Bugonia

25

It’s a little odd how prolific Yorgos Lanthimos has been over the past few years. His head must be so filled with fuckery that he just has to get it out there. Granted, Bugonia is actually an adaptation of a Korean film, Save the Green Planet!, and the screenplay wasn’t actually written by Lanthimos. So the fuckery, in this particular case, is actually someone else’s. Though, if you’ve seen other Lanthimos films — particularly The Killing of a Sacred Deer — it’ll feel like something that sprung from his head. The paranoia and psychological terror and the absolute feeling of not really knowing characters’ true motivations until they’re revealed them with a violent wallop. This all overlayed with Lanthimos’ typical blacker-than-black sense of humor, stylized visuals and weird body horror stuff. And, as usual, the sense of time and place is skewed in a way that feels both contemporary and grounded, but like we’re getting a peek into a universe that is just one over from ours.

Though Bugonia is not without its modern-world facets. Mainly the damned Internet and the isolating conspiracy theory rabbit holes that seem to be a driving engine of large chunks of it. And this is where we find our main character, Teddy Gatz (Jesse Plemons). An isolated loner who has clearly gone deep on conspiracy theories and the communities that inspire them. His interest has come to a fine point, focusing in on an obsession that an alien race called Andromedans has invaded the earth and is basically trying to put all human beings under their spell. To what end, I’m not really certain, but suffice it to say that Teddy is not high on the idea of becoming a slave to an alien race. He has roped in his level-2 autistic cousin, Don (Aidan Delbis), into his plan. Which, for some reason, includes chemically castrating themselves and adhering to some other weird shit. His big plan is to find and kidnap an Earthbound Andromedan and force that person to take him to their mothership to procure a truce (maybe) during the lunar eclipse that’s set to happen in four days. Teddy’s Andromedan target is the CEO of a pharma company, Michelle Fuller (Emma Stone), who his research tells him is indeed an alien. Chicken or the egg, I’m not sure if he picks Michelle because she works at a company close enough to his house that he can ride his bike there, or if that’s just a giant coincidence. I think we’re just not supposed to think about that, I guess. But there is also another reason why Teddy’s obsession might coalesce around her: Michelle’s pharma company, Auxolith, provided the experimental cure to his opioid-addicted mother, Sandy (Alicia Silverstone), that put her in a coma. Where she remained to that day.

After Teddy and Don successfully kidnap Michelle, shave her head and chain her up in their basement, we are faced with some decisions to make in terms of our viewership. Is Teddy really onto something with this alien thing? Or, more likely, is he a damaged human being who has decided to concoct this story in his head in order to exact revenge against the women he sees as taking his mother away from him? After all, we see Michelle in action, and the woman is a real asshole. She’s not insane like Teddy, but she is clearly not a nice person at work or otherwise. What we’re faced with is a battle of wills. Teddy insisting to her from her that she’s an alien, and her denying it in the most ferocious way. It’s an interesting dynamic that Lanthimos and company have set up. Here’s this Internet-addled weirdo who believes absolutely wack-a-doodle things, versus a very educated woman who is a chemist by trade, but has risen all the way up the ranks to lead a large pharma company and get her face on the cover of business magazines and whatnot. Most movies would not make that even close to a fair fight. But, as it turns out, Teddy is more of a well-rounded kook than we would have originally expected. Half of his anger toward the Andromedans (and some of his scientific exploration) revolves around the disappearing bees, which he keeps in his backyard. The movie really circles around this central intellectual point if Teddy is really as crazy as he seems, or if Michelle is indeed exactly what Teddy says she is.

And somehow the movie makes us continue to doubt ourselves. It’s not like The King of Comedy, for instance, where you absolutely know that Rupert Pupkin is completely insane. Sure, Bugonia starts off that way, but through the amazing acting of both Plemons and Stone, there is an internal tug-of-war that at first seems like a blowout, but really starts to see-saw as the movie progresses. It’s unclear if Michelle is just telling Teddy what he wants to hear to be set free. Or if she’s just toying with him. Or if, just if, the outlandish stories she’s telling him about the Andromedans are the real thing. Nah, that can’t be. Or can it? But just as she is toying with him, Lanthimos is toying with us. Because we truly don’t know what the hell is going on any more than Teddy and Don do. And, sure, Teddy does finally fall under her thrall and completely forget himself — in a scenario with his mother that I frankly bumped on a bit — but we have to just assume that him suddenly going from a paranoid, but studied, person to a complete dupe had something to do with Michelle’s incredible powers of persuasion and, ultimately, her superior intellect. She didn’t become this high-powered CEO on a whim, after all. Taking a look at the casting for a sec. Jesse Plemons is 37. Alicia Silverstone (who, again, plays his mom) is 49. Jesse’s own wife, Kirsten Dunst, for context is 43. The dude who plays the sheriff and Teddy’s childhood babysitter, Stavros Halkias, is also… 37. And, look, I know the actors’ actual ages have nothing to do with their characters’ ages, but it did feel a little off when they came into frame. Small nitpick, but just thought I’d put it out there, as it somehow sat in the back of my head that there might be some time travel going on here. There is not.

I don’t want to give too much away, but suffice it to say that there is some violence. There is some almost cartoonish gore. There is absolute weirdness, though not as much, honestly, as there has been in some of Lanthimos’ other absurdist films. In some ways Teddy’s adherence to his conspiracy beliefs are funny in the darkest way imaginable. The violence, for instance, that he’s willing to enact because of his deep-seated belief in himself is childishly admirable. I’m still a little stumped why Don is really included in all this. He’s basically just a ridiculous sounding board for all of Teddy’s outlandish ideas. Almost a prop that he can talk to so the Lanthimos didn’t have to have Teddy talking to himself. Or do some sort of terrible voiceover. He is the unnecessary audience avatar to some point, confused and questioning Teddy’s methods. Ultimately, this is a two-hander that Stone absolutely killed. Plemons is great as this unwashed foil, but Stone just gets Lanthimos, and her shaved head and bugging eyes and pitch-perfect cadence make her by far the most memorable part of the movie. She’s really the driver of this mystery that shouldn’t be a mystery. Crazy dude locks up CEO in his basement and tortures her until she admits she’s an alien and agrees to bring him to her ship to work out a peace agreement with her alien overlords. Sounds pretty clear who’s the good guy here and who’s the bad guy. And this isn’t some Christmas Vacation thing where Cousin Eddie kidnaps Clark’s boss only to have him see the error of his ways and give him the bonus money to build that new pool… No, this isn’t that. We know Teddy is a tragic character from minute one, and Lanthimos is not sentimental. Maybe this is more The Assassination of Richard Nixon than anything else. And, please, for your own mental health, do not watch that movie. Bleak. Nihilistic. Whatever you call it, the point seems to be that losers gonna keep losing and the winners write the history. Always and forever.