Bugonia is the latest film from Yorgos Lanthimos (The Favourite, The Lobster, Poor Things) and it’s about a conspiracy theorist who kidnaps a pharmaceutical boss. It’s extremely wacky – possibly in a good way, still not sure. You certainly get value for money; it smashes together several genres (absurdist comedy, sci-fi, thriller, body horror) and takes a swipe at everything from capitalism and conglomerates to echo chambers and internet rabbit holes. But whether it adds up to much or has anything to say, also still not sure.
It has a script by Will Tracy (Succession, The Menu) and is a remake of the 2003 Korean cult favourite Save The Green Planet!. It stars Emma Stone, Lanthimos’s most frequent collaborator, as Michelle, the Louboutin-wearing CEO of the major pharmaceutical company Auxolith. She likes to give the impression that Auxolith is a company that cares but the reality is rather different – of course employees should be able to leave at 5.50 p.m. ‘…unless they still have things to do’. We’ve all worked for someone like that.
Elsewhere we have Teddy (Jesse Plemons), who lives in a rural rundown property and blames Michelle for much. He keeps bees and blames her pesticides for CCD (colony collapse disorder). Also, his beloved mother is in a coma after an Auxolith drug trial gone wrong. That’s enough to hold against anybody, you’d think, but he is also a fanatical conspiracy theorist who believes Michelle is an alien from Andromeda intent on destroying the human race. He must get to her so she can put him in touch with her fellow Andromedans and, who knows, maybe he’ll be able to talk them down, thereby saving humanity. Not wacky enough for you? Rest assured, it gets wackier.
He kidnaps Michelle and is aided in this endeavour by Donny, his cousin, who will increasingly question Teddy’s plans. Donny, who is played brilliantly by Aidan Delbis, has an air of childlike innocence and may be the soul of the film. You can warm to him at least. If Michelle is all cold, hard, stilettoed Louboutins, then he is all Hush Puppies. Or Clarks, maybe. (I will write The Shoe Language of Cinema one day.) I can’t say what happens to Donny but he is the one character you will care about.
Michelle is now chained to a scuzzy mattress in Teddy’s scuzzy basement where he shaves off all her hair as it’s through her hair that she communicates with her people. Or so Teddy believes but hang on… doesn’t he want her to communicate with her mother ship? Confusing. The film becomes a two-hander as Teddy tries out more ideologies – ‘I’m Leninist, Marxist, alt-right, alt-left… I went to the store and bought everything,’ he says at one point – and she tries out more tactics to escape: bargaining, threatening, playing along. Each confrontation, however, comes down to the same thing. Teddy: ‘You’re an alien, admit it.’ Michelle: ‘I am not, let me go.’ These circular arguments get tiresome.
If Michelle is all cold, hard, stilettoed Louboutins, then Donny is all Hush Puppies
But the film will keep you guessing, even if Jerskin Fendrix’s dramatic score can’t quite deflect attention away from its periods of sluggishness. Stone is compelling, with her shorn head filling the screen – you’ll be put in mind of Sinead O’Connor in ‘Nothing Compares 2 U’ – and her ability to switch from satire to fury to vulnerability. Meanwhile, Plemons, who appears to have lost considerable weight and doesn’t fare well in the hair department either (dirty, stringy), entirely captures Teddy’s desperation.
I wasn’t sold on the bleak ending; it’s one of those endings that fails to make sense of anything that you’ve seen. As for conspiracy theorists, are we for or against them? No idea. Let’s say Bugonia is good-ish and leave it there.
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