Yorgos Lathimos has always dedicated himself to bringing the unnervingly absurd to the masses which has thus far encompassed passive agressive historical farces, infantile dating rituals, fantastical feminist Frankensteins and everything in-between. In fact, there’s few around at this point who can fuse ridiculous laughs with a genuine sense of swelling dread as confidently as the Greek filmmaker and with his newest movie, he’s gone and done it again.
Turning his attention to out of control conspiracy theories, Bugonia is a remake of the equally daffy, Korean black comedy, Save The Green Planet, that sees the director embark on his fourth, consecutive movie with Emma Stone front and centre but with far less hair. With Jesse Plemons also pulling another one of his weirdo, outsider characters out of his seemingly bottomless oddball sack, we’re seemingly in store for yet another unsettling bout of dark satire that, to a more conventional audience, will undoubtedly feel… pretty alien.
Epically lost conspiracy theorist Teddy Gatz has it all figured out – or at least he thinks he does. Between cycling to his shifts as a lowley warehouse worker for gargantuan pharmaceutical company Auxolith, he and his neurodivergent cousin Don have become convinced that there’s an alien conspiracy already in progress by a race called the “Andromedans”. Their mission was to first subjugate and then gradually wipe out the human race using colony collapse disorder much in the same way they’ve been doing with bees, so after years of research, Teddy thinks he’s found the perfect target to help him save the Earth: Auxolith CEO, Michelle Fuller.
Believing that she’s an alien in disguise, Teddy and Don abduct her and keep her prisoner in the basement of their house with the hope that they can use her as a bargaining chip against the Andromedans and demand that they leave Earth immediately. With four days left until the lunar eclipse that will allow Michelle to return to her mothership, the guys shave her head, cover her in antihistamine cream to stop her communicating with her people (naturally) and start the negotiation process. Of course there’s one slight problem: Michelle obviously has no idea what the fuck they’re talking about.
Yes, Michelle is maybe a cold, hard, CEO whose company’s drug tests put Teddy’s already sick mother in a coma, but Teddy is also objectively out of his mind, who seems to be using his wild conspiracy theories to deflect a sizable amount of childhood trauma he’s unable to process. But as the luna eclipse gets ever closer and Michelle resorts to multiple tactics and “dialogues” to reason with her captors, the calm demeanour Teddy’s trying to cultivate starts to crack.
While watching Bugonia, there’s a feeling that there’s multiple struggles going on both in front of and behind the camera. Obviously the battle of reasoning between shaven-headed CEO and a lank-haired conspiracy nut is quite a sizable conflict to begin with, but there’s also a feeling the Lathimos is wrestling with an urge to break free of the stripped back, uncomfortable nature of some of his more intense films and hurl himself back into the unrestrained surrealism of Poor Things. As a result, the director’s newest offering feels very much like a movie of two halves which tends to both of his favoured tones.
The first half obviously is his warped version of a kidnapping drama as Stone’s icy surrogate for basically any famous billionaire with iffy human rights issue you can name finds herself in something of a nightmarish situation. Locked in a strange basement with kidnappers who have an utterly unshakable belief that she’s an extraterrestrial agent, she finds thst she has to use every inch of her diplomatic skill to try and put cracks in Teddy’s ironclad confidence that he is absolutely correct. Similarly, her captor has a ticking clock to contend with as he’s utterly convinced that he’s on a genuine mission to save the world and he simply isn’t going to fall for Michelle’s attempts at reasoning with him when the “truth” is staring him in the face. It’s anyone else’s hands, this would be tense stuff, and yet Lathimos keeps things disturbingly relevant with our times as he uses the deadlock to mirror the lack of dialogue and understanding that our species is locked into right now. No one is willing to bend on their resolve and as a result, the director takes obvious glee in muddying the waters further by blurring every line he possibly can.
Jesse Plemons’ troubled Teddy is a conspiracy theorists wet dream; utterly dedicated to his belief to the point that he’s had himself chemically castrated to avoid “distractions” (now that’s dedication to the bit) and the actor plays his resolve so well, there are times where I’m starting to believe that Plemons isn’t actually a functioning member of society anymore. However, to both aid and diffuse his views, Stone’s Michelle is not only made up to look vaguely inhuman (those giant eyes set in a shaved head coated in white cream makes her admittedly look otherworldly), but her equally calm actions in the face of such apparent insanity sometimes make you doubt what you’re actually seeing.
However, when the final third kicks in and the pressure becomes too much for some of the characters to handle, Lathimos cuts loose by sending the story into gonzo-ville and never looks back. Some viewers may be annoyed that the blurring of lines may dilute the message that some people are so lost that they’ll believe anything – because what would it actually mean if Teddy was right? – but the movie is obviously having so much fun with its rapidly more farcical rug pulls, that it’s tough not to get swept along with it. In fact, among the shocking twists, acts of violence and some startling spots of sudden gore (what with a flying, severed head gag here and Poor Things’ “Franken-prostitute” plot thread, are you seriously telling me that Lathimos isn’t a closet Frankenhooker fan?), there’s an incredible amount of dark laughs being mined that gets evermore ludicrous until a marmite ending plays us out in dubious style.
The performances are wonderfully dedicated with both Emma Stone and Jesse Plemons fabulously trying to out do each other when it comes to their character’s devotion to what is real (Kirsten Dunst, seriously, check on your husband, yeah?), but while some may think Bugonia might tilt too far off its axis before the end, Lathimos’ dedication to the bit still manages to deliver all the unsettling giggles he’s known for.
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