‘Bugonia’ Review: Yorgos Lanthimos Shows Restraint In Paranoid Black Comedy

Director Yorgos Lanthimos teams up with previous collaborators Emma Stone and Jesse Plemons to bring audiences another slice of darkly weird comedy. For any other director, Bugonia (a Greek word meaning the belief that bees were spontaneously born from the carcass of a dead cow or ox) would be out there, but for Lanthimos, this feels like a more restrained entry for his filmography.

Michelle Fuller (Emma Stone) is the cutting-edge CEO of Auxolith Corp, a pharmaceutical company that is pushing the world of medicine forward. We meet her in his gilded cage of a glazed office, filming a corporate diversity training video with an eerie coldness. She almost exclusively speaks in 21st-century corporate lingo, walks in impossibly high stilettos, and manages to put in a full training session before work. Michelle wants her staff to know they can finish at 5.30 if they want to; they probably shouldn’t, but they could. It takes just one scene to understand who this woman is, helped by Stone’s manic performance.

She is an easy character to hate, as most people have an aversion to these cold CEO billionaires. This makes down-and-out beekeeper Teddy (Jesse Plemons) and his meek cousin Donny (Aidan Delbis) sympathetic characters. Teddy, who works as a cog in Auxolith Corp’s large machine, believes that the CEO is not just an evil human but she’s an alien whose entire mission is to bring down humanity.

Teddy and Donny concoct a hair-brained plot to kidnap Michelle at her mansion and bring her back to their dilapidated farmhouse. Teddy has fallen down the rabbit hole of conspiracy theories, convinced that Michelle is not of this planet. Their plan mostly works out, and the powerful CEO ends up chained in their basement, hairless and smeared in antihistamine cream.

Teddy is a simple man, and he has just one request for Michelle. He wants her to introduce him to her space emperor so he can negotiate a peace treaty. If she doesn’t stop the aliens from poisoning the world and causing misery, he will have to hurt Michelle. Initially, you sympathise with Michelle, a vulnerable woman trapped in a basement by two dangerous men who have been radicalized by online material. As the plot unfolds, sympathies and opinions will switch between teams.

Teddy is a man caught in his algorithm. There is no reason to believe he hasn’t got a good heart; he’s just fallen down a rabbit hole of believing the world’s powers are actually malicious aliens from the Andromeda galaxy. Bugonia explores Teddy’s past through black-and-white flashbacks involving his sick mother (Alicia Silverstone) and current-day conversations with the police officer/ former babysitter (Stavros Halkias). 

Bugonia does not mock or patronize people who engage in these theories. Adding a tragic backstory to Teddy gives him humanity, and he doesn’t use his eccentric opinions as the butt of a joke. Donny adds a moral dilemma to Teddy’s well-thought-out plan, keeping him grounded when his diet of YouTube videos, podcasts, and Reddit threads clouds his judgment. He also acts as the voice of the moderate audience, whose opinions may lie between the two foes.

Despite this thrilling start, which sees Teddy and Donny attacking Michelle in her gated community driveway, Bugonia is a quiet film about two people’s ideologies. Much of this movie sees Teddy and Michelle talk it out face-to-face. While both come from different backgrounds and have had different personal trajectories, neither is that different. Both are self-righteous and unmovable in their opinions, which probably have more crossovers than they would like to admit. It’s like your social media timeline has come to life and is being acted out by two generational talents.

Without such skilled actors, Bugonia could have suffered from an incredibly dry second act. Stone and Plemons going head-to-head over a dinner table is as sharp and thrilling as a shootout or car chase. Plemon’s greasy basement revolutionary thinks before he talks, while Stone’s cold visionary talks in pre-prepared corporate taglines. 

 While the two Osar-nominees intellectually face off, Aidan Delbis, in his film debut, more than holds his own as the doubting voice of reason. The writing and acting combine to make both sides both dislikable and sympathetic simultaneously. Throughout the film, the script encourages you to flip between sides and opinions.

Written by Will Tracy (The Menu) and based on the 2003 South Korean sci-fi/comedy Save the Green Planet!, this story has only become more relevant since the release of the original over two decades ago. Tracy, who also penned Succession, uses well-worn themes to put a fresh twist on the Eat The Rich genre. Capitalism, big pharma, climate change, online radicalization, and performative activism are all targeted with this sharp script.

At over 120 minutes, this script could have benefited from an edit. The second act sags and starts to repeat themes, making sure the audience really understands what is going on. Lanthimos’ work can suffer from pointing out the obvious instead of leaving things ambiguous. The ending may have been more impactful if the film had cut two scenes sooner, letting audiences use the evidence presented to come to their own conclusion.

Bugonia is a film of three distinctive acts. The first plays as a thriller comedy, where two hapless and undertrained men try to take out a woman whose athletic prowess more than outweighs theirs. The second act is quiet and dialogue-heavy, almost like a darkly comic play adaptation. The third act explodes into the zany genre narrative Yorgos fans have been waiting for. The divisive ending will either make the entire film for people or make the first 100 minutes appear hollow. 

Lanthimos is unusually restrained in Bugonia, toning back many of his trademarks. The genre stylings are replaced by a 21st-century paranoia and an uncharacteristic bleakness. The subtlety means that the bursts of violence among the black comedy are even more shocking, and Teddy’s extreme behaviour is even more chilling. 

Grade: B

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