Bugonia is one of the best films in recent memory to capture what it feels like to be alive right now. Because of that, it is Yorgos Lanthimos’s darkest and most timely work. Here he’s joined forces with new collaborator Will Tracy, the former editor-in-chief of satire site The Onion and a writer on the similarly cutthroat series Succession. Tracy, then, lives at the centre of the American circus show, and when passed through Lanthimos’s cool-toned, deadpan-tragic camera, we’re delivered a true alchemical wonder: violent, absurd, current, fantastical, shrewd, and unexpectedly heartbreaking.
The film it’s adapted from, Jang Joon-hwan’s Save the Green Planet! (2003), was always meant to feel at least a little outrageous. Yet it doesn’t take much from Tracy and Lanthimos to make its premise – a conspiracy theorist kidnaps a CEO, convinced they’re an alien – uncomfortably plausible in our current landscape of internet rabbit holes, loneliness epidemics, and AI-induced psychosis.
Our world right now feels like the punchline to a joke somebody would make on their deathbed, and the fact no one knows whether to laugh or cry about it is an integral part of why everyone seems to be losing their minds. Lanthimos makes sure his film plays that way, too. Take, for example, his and Tracy’s choice to make the CEO here a woman, Michelle Fuller, played by the director’s thespian go-to, Emma Stone. She’s the head of a pharmaceutical company her kidnapper Teddy (Jesse Plemons) blames for, among other things, the demise of the bee population.
She represents performative ethics at their most slickly sinister, declaring that her workers are now free to leave at 5.30pm (“new culture, no more unpleasant incidents!”) – of course, that is, unless there’s work to be finished. So, you don’t exactly want to believe her sneering invocations of the “politicised optics” of her imprisonment. And when Teddy shaves her head and slaps anti-histamine cream all over her body (to dampen the extraterrestrial neurotransmitters, you see), you want to laugh at how she looks like a fumbled attempt at an Uncle Fester costume.
And yet, as much as Bugonia keeps you aware that Michelle has always weaponised her gender in order to maintain a portrait of innocence, Stone will still flash up these small, disorientating little moments of humanity (or extraterrestriality, perhaps?). She and Lanthimos are an ideal match because she can push for the new and the wild – from a Frankenstein’s monster remix to a bald, alleged alien – all while maintaining a tight control over tone, whether dramatically or comedically.
The same is true of Plemons’s Teddy, who speaks in the slow, deliberate manner of someone who’s extensively rehearsed their personality. He insists on his “humanist principles”, yet still we see something deeply frightening start to emerge – is this really a righteous crusade or an excuse to inflict patriarchal violence? We’re on a moral seesaw here, aptly accompanied by the Stravinsky-esque detonations of Jerskin Fendrix’s score.
At the centre of it all is Don (Aidan Delbis), Teddy’s cousin who’s been roped in as co-conspirator. He’s an autistic character written with complexity and nuance, and played – in what is a stark rarity – by an autistic actor. It’s hinted that Don has been abandoned by his family, that Teddy is really the only person he’s ever felt safe with. What happens, then, when that view of him is challenged? Delbis plays the anguish beautifully. You can practically see the world being ripped out from under him.
While it’s been argued that Lanthimos harbours active disdain for other people, Don reminds us that there’s a poignant streak of empathy to be found in even his most nihilistic of stories. Hope, in Bugonia, is mostly lost. But not entirely.
Dir: Yorgos Lanthimos. Starring: Emma Stone, Jesse Plemons, Aidan Delbis, Stavros Halkias, Alicia Silverstone. Cert 15, 118 mins.
‘Bugonia’ is in cinemas from 31 October
