★★★ (3 out of 4)
When will we ever learn? That seems to be the warning coursing through “Bugonia” as it cuts a path through theaters nationwide this week on the wings of film festival praise for the performances of Emma Stone and Jesse Plemons, two of the best actors on the planet.
Speaking of planets, ours is in big trouble. Or so says acclaimed Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos, that brilliant sadist of world cinema. In films as diverse as “Dogtooth,” “The Lobster,” “The Favourite” and “Poor Things,” Lanthimos revels in punishing humans for, well, being human and prey to what Shakespeare called “the thousand shocks the flesh is heir to.”
Even with Emma Stone as his glorious muse, Yorgos Lanthimos can be self-indulgent, self-satisfied and grindingly obtuse, but damn he is also a true visionary.
Teddy, the workslave, amateur beekeeper and incel eco-terrorist played by Plemons, blames aliens. And so he kidnaps his boss, Michelle Fuller (Stone), the CEO of Auxolith pharmaceuticals, arguing that her narrow feet and slight overbite are an alien giveaway. He’s convinced this Time cover celeb and pal of Michelle Obama is from the planet Andromeda and hellbent on destroying Earth.
Maybe this plot will remind you of “Save the Green Planet,” the 2003 black-comic, sci-fi thriller from South Korea. Rest assured that Lanthimos is not one to play copycat, so expect tonal changes in the script by Will Tracy (“The Menu,” “Succession”), though the scaffolding remains.
Back to Teddy. He is not alone in the abduction plot. His co-conspirator is his cousin Don, sweetly played by Aiden Delbis, who prefers to self-describe as autistic rather than neurodivergent. Don loves Teddy (why else would he agree to join him in chemical castration?) more than he believes him, which makes him the audience surrogate as the film detours further into the darkest corners of Teddy’s mind.
Don winces when Teddy shaves Michelle’s head (Stone did it for real)—thinking aliens communicate through DNA in the hair—and actively rebels when he gets rough with her in their farmhouse basement. The film’s violence can be hard to take—beware the electroshock torture!— and Michelle’s screams feel piercingly real. The one (Stavros Halkias) who appears is Teddy’s sexually abusive ex-babysitter. What a town.
Lanthimos directs the actors to speak in monotones until Teddy explodes, giving Plemons a chance to show his remarkable range. Teddy blames Michelle for putting his mother (Alicia Silverstone) into a medically induced coma after a failed drug experiment. His fury is palpable and absurdly funny, just like Lanthimos likes it.
And watch Stone—two Oscars in on a thriving career— negotiate the hairpin turns of the script to deliver a master class in highwire acting. She uses icy corporate speak as a weapon to exploit her employees under the guise of caring. And when she softly announces everyone can stop work at 5:30 pm, her eyes warn, “don’t you effing dare.” The same technique doesn’t work on Teddy and the twitch of fear on Michelle’s face sparks more than comic mischief.
Stone has never played a character this easy to hate, representing the polite contours of greed that slowly erase humanity from the existence equation. On the soundtrack, Chappell Roan sings, “You have to stop the world, just to stop the feeling” and we wonder if Teddy is the only one who thinks that numb inaction is a bad idea.
That’s Lanthimos for you, showing the worst of humankind while arguing for its survival. The film begins and ends with nature. “It all starts with something magnificent,” says Teddy, speaking of his admiration for “bugonia,” a term for bees coming to life from something dead.
Is that a symbol of us surviving an apocalypse? You be the judge. No spoiling the ending that goes deeper than figuring out who Michelle is or isn’t. We’re seeing a cycle of creation and destruction that asks us again, when will we ever learn?
Even with Stone as his glorious muse, Lanthimos can be self-indulgent, self-satisfied and grindingly obtuse. But damn, he is also a true visionary who knows how to use sound and image (deep bows the camera wiz Robbie Ryan) to make us see the world in crisis and maybe do something about it. I’d call that a potent provocation and reason enough to put “Bugonia” on your watchlist.