Bugonia
by Hope Madden
Humanity can be, individually and collectively, disappointing. No one picks that scab quite like Yorgos Lanthimos.
The filmmaker followed up his 2023 Oscar winner Poor Things, arguably his most hopeful and certainly his most mainstream film, with the blistering 3 hour anthology skewering the human condition, Kinds of Kindness.
Bugonia, his latest, reins in some of the excesses of Kindness, but the filmmaker’s observational insights on wasted, wounded humanity are as sharp as ever.
Emma Stone is Michelle Fuller, a pharmaceutical company CEO hailed on Forbes and Time and dozens of other framed magazine covers for her leadership and innovation. Jesse Plemmons is Teddy, the broken, broke, bumbling conspiracy theorist convinced she’s an alien. Teddy kidnaps the CEO/alien and drags Michelle back to the lonesome home where he grew up. The goal is not ransom, but to convince her to take him to the mother ship where he’ll persuade the aliens—responsible, as they are, for the obvious crumbling of human society—to leave earth in peace.
The script from Will Tracy and Jang Joon-hwan offers Lanthimos and his small but savvy cast fertile ground for the bleak absurdism the filmmaker does so well. Bugonia treads tonal shifts magnificently, slipping from comedy to thriller to horror and back with precision. Lanthimos’s control over audience emotion has never been tighter.
The same can be said for both Stone and Plemmons, who manage the absolutely impossible with these two characters. Their chemistry is without peer, each wrestling the audience’s sympathies from the other, both always horrifying and vulnerable.
Stone is the picture of leadership qualities. Even shorn and chained in a filthy basement, Michelle acts from a reserve of superiority and calm. Stone is utterly convincing as a survivor and fearless negotiator.
Plemmons’s range is breathtaking and Lanthimos takes advantage. Sad sack Teddy contains multitudes. He’s pathetic, terrifying, cruel, tender, manipulative, loving—all of it seamlessly integrated into a single character. Plemmons should be remembered come awards season.
The film’s final act is brazenly bizarre, but also startlingly emotional. It’s an about face that wouldn’t have worked in most films. But most films are not Yorgos Lanthimos films.
