Director: Yorgos Lanthimos
Actors: Emma Stone, Jesse Plemons, Aidan Delbis
Yorgos Lanthimos and Emma Stone return to cinemas with their fifth collaboration – the gripping absurdist black comedy, Bugonia. Bugonia, based on Jang Joon-hwan’s 2003 film Save the Green Planet!, follows two men who abduct a CEO, believing in a conspiracy that she is an alien whose mission is to destroy humanity.
Emma Stone plays Michelle Fuller, the cutthroat and ruthless CEO of Auxolith, a pharmaceutical company. She has mastered the use of duplicitous platitudes to appear to propagate an inclusive corporate culture in her sterile, soulless white office. Jesse Plemons and Aidan Delbis play Teddy Gatz and his neurodivergent cousin Don, beekeepers, incels, and conspiracy theorists who believe Michelle is an alien and that bees are dying from colony collapse disorder caused by Auxolith’s pesticides. Lanthimos links Teddy’s paranoia to grief, depicting in flashbacks how Teddy’s mother became comatose after taking an experimental drug manufactured by Auxolith. Their plot to free Earth involves using Michelle as a bargaining chip to secure an audience with the Andromedan Emperor and to persuade aliens to leave the planet. Bugonia derives its title from the ancient Greek ritual of generating bees from the carcass of oxen, alluding to the new era Teddy wants to usher in.
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The film is gripping and intense from the get-go. Within the first couple of minutes, Teddy and Don chemically castrate themselves, and Michelle is ambushed, sedated, and gets her head shaven (since aliens communicate with each other through their hair).
The film shines in the moments of verbal sparring between Michelle and Teddy. Michelle asserts that she is not an alien, while Teddy remains steadfast in his accusations. Locked in a basement, Michelle surprisingly retains her poise, speaking in a robotic, unfeeling manner. She remains calculating while locking horns with Teddy, who is impulsive and frantic, and whose rage overwhelms the screen. He bears a proclivity for violence, even choking and attacking Michelle. The score by Jerskin Fendrix heightens the intensity of the showdown between Michelle and Teddy. Even tied up, the two are on equal footing, with Michelle being captured from a high perspective and Teddy from a low angle. The thrum of the score accompanies the continually shifting power dynamics as Michelle desperately attempts to manipulate Teddy when he inches towards the truth. Will Tracy’s incisive dialogue expertly plays with our sympathies. Teddy may be a staunch critic of capitalism and authoritarianism, but is he the class saviour we want? Michelle may be classist and contemptible, but we want to see her escape.
Threats of eco-terrorism, techno-slavery, corporate greed, and misanthropy run amok in the movie. Will Lanthimos bitingly comments on the exhibitionist nature of activism, the dangers of echo chambers, and the rottenness of the human species. The film spends most of its time distinguishing between what is concretely human and alien; by the end, it ceases to matter whether Michelle is an alien, since the only thing concretely human is cruelty.
