Emma Stone plays a kidnapped CEO fighting for survival in this slick retooling of the feelbad maestro’s formula, just screened at Venice
Greek weird-wave titan Yorgos Lanthimos has opted for a slight change of tack with Bugonia. After two ambitious projects – the Oscar-winning Poor Things and the more coolly received feel-bad anthology Kinds of Kindness – the director offers a lean and mean thriller with more focus and momentum than any of his work since The Killing of a Sacred Deer. Set in a corner of the American heartland, two cousins hatch a plan to kidnap a major pharmaceutical CEO, convinced that they can reveal her true alien identity and negotiate the cessation of the longstanding infiltration of “Andromedan” creatures on Earth.
Today’s world is one of rampant conspiracy, where delusions can only be resolved if we commit to their illogic with absolute certainty, and Ted (Jesse Plemons) believes that the sickness affecting human co-existence can be neatly expressed with apian metaphors – humans are deserting the hive because the alien-driven agro-capitalist influence wants us without community and concentrated strength. To Ted, an avid beekeeper himself, there is little distinction between the corporate pathogens causing Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) and the oppression humankind faces from alien intervention – wouldn’t you know, it’s all connected.
Plemons is, unsurprisingly, convincing as a very intense dude, switching between an uptight speaking style to announce his manifesto and a volatile, ugly frustration whenever his hostage, Michelle Fuller (Emma Stone), doesn’t affirm his dubious assessment of our modern crisis. Stone is a compelling match for Plemons’ erratic intensity; handcuffed in a dingy farmhouse basement, with a shaven head and lathered in an antihistamine cream, she animates Michelle’s smug, manicured, but also pragmatic qualities. In Ted, she is attempting to negotiate with someone who cannot be diverted or bargained with – and time is running out before she’s expected to summon a mothership.
Wrapping up in under two hours (shorter than Save the Green Planet!, the Korean film by Jang Joon-hwan that Lanthimos and screenwriter Will Tracy are adapting), Bugonia has a welcome clip after the extended and misshapen Kinds of Kindness, and it helps that the plot comes loaded with inherent stakes, urgency and a vague ticking clock. Most of the film is spent in the company of only Ted, Michelle, and Ted’s cousin, Don (Aidan Delbis in his film debut). Loyal but less zealously subscribed to the Andromedan conspiracy, Don is taken advantage of by his righteous, manipulative cousin, even pressured into accepting chemical castration because Ted says it will help their mission. In one especially upsetting moment, Michelle gives up trying to appeal to Don’s logical, humane side, and indulges in Ted’s dangerous fantasy by promising Don extraterrestrial rewards. Michelle may feel like a kinder, more reasonable alternative to Ted, but her empathy only extends as far as it aids her survival.
The only other significant players are Ted’s mother, Sandy (Alicia Silverstone, mostly seen in grave, surreal flashbacks), and a local cop called Casey (Stavros Halkias) who keeps apologetically hinting at his nasty behaviour when he was Ted’s babysitter. Abuse is a central throughline in Lanthimos’ work, emerging or repeating in absurd and puerile ways, and Bugonia’s invasive moments of torture and manipulation indicate that, while the director still relies on the same tools of provocation, he deploys them here for a new, arresting and intimate calibre of discomfort.
Tinged with burnt yellows and oranges and filled with centre-framed dolly shots that feel eerily exact amid the chaos, Bugonia still hints at a softening in Lanthimos’ unique visual style. The film prefers to bask in its own strangeness and misery than lean too hard into its suspense dynamics, and is at its most confident in the extended dialogue scenes between Plemons and Stone, who infuse the extreme contrasts between Michelle and Ted into every spoken line. Their impossible accusations and calculated concessions are charged with the tension of their respective, unique power; Michelle’s wealth and image control are isolated and starved in Ted’s custody; but he is the only authority on his vast network of rules and convictions who cannot risk slipping fully into fantasy – which is why the final section, where Ted’s sensible and sharp instincts slip away into panicked credulity, feels like a too-easy betrayal of the characters’ finely tuned dynamic. It’s what makes Bugonia feel like a minor course-correct for Lanthimos; a return to something slick, sharp and nasty, but perhaps less of a wholesale renovation of his vision than a smart, savvy redecoration.
