaggerating the weirdness of the characters and plot. His memorable visuals are enhanced by Jerskin Fendrix’s symphonic, bewildering score, which elevates this small scale crime drama into something otherworldly, mirroring the main character’s preoccupation with outer space.

Up until its surprising conclusion, ‘Bugonia’ is a thrilling, funny and violent joyride that will constantly keep you guessing. Each time you feel you have a grasp on who has the upper hand, the ground shifts and the stakes are altered, resulting in a delirious and madcap commentary that never sacrifices entertainment in the name of its message.

Bugonia
Rated R for bloody violent content including a suicide, grisly images and language.
Running Time: 1 hour and 58 minutes

Director Yorgos Lanthimos
Writers Will Tracy
Stars Emma Stone, Jesse Plemons, Aidan Delbis, Stavros Halkias, Alicia Silverstone
Rating R
Running Time 118 Minutes
Genres Comedy, Crime, Sci-Fi