REVIEW: ‘Bugonia’ is a bugged-out conspiracy comedy - or is it?
Emma Stone as Michelle Fuller in Bugonia, directed by Yorgos Lanthimos.
I struggle sometimes with applying the label “comedy” to Yorgos Lanthimos’s movies. In certain films, there’s no denying it; there are straight-up jokes in The Favourite and Poor Things, and that might be why those movies have had an easier time at the Oscars, compared to releases like The Killing of a Sacred Deer or Kinds of Kindness. Those less mainstream movies, as well as Lanthimos’s latest work, Bugonia, have moments that you might laugh at in spite of yourself. It’s an uneasy kind of chuckle, the kind you have when you’re not really sure what reaction is appropriate. Does that make Bugonia a comedy? I’m still trying to decide – no matter what Emma Stone says.
On its face, Bugonia has a darkly funny premise, where a warehouse worker and amateur apiarist named Teddy (Jesse Plemons) decides to kidnap Michelle (Stone) the high-powered CEO of the biotech company he works for. Teddy believes Michelle is an alien emissary from the Andromeda galaxy, part of an insidious force that is corrupting the planet from within, sickening humans and killing honeybees. The story is based on a 2003 Korean film called Save the Green Planet!, and it’s the latest in Lanthimos’s fruitful collaboration with Stone and (more recently) Plemons. But despite the original movie’s origin and the filmmaker’s Greek background, there’s an unmistakably American flavour to Bugonia, one that could only come via a character like Teddy, who has been hooked up to a firehose of Infowars-esque conspiracy material.
Teddy and his cousin Don carry out the abduction and leave very little evidence, chaining Michelle up in the basement of their farmhouse. Teddy wants Michelle to summon her mothership so he can board it and negotiate some kind of peace treaty with the Andromedans, but of course Michelle has no idea what he’s talking about. This kicks off a back-and-forth between the two, where Michelle tries different tactics to appeal to Teddy, almost like a hostage negotiator for herself. When it becomes clear that the authorities aren’t making much progress in finding her, she resorts to humouring Teddy, hoping that by playing along she can create an opportunity to escape.
Jesse Plemons and Aidan Delbis play the conspiracy theorists Teddy and Don.
There’s a noticeable physicality to Stone and Plemons’ performances here. Stone pulls her face taught like a drum, emphasizing the preening effort her character puts into everything. Plemons is by contrast shaggy and loose, initially easy-going and polite but liable to fly into a rage when provoked. There’s a striking shot where an argument at the dinner table explodes into a brawl, and Plemons climbs across the table on all fours to pounce on Stone. As goofy as Plemons’ beliefs might be, he has a cold-blooded willingness to act on them, putting him (not unlike a certain alleged assassin last year) in the tiny fraction of people who take the extra step that thousands of Internet dwellers don’t.
As for Michelle, there’s an undercurrent of menace throughout her time on screen. She may be a young woman who’s been kidnapped by an extremist, but it barely seems to affect her – she only allows herself to cry once. Whether it’s her time helming a powerful company and steering it through a product safety scandal or something more intrinsic to her nature, it’s fascinating watching Stone play a hyper-capable character placed in such a terrifying scenario. It also doesn’t hurt that Stone felt so committed to the character that she had her head shaved on camera (a consequence of Teddy’s belief that her hair allows her to communicate with the rest of the aliens).
The other part of Bugonia that defies the comedy label is the violence it contains (including dialogue references to sexual assault). While I’m all for shocking deaths in a comedy like Game Night (which features another all-timer Plemons role), the level of violence here tips over into horror territory pretty quickly. This isn’t new ground for Lanthimos by any means, but it’s a little hard to laugh when the stakes are so deadly.
So if Bugonia is more of a thriller with a particularly mordant edge, is it satisfying? There are undeniably some images here I’ll never forget, especially from the amazing ending, which I won’t spoil. Everything leading up to that ending, unfortunately, resembled a somewhat low-energy stage play, punctuated by the aforementioned bursts of action. Bugonia sometimes feels like an expanded segment from Kinds of Kindness, in that it might not have enough material to exist on its own. However, it was far easier to connect to the characters in Bugonia than in any of the sections of the previous film, and Bugonia has, at least for me, a lot more rewatch value. The best laughs it has to offer might just be the Selina Meyer kind.
Bugonia gets three stars out of four.
Stray thoughts
Very interesting choice to cast Aidan Delbis, an actor on the autism spectrum, as Don. He lends the film some extra realism, giving Teddy a dependent who gets pulled into the scheme more out of love than ideo2logy.
I want one of the costumes from the ending so badly!