Yorgos Lanthimos, everyone’s favorite Greek freak filmmaker, is often unpredictable. Before a new movie of his premieres, film fans tend to ask themselves whether it will be one of his glorious, Oscar-friendly fables (The Favourite, Poor Things) or something so macabre that the same audience will find it unpalatable—too transgressive for mainstream prizes (The Killing of a Sacred Deer, Dogtooth). Bugonia, his third film in as many years has the ingredients of both. An indictment of big pharma, an environmental parable, an underdog story, and a grisly horror film that bleeds by the litre. Emma Stone has her head shaved for real. It wouldn’t be surprising if she got an Oscar nomination for it.
Based on the South Korean sci-fi film Save the Green Planet by Jang Joon-hwan, Lanthimos juices it up to give it a contemporary, American edge. Bugonia tells the story of two isolated cousins Teddy (Jesse Plemons) and Don (newcomer Aidan Delbis), living in a tin-foil-clad house in a bland American town. Led by Teddy, with Don a mere follower of his cousin’s problematic politics, Teddy is convinced that alien interlopers are responsible for the woes of the world, and, thankfully, there’s an alien in his near-midst that he can take down to help save us. In preparation, they undergo a psychic cleanse: “no gaming, no vape, no whacking it.”
That person is the CEO of the pharmaceutical company he works for: a red light mask-wearing yogi named Michelle Fuller (Emma Stone), who’s graced the cover of Time magazine and met Michelle Obama. The pair have barely met, but she’s the thing keeping Teddy—the film’s more conspiracy-minded Mangione—up at night. And so, Fuller, after driving home from work singing Chappell Roan and sipping on her Stanley cup, is bombarded by Teddy and Don, wearing Jennifer Aniston masks. In the back of Teddy’s car, Michelle—passed out—has her head shaved, to “prevent [her] from contacting [her] ship,” Teddy insists.
Thus starts Lanthimos’ expectedly strange, funny and ultra-violent take on a sci-fi horror film, which bears as many similarities to satirical eat-the-rich movies like Parasite and Triangle of Sadness as it does Saw. Alicia Silverstone makes a crazy cameo appearance as Teddy’s comatosed, self-described “slob cunt mom,” who’s been consumed by the opioid crisis. These worlds—the real familiar and the alien—soon collide.
If you found f Kinds of Kindness a little unwieldy, then you’ll be glad to hear that Bugonia is tight—Lanthimos’ first film in 10 years to have a sub-two hour runtime. That works in its favor. Both Poor Things and Kinds of Kindness felt like odysseys—big films with big ideas that demanded a lot from their audiences. Bugonia, however, is mostly set in the strange experimental torture basement of Teddy’s home. Its big questions, about human empathy and the consequences of betraying planet earth, are buried beneath something straight (in Lanthimos’ own hyper-violent and cruel way) and entertaining.
Earlier this year, Ari Aster (a producer on this film) made his own movie about tin foil hat truthers in Eddington, a film so confronting and hard to decipher that lots of people decided it wasn’t for them. Lanthimos’ take—more accessible, pushing different kinds of buttons—paints the same kind of characters as straight loopy: mentally unsound, the product of the kind of Western brain rot that seems to sweep up at least one extended family member.
If not an indictment of America as a nation per se, Bugonia certainly feels like a film about the horrors of capitalism, existing in its grasp, and then taking the most extreme, fucked-up roots to restoring balance. Gobsmacking, gut-churning, excellent, this is peak Lanthimos for me.