Admittedly no one goes to a Lanthimos movie in search of a feelgood hang. His subjects are memorably diverse — dystopian romance in The Lobster (2015), a malign middle-class family invader in The Killing of a Sacred Deer (2017), the sex life of an 18th-century British queen in The Favourite (2018). But his blackly comic tone, grotesque eye for sex, violence and frail human bodies, and obsession with how society’s powerful prey on its weak, tends to make for uncomfortable viewing (albeit with chuckles mixed in).
And yet there’s a strain of playfulness in Lanthimos’s work that has recently begun to verge on genuine warmth. His last big film, Poor Things (2023), was not only his most commercially and critically successful to date (it won four Oscars, including best actress for Stone) but also his sunniest. Stone’s performance as Bella Baxter, a kind of pure-hearted, sexed-up Victorian adventuress, was powered by anarchic exuberance, delight in the world around her, even at times, joy.
No sign of any such emotion in Bugonia, a sci-fi-spiked revenge fantasy about big bad corporate America, in which flashes of toothily funny social satire and a strain of genuine misery wilt beneath the thudding obviousness of its political allegory.
Based on a 2003 South Korean drama, Save the Green Planet!, the film stars Jesse Plemons — who popped up in Lanthimos’s last film, Kinds of Kindness (2024), a little-seen savage triptych of social satires that really should have clued us in to a change in the director’s mood — as Teddy Gatz, a greasy haired one-man metaphor for America’s oppressed.
He’s a conspiracy theory-ridden, sexless singleton in opioid country with a warehouse job scanning boxes and a tragic medical malpractice backstory. Having coerced his devoted autistic cousin Don (played by the newcomer Aidan Delbis) to help, Teddy sets out to kidnap his boss, Michelle Fuller (Stone), the head of a Purdue-style pharma outfit, convinced that she’s an alien sent to Earth to squash us. Still with me?
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I’m torn about the whole alien thing. On the one hand it’s a piece of deadeningly heavy-handed symbolism — as in: Michelle, who dresses in gravity-defying Louboutins and rises at 4.30 each morning to work out in her glassy mansion, might as well belong to an entirely different species to the rest of us — but one that also generates, thanks its weirdness, a bunch of good jokes. “How can you tell she’s an alien?” Don mutters as the cousins stand over Michelle’s supine form. “Narrow feet. Slight overbite,” Teddy explains.
Even better are the early exchanges between Teddy and Michelle, kidnapper and kidnapped, in which conspiracy-speak and corporate-speak, two distinct but equal kinds of contemporary derangement, grind up against each other. “Let’s just unpack the problem,” she tells him breezily, preparing for some boardroom-style negotiations. But when the problem turns out to be “the techno-enslavement” of Earth by an “Andromedon emperor” she looks a little crestfallen.
Unfortunately the film doesn’t find anywhere particularly interesting to go from its set-up, or to add to its observation that class and corporate greed have created gross unfairness. After a stultifying middle section in which Teddy and Michelle debate their respective attitudes over bowls of spaghetti, the plot lurches in predictable directions. Variety comes in the form of grim torture scenes and intense goriness, unleavened by any of the comically chaotic sex Lanthimos is loved for.
The actors do their best. Plemons, a skinny, sad-eyed yeti, is excellent as usual, as pathetic as he is chilling. The film awards him lovely, fleeting moments of grace as he whizzes around on his bicycle to the swelling orchestral strains of the score by Jerskin Fendrix (Oscar nominated for Poor Things), as though we’ve briefly stumbled into a Spielberg movie, a self-styled hero off on his own madcap mission.
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Delbis is poignant too but has little to do beyond carrying the film’s conscience (“Stop it Teddy, you’re going to kill her!”). In fact his whole character gave me pause — making the autistic guy a pure-hearted innocent feel a little hackneyed. Stone gamely subjects her shaved head and body to the usual batterings of her Lanthimos collaborations (while still managing to look hot, of course, for this is Hollywood) but her character provides much less meat for her to work with than Bella in Poor Things.
If the ideas powering Bugonia feel tired, perhaps that’s because the film-maker is — Lanthimos and Stone have together made three big, ambitious films in three years. Even relentless political satirists need to recharge sometimes.
I enjoyed the ending more than the rest of the film. The final twist, if you can call it that, might be about as subtle as a UFO but its implications are refreshingly nihilistic. The closing shots, which I won’t spoil here, are fantastically, chillingly memorable. Still, bit of a tough one to wholeheartedly recommend.
★★★☆☆
15, 120min
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