Bugonia Review

Yorgos Lanthimos Provides Another Darkly Twisted Gut Punch

By: Marc Kozak

Bugonia

Yorgos Lanthimos Provides Another Darkly Twisted Gut Punch

By: Marc Kozak

It's interesting that our biggest filmmakers have been mostly unwilling to make movies set in modern times, especially since 2020. There have always been those who balk at the very idea of shooting anything set in an era of contemporary technology — Robert Eggers famously said that "the idea of photographing a cell phone is just death." Ever since the COVID pandemic (and the second Trump presidency) began, even fewer directors have been interested in covering the events of the present day. And really, who can blame them? We have all been consuming an overwhelming onslaught of conflicting and/or terrible information on a daily basis for a very long time; why would we want to make or consume entertainment that rehashes more of the same?

It seems like 2025 is the year that the dam has finally broken. Maybe enough time has passed that people can look back on the past few years with some kind of clarity, or maybe we're just coming to terms with this just being how things are now. For whatever reason, the second half of this year has seen three major directors taking on the topic of today's loud and chaotic society, specifically the ultra-divisive American cultural moment. Ari Aster's "Eddington" seemed to kick things off, impressing critics but not really winning over a general public that still seemed a bit reluctant to watch a movie specifically about COVID. It may have helped prime the pump at least somewhat for Paul Thomas Anderson's "One Battle After Another," a critical and box office hit that encouraged audiences to overcome the malaise of our daily lives and continue to fight against oppression.

And then there's Yorgos Lanthimos' "Bugonia," predictably the strangest in the bunch. Effectively an English-language remake of the 2003 South Korean film "Save the Green Planet!", the story follows two frustrated young men who kidnap the CEO of a powerful pharma corporation, believing that she is an alien that has ruined their lives and is set to destroy the Earth. It's an effective and entertaining thriller on its surface, but also a clever satire of how easy it is for people (read: young men) to get sucked into an information bubble and create confidently incorrect beliefs that have dangerous effects on those around them. It's Lanthimos' most accessible and most political work to date, all done in the same darkly comic, absurdist style that we've come to expect from the acclaimed director of "The Favourite" and "Poor Things."

Jesse Plemons stars as Teddy Gatz, a schlubby conspiracy theorist who lives in a quiet country home with his autistic cousin Don (Aidan Delbis). Teddy is a beekeeper and a worker at an Amazon-esque shipping facility, biding his time before he and his impressionable cousin can kidnap Michelle Fuller (Emma Stone), CEO of pharmaceutical megacorporation Auxolith. Various internet rabbit holes have led Teddy to believe that Michelle is an "Andromedan," an alien race that has systematically destroyed communities and forced humanity into a dumb state of mindless subservience. Teddy, of course, is the only one who knows the truth, and expects Michelle to take him to the mothership so he can negotiate on behalf of the planet.

" It's Lanthimos' most accessible and most political work to date, all done in the same darkly comic, absurdist style that we've come to expect from the acclaimed director. "

Teddy's strategies to withstand the alien's influence are initially played for laughs, as he does everything from covering the house's windows with tinfoil to chemically castrating himself in order to prevent sexual seduction. He knows for a fact that he has to shave Michelle's head and slather her body in an antihistamine cream so she can't send out a distress signal to the mothership. He listens to beyond-niche podcasts and UFO broadcasts, completely convinced in his own research. His poor cousin Don is just along for the ride, easily convinced by Teddy's calm, unshakable confidence.

Stone, working with Lanthimos for the fourth time, gets her meatiest role yet as the cold, corporate figurehead Michelle, full of phony smiles for her underlings, cheerfully encouraging them to head home at 5:30 but only if they got all of their work done and feel it's totally necessary. Her intense falseness will be familiar to anyone who's worked in a corporate environment, as she loudly preaches employee mental health and environmental responsibility in public, all while simultaneously covering up the company's deadly opioid-withdrawal medications. She is the face of corporate America, sleeping soundly on a bed of money without a care for anyone or anything other than the bottom line.

Even after she is kidnapped, she maintains a cool level of bemused control, prodding at Teddy's ridiculous arguments and quietly manipulating Cousin Don into letting her go. Even after her hair is forcibly shaved and she's pumped full of drugs and covered in lotion, she still maintains an eerie calm. After a profoundly uncomfortable torture-by-electrocution scene, we are ready to believe that Teddy is an absolute psychopath, traumatized by his mother being hospitalized due to Auxolith's faulty medications and unstable enough to kidnap the CEO in a misguided attempt at some kind of revenge.

Every time you're just about convinced one way or the other, Lanthimos and screenwriter Will Tracy throw a wrench in the works, never letting you really be sure if Michelle is actually an alien or not. The final 20 minutes do provide a concrete answer, culminating in a tripped-out finale that drives home the movie's misanthropic overall message: maybe humanity has had its time, and the planet is simply better off without us. Lanthimos has never shied away from the ugliness of the species, but this ending feels particularly hopeless. Even worse, it's hard not to agree. "Bugonia" is capitalism in a nutshell, a succinct summary of society's ills that make it hard to see how we can ever make it back.

Stone and Plemons are both tremendous talents putting in career-best work; their best trick is that we spend equal time both hating them and wanting them to succeed. Plemons in particular is able to garner surprising empathy thanks to the sadness and rage that bubbles under his composed demeanor, allowing Teddy to be a much more tragic character than he might have been in the hands of another actor. Stavros Halkias also appears as Casey, a local police officer who has a disturbing history with Teddy, in a small subplot that honestly could have been left out almost entirely.

Still, Lanthimos has hit a real sweet spot with "Bugonia," combining his trademark stylistic weirdness with a real thematic urgency that results in one of his strongest works yet. It may be the easiest of his movies to recommend, but it still might be a little out there for some audiences (and there's a few particularly cruel and gruesome scenes that might send some running for the exits). But hey, it's a strange and sick world out there — Lanthimos might just be the best equipped to confront us with our own ugliness while still making us laugh.