Yorgos Lanthimos and Emma Stone, one of the most fruitful director-actor partnerships of recent times, are back for the third time in as many years (and the fifth time overall) with Bugonia and, wouldn’t you know, it’s another knockout. Though I was less keen on 2024’s Kinds of Kindness, both The Favourite and Poor Things absolutely deserve their status as some of the most critically lauded and awards-laden films of recent years, and Bugonia rises to meet their high bars. Thrilling, funny, exceptionally well-acted, and just wildly unpredictable (unless, of course, you’ve seen the Korean film Save the Green Planet, of which this is a remake), it’s another dose of blackly comic heady brilliance from one of the best cinematic double acts around.
Stone here stars as Michelle, the epitome of a fake-progressive girlboss, a CEO of a clearly rather evil pharmaceuticals company passive-aggressively demanding long hours from her employees while ‘empoweringly’ singing Chappell Roan on her drive home. It’d be easy to see her as the villain of the piece…until we meet Teddy (Jesse Plemons). A truly dedicated conspiracist, Teddy has convinced himself and his autistic teenage cousin Don (played by first-time autistic actor Aidan Delbis) that Michelle is not just a corporate evil, she’s a world-conquering Andromedan alien in disguise, here to wipe out humanity. So Teddy and Don kidnap her, chain her to a bed in the basement, and demand she confess to her alien crimes and summon her mothership to negotiate the removal of all in-disguise Andromedans from Earth.
Lanthimos and screenwriter Will Tracy keep your sympathies in delicate balance. For one, you’re never quite sure that Michelle *isn’t* an alien (shaving Stone bald and slathering her in various anti-allergy creams certainly has her looking less human), and her company, Andromedan or no, has visited hideous hurt on Teddy and his family, but Teddy’s rage and physical violence against her is genuinely frightening and upsetting.
To make this tightrope walk work requires incredibly precise writing and performances, and luckily everyone’s on the top of their game. Tracy’s more obvious satire moments (he’s a veteran of The Onion, Succession, and The Menu) are pretty broad, but he captures the hurt, rage, and fear on all sides as power dynamics shift and crack expertly, while Stone and Plemons are exceptional, with Delbis making an incredibly impressive debut too. Sometimes icy, sometimes deeply vulnerable, Stone also manages to make Michelle consistently funny, while Plemons puts in possibly career-best work as a man so scared of the world that the fear has left him completely broken.
It’s a much smaller ensemble here than in Lanthimos’s last couple films, really restricting the action to this lead trio (plus a grimly funny supporting role for comedian Stavros Halkias as a local cop with a nasty past) and one single house, and the result is a constant, claustrophobic ratcheting up of tension. The final third in particular is just one ‘holy shit’ moment after another, Lanthimos kicking the film into an insanely high gear, spurred on by the brilliantly grand and propulsive score from Jerskin Fendrix that twists and escalates as the characters descend deeper into paranoia and cruelty.
Consistently bleak as it is – by the end, all the characters look like they must smell just awful, old sweat seeping into everything in the house – Bugonia is also just gorgeous. Shooting with VistaVision on 35mm, DP Robbie Ryan loads the frames with enrapturing light and colour, adding a sense of the epic to an otherwise very contained plot (no Brutalist-style trip to an Italian marble quarry here to really show off the format). He also largely does away with a few of the tricks his collaborations with Lanthimos have become known for, most notably the fisheye lenses, but keeps the most crucial one of the steadily, creepily mobile camera that tracks the actors like a predator.
With a title based on the mythic Greek notion of bees spontaneously emerging from rotting corpses and a cast of characters convinced the world is going to end, a sense of death and doom is all over Bugonia, but Lanthimos and Tracy never let it get purely dark, particularly in a sure to be divisive ending which I thought was perfect. Is it all a big joke? At whose expense? Maybe ours, but when Lanthimos is laughing, it’s pretty hard not to laugh along with him.
Jack Blackwell – Film Reviews 