THIS REVIEW CONTAINS SPOILERS.
Yorgos Lanthimos has carved an incredibly niche, and wonderfully distinct, place for himself in modern cinema. There’s no way you can watch one of his films without knowing intrinsically that he made it. Which is why it’s surprising that Bugonia, his fourth collaboration with Emma Stone, was never originally meant to be his. A remake of the Korean film Save the Green Planet! (which, full disclosure, I have not seen at the time of writing), the original director Jang Joon-hwan was set to direct his own remake. This is not the first time an international director has remade their film in English, though this often yields mixed results; for every Funny Games (Michael Haneke) there is The Vanishing (George Sluizer), which somehow seems to misunderstand its own source material (although presumably at least some of this can be attributed to the American studio system and their idiotic insistence on a positive ending, see also: James Watkin’s surprisingly good but inferior remake of Christian Tafdrup’s Speak No Evil). After Jang left the role, Ari Aster picked it up – which would have been a very interesting development. This film shares a lot of thematic elements with Aster’s recent Eddington, particularly the idea that humanity is being driven to psychosis by the social media bubble, and Aster still serves as a producer here – but I think he ended up directing the right film. So in steps Lanthimos, and suddenly you can’t imagine anyone else making Bugonia. For one, he brought along Stone and Plemons after working with them on Kinds of Kindness, and once you have seen their performances it is difficult to picture anyone else doing a better job. I know we joke that Stone will do anything Daddy Yorgos asks of her, but if I was an A-list two-time Oscar winner, why wouldn’t I keep working with a director putting out consistently great films and offering me complex, challenging roles (that the awards bodies also happen to love)?
Bugonia follows Teddy (Plemons), a conspiracy theorist who enlists his cousin Don (Aidan Delbis) to kidnap Michelle Fuller (Stone), a Musk-eqsue girlboss CEO, because Teddy is convinced she is an alien sent to Earth to corrupt humanity. In a way, it’s a comfort fantasy: it’s much easier to believe the evil of billionaires and megacorporations could never originate on our planet, but it’s also entirely wishful thinking on Teddy’s part. The film delves deeper into how Teddy fell down the conspiracy hole as Fuller, never feeling like she does not have the upper hand even when tied up and tortured, interrogates his motives and makes the cousins question how sure they are of their own beliefs. The problem is, Teddy knows exactly what she is going to say: he knows she will tell him that he is living in a social media echo chamber, that he has been corrupted by the internet and his own experiences, and that he is not mentally well. But even then, he rejects these possibilities because his truth is absolute – we think. But there is a heavy irony, because as soon as Fuller attempts to confess to being an extra-terrestrial, he does not believe her conviction. He is too blinded by his own expectations to accept anything at face value other than his own perception of Fuller’s alien origins.
This is a film where two extremes are pitted against one another. It almost feels like a chamber piece, the vast majority taking place in Teddy’s lonely house, still reeking with the presence of his mother, and the film is heavily dialogue-driven. On the one side, Fuller has everything at her disposal: money, education, upbringing. The juxtaposition of singing along to Chappell Roan in the car, her purportedly feminist role as a female CEO (including a photo with Michelle Obama) gives way quickly to a cold woman who is letting her employees leave at 5:30 “if they want to – but if they have work to do, they should probably stay later”. And this is just the tip of the iceberg, as we see the depths of her evil in the botched medical trial that left Teddy’s mother (Alicia Silverstone) comatose. She is everything a typical billionaire must be: exploitative, unfeeling, and doing absolutely everything in her power to hide this from the public. On the other hand, Teddy is at the bottom of the food chain, packaging deliveries for Fuller’s company, living on very little, isolated from his community, and trying to repress the trauma of both implied sexual assualt by his ex-babysitter turned police officer Casey (Stavros Halkias) and his mother’s condition. He is a broken man, and in our world it is not hard to see how he went down his alien rabbit hole. He tells Fuller he tried everything: alt-right, alt-left, religions, cults, just to grasp for some meaning in the world, before landing on his theory of the Andromedons. This was mostly spurred by his apiarist tendencies and watching his beloved bees dying, which he attributes (probably correctly) to the action of people like Fuller and the pollution they create.
It’s interesting: there is a distinct issue often present in American cinema that portrays the socially conscious as the bad guys. Watch any Marvel film and you will often think, “Hang on a minute, the villain has a point!” But because they want to blow some shit up, suddenly they are in the wrong, and our government-sanctioned hero can stop the nasty people who were angry that the USA were killing them unrepentently. Bugonia could go down that route easily: Teddy’s cause is humanist, in a way, as he wishes to save the green planet from the billionaires gutting the environment and poisoning the water supply. But the film asks how this could ever be productive when social media has made us all lose our minds? How could we ever lead a movement that makes a difference when the only people taking action are conspiracy-pilled nutjobs intent on kidnapping, torturing and murdering their way to victory, all for an inane reason that feels more like an excuse than an explanation?
Caught between these extremes is Don, who only seems to be along for the ride out of love for his cousin, and perhaps represents the middleman of (relative) normality. As Fuller plays with his mind to turn him against his cousin, we see how visible and powerful extremism is in our society compared to those who just want to do the right thing. He is sidelined as the two leads dominate the conversation, and the horror of witnessing this clash of two evils leads him to the only place he can seemingly find solace: shocking, sudden suicide. Fuller, splattered with an insane amount of his viscera, is a striking visual, for what billionaire is not strained with the blood of the working classes? And Lanthimos asks, rather depressingly, if there is any point trying to fight the system, or is it better to just bow out now?
The strength of the film from an audience perspective will surely hinge on their perception of the ending. After Fuller finally convinces Teddy she is not lying about being an alien, she leads him back to her office and promises to transport him to the Andromedon ship via a remote disguised as a calculator – all very funny and stupid stuff. After entering the closet/transportation chamber, Teddy’s homemade bomb accidentally detonates, blowing him up and finally leaving Fuller safe. This could be the ending: Teddy is poetically destroyed by his own values, and Fuller escapes virtually unscathed, just as the upper classes always seem to do. Evil unfortunately does exist in humanity, and the audience is left to debate whether Teddy or Fuller was the worse of the pair.
But Lanthimos is not done: after escaping the ambulance and returning to the office, Fuller enters the closet and is transported to her ship, revealing Teddy’s conspiracy was right all along, down to the last detail. Fuller, the emperor of the Andromedons, declares that the Earth experiment has failed: after years of being driven to moral depravity by the evil she has seen, they do not feel the human race is fit to survive. She bursts a bubble over the flat Earth and the film ends with a beautiful montage of the planet, seeing every human lying dead: in factories, on beaches, in offices, on the street. It’s a quiet, reflective and strangely optimistic sequence, as the animals start to reclaim the Earth. Would this planet be better off without us? As the bees, now free from our polluting grasp, continue to pollinate flowers, you have to wonder if it would.
But there is a greater depth, as we consider what we have seen throughout the film. Extremism expressed in violence, trauma manifesting in vengeance, and greed on a level beyond imagination. But this is surely not the whole of humanity? There are many types of people we see lying dead, little and large, important and average, Teddy’s colleagues who cannot fight medical care placed on the same level as politicians. The Andromedons, in their privileged positions, are blinded to the true scope of humanity, and Fuller decides 7 billion deserve to die when she has never truly experienced the human race. But this is the state we are in: social media, the news, the internet and society at large tend to magnify and platform the negative, the worst of the worst. And too often we allow it without any attempt to fight back. We have the power to question these people; we do not have to accept them. But when we do, the problem is only going to grow larger and larger until it is out of our grasp; until, like Teddy’s mother, it floats away from us. There may not be a God or an alien race looking down and making the choices that affect humanity, but the people in power share this blinkered vision that excludes the normal, the adjusted, the people just trying to live and find joy in existence. I can understand why the ending would not work for everyone: for a second, it seems Lanthimos is undermining his own point by validating Teddy’s conspiracy. But it doesn’t really matter because it’s not about what he believes, it’s why and how he believes it, and his actions that come from his beliefs that are truly damaging. Fuller actually being an alien feels in line with the black comedy and irony in the film, but I don’t think it destroys the idea that is presented: that the people in power are so removed from the majority that they might as well be aliens.
Bugonia is a more stripped-back film than the epic scope of Poor Things or the epic runtime of Kinds of Kindness, but the final film in Lanthimos’ two-year run lacks none of his sophistication, whimsy, or entertainment value. There have been several films this year that have really shone a lens on the now, particularly Eddington and Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another, but also Francis Lawrence’s The Long Walk and Edgar Wright’s The Running Man. It is abundantly clear that we are at a time when political filmmaking is more important than ever, particularly when the horrors already exist and live in the White House. But politics does not require a sacrifice of enjoyment, and Lanthimos’ trademark dark humour, unconventionality and distinct visual style make this film well and truly his, even if it was never originally supposed to be. If Emma Stone misses the Oscars next year, I will be genuinely surprised. She shaved her head on camera! They love that shit! But if we’ve learned anything at the cinema this year, it’s this: use your voice, don’t ever think you are not important or that the fight cannot be won, and if you think the rich are from another planet – they probably are.
Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐ (big slay)
Director: Yorgos Lanthimos
Cast: Emma Stone, Jesse Plemons, Aidan Delbis
Country: United States
Runtime: 118m
Certificate: 15
Image: Focus Features, Fremantle, Element Pictures