Greek auteur Yorgos Lanthimos is steadily proving himself to be among cinema’s masters of pitch-black comedy.
He did it in particular with period pieces The Favourite (2018) and Poor Things (2023), both of which earned Academy Award nominations for Best Picture and Best Director. His latest, Bugonia — his fourth collaboration with generational talent Emma Stone and his first with screenwriter Will Tracy — isn’t quite as ornate or sophisticated as those films. Instead, it’s more of a piece with his earlier features The Lobster (2015) and The Killing of a Sacred Deer (2017): wry, modern and gruesome, dreamlike and occasionally surreal but with a patina of realism.
Stone here plays Michelle Fuller, the CEO of soulless Georgia-based pharmaceutical company Auxiloth. She’s impossibly fit and obnoxiously type-A — the final boss of girl bosses, waking at 4:30 each morning to engage in a suite of anti-aging tactics before virtue-signaling her way through phony diversity initiatives and photo ops. Jesse Plemons, in what is perhaps his most dynamic performance yet, plays Teddy — a grimy, disheveled conspiracy theorist and low-level employee at Auxiloth. Teddy and his hapless cousin and “colleague” Don (newcomer Aidan Delbis) decide to kidnap Fuller, convinced she’s an extraterrestrial with designs on conquering earth.
Teddy is misguided, unstable and dangerous, fixated on the sorts of nonsensical contemporary conspiracy theories that many young men find themselves plunging down rabbit holes after. But there’s plenty he’s right about. He’s right that rampant corporate greed is eating away at our social fabric. He’s right that ostentatious overtures at progress by people like Fuller are largely hollow. He’s right that the bees are dying. As Teddy puts it, ideologically speaking, he went grocery shopping while hungry and bought everything in the store — “alt right, alt lite, leftism, Marxism” — before settling on “the truth”: that Fuller and her fellow Andromedons are to blame for all of it.
Adapted from relatively little-seen 2003 Korean film Save the Green Planet!, Bugonia is, according to fellow Scene film critic Ken Arnold, “probably the best attempt at remaking a Korean film I have seen yet.” Like its Korean counterpart, Bugonia centers on a protagonist who is seemingly in the throes of psychosis, brought on in part by his mother’s comatose state — a result of experimental treatments by Auxiloth. (Unlike the Korean film, this one features an incredible Green Day needle-drop.)
The Greek director’s second collaboration with Emma Stone opens this week at the Belcourt
Throughout Bugonia, Lanthimos and his cinematographer, frequent collaborator Robbie Ryan, alternate between wide-angle establishing shots and tight, almost claustrophobic close-ups. It’s also a movie on a much smaller scale than Lanthimos’ other recent efforts. Most of the action takes place in Teddy’s home, and aside from Fuller and her two captors, the only significant characters are local cop Casey (played by comedian and podcaster Stavros Halkias) and Teddy’s invalid mom Sandy (Alicia Silverstone). According to the conspiracies Teddy buys into, what happens with Fuller will impact the whole of human civilization — but his entire universe is contained in his weathered rural home.
Bugonia’s themes aren’t small, however. Its action isn’t small. It’s full of shocking surprises, steady laughs and captivating moments from Plemons and Stone, powered by screenwriter Tracy’s tight dialogue. (Tracy’s got an enviable résumé, having written for The Onion, Last Week Tonight and Succession before penning the scripts for The Menu and Bugonia.) It’s all about the payoff, which of course you won’t find spoiled here. This director takes risks, and risks are bound to confuse, annoy or plainly piss off plenty of moviegoers. One audience member at the end of my screening turned to a friend and said, “Holy fuck,” with no further follow-up.
This is a film that takes big swings. Some very big swings. But when Lanthimos is the one holding the bat? I say swing away.
