It used to be that I only preferred every other film by Greek auteur Yorgos Lanthimos. But after Bugonia, I have to admit I’m 100% all-in. I’ve liked or loved everything he’s made since 2018’s The Favourite. To be fair, his recent run has included inarguably his most accessible films, free from much of the cruelty and high shock factor of his early work, which could often be interpreted as mean-spirited.
As Lanthimos has found mainstream global success, I think he’s found a way to harness his uniquely unflinching voice for stories and motifs which combine the utterly dark with the utterly fanciful. That’s what makes Bugonia — a remake of a South Korean horror-thriller called Save the Green Planet! (2003) — such a fascinating outlier. It’s much more like his earlier, non-English-language work, in that it’s a more bare-bones chamber piece (still beautifully filmed by Robbie Ryan) with some really gnarly plot and character elements. However, I think it will undoubtedly find its audience, even if its much grimmer outlook compared to my beloved Poor Things — Lanthimos’ weirdest but most colorful mainstream success — will throw many viewers for a loop.
Bugonia stars Lanthimos’ most recent muses: Jesse Plemons and Emma Stone. Plemons is worthy of an Oscar nomination as Teddy, a conspiracy theorist and amateur beekeeper whose day job packaging items for a company run by CEO Michelle Fuller (Stone) is a front to get him some kind of in at the company. He believes Fuller to be responsible not only for many traumas in his life (which he has every right to believe, given what we’re shown as the story unfolds), but also for plotting to destroy Earth as a leader of an alien race. The inciting incident of the film is Teddy’s plan to kidnap Fuller and wring from her any information she may or may not know. To do this, Teddy enlists the help of his younger, very innocent and persuadable cousin Don (Aidan Delbis), who seems to have come to live with him after a series of family tragedies.
Ever since Breaking Bad, Plemons has mastered that steel-eyed stare of his, and has harnessed it in a variety of interesting ways. Here, he adds a righteous anger and a very particular twitch, sometimes betraying the idea that Teddy fully believes what he’s saying. This actually works wonders for what the film is exploring. Teddy says at one point that he doesn’t “get [his] news from the news,” and although that line feels a little on-the-nose in our current era, it’s exactly the kind of guy Teddy is or has been molded into by his brutal life. His mother has been in a medically induced coma for some time, partly due to treatments pioneered by Fuller’s company. There are allusions to abuse from outside the family as a child. Teddy has had more than a rough go of it to get to his thirties, and despite all his rantings about aliens, many of his actions read as pure revenge. Both the film and Plemons’ performance ride a perfect line between what is real, what is imagined, what is believed, and what is second-guessed. As much as any threat of physical violence, that tension is paramount and kept taut for the vast majority of the film’s runtime.
Like most of Lanthimos’ catalog, Bugonia will be hotly debated, and viewers will likely have equally passionate arguments for loving it or hating it. I’m definitely on the more positive end of that spectrum, but I don’t think I’m at Poor Things levels of love, at least not yet. The film’s ending gives us so much to chew on that a proper full analysis right after having seen it feels impossible. I won’t spoil it, of course, but suffice it to say that the ending is the thing that will be most debated in movie theater lobbies and parking lots in the weeks to come. Regardless of how one might feel about its conclusion, Bugonia is a wild, thrilling, one-of-a-kind ride, as many of Lanthimos’ films are. | George Napper
