Bugonia
I would say that, on the basis of my experiences with his work since 2018’s “The Favourite,” I’m more on Yorgos Lanthimos’s wavelength than not. I’m definitely not a die hard fan of his as others are, but I appreciate what he’s throwing down, and how he’s doing it. With his latest film, he had me every step of the way until the end, and honestly, it’s the most jarring rug pull I’ve had with a movie in a couple of decades.
The screenplay is by Will Tracy, who’s done some previous work in dark comedy such as “The Menu” and “Succession.” Here, he is adapting a South Korean movie from 2003, “Save the Green Planet!,” and now that I know that, I understand the choices made by “Bugonia” more, but that doesn’t mean that I like them. It just makes me wonder if something got lost in the translation.
We live at a time where a situation like the one in “Bugonia” is not out of the realm of possibility. We begin by being introduced to Michelle (Emma Stone), a high-powered corporate executive who has a pretty intense workout regiment. We also meet Teddy (Jesse Plemons) and his cousin, Don (Aidan Delbis). They are on the opposite end of the social scale, and they are preparing for something. It’s obvious that Teddy is in charge, and Don is along for the ride. One day, after she leaves work, they kidnap Michelle, and shave her head. Why? That is how her species is tracked. Teddy and Don think she is an alien. Where will this type of thinking take the situation?
For much of the film’s nearly 2 hour running time, I was down with “Bugonia.” There’s a great source of social satire here, and how it can go to a dark, troubling place. Knowing what I know about conspiracy theories, I loved what this film was doing, and how it was showing the dark underbelly of our media sphere, and how it is rife with people like Teddy and Don, who see the issues with society, but who have been led to the wrong conclusions. We get hints that this is not Teddy’s first rodeo, as well as hints as to why Michelle is his target.
The three central performances in this film are terrific. Stone is an actress whose career has blossomed the more she’s taken chances, and the work she does here is some of her very best. Plemons is an actor whose versatility means that we can’t quite be certain what we’re going to get from him in his performance. In this film, that means we get someone broken, but certain of themselves, and as the film goes along, we see the lengths that those two qualities tempt him to go. Delbis seems like the most straightforward of the three performances, but it’s also the saddest for that reason. He goes with Teddy’s plans, but even early on, we see that there is conflict in his support of his cousin, so much so that we are not left surprised by his final choice.
And now, the ending. Knowing what I now know in regards to the film being a remake of an earlier film, I understand more why it went in the direction it did, and in doing so, it was being true to its source material, and underlying its themes in bold sharpie. I wish it had veered off from its source, though, given the current political climate, which would have made its ending position BEFORE its big twist more impactful, and would have remained true to its themes. As soon as one event happened, however, I just had a feeling as to what was going to happen, and it was genuinely enraging. “Bugonia” almost feels like a cop out, and one absurdist choice gone too far, in a way that did not aid what it was at all. Lanthimos has earned the right to make his films the way he makes them- and the filmmaking in that ending is fantastic- but the choice of that ending just didn’t work for me, which is a shame because, before it happened, this might have been one of my favorite films of the year.
