Directed by Yorgos Lanthimos | Written by Will Tracy, adapting the screenplay by Jang Joon-hwan’s Save The Green Planet | ▲▲▲1/2
Emma Stone is Michelle Fuller, a CEO of a big pharma company that’s a major employer in a depressed suburban zone that could be anywhere in the United States. She’s an ambitious and fierce figure, her success earning her an appearance on the cover of Time Magazine, but her company isn’t free from scandal. Her medication put a woman, Sandy Gatz (Alicia Silverstone) in a coma, a coma where she also levitates. The woman’s son, Teddy Gatz (Jesse Plemons), is a conspiracy theorist and beekeeper on a mission: with his intellectually disabled cousin, Don (Aidan Delbis), he’s going to kidnap Fuller and hold her until her galactic overlords negotiate the release of the planet Earth. That’s right, Teddy thinks she’s an alien.
We’re in Yorgos Lanthimos territory — a mix of dark comedy and absurdity with a dollop of fantasy from the master of peculiar, surreal filmmaking — even as he’s chosen to remake a South Korean picture, he does it his own way. In the past six years he’s been on quite a run of quality with the anthology thriller Kinds of Kindness, the Oscar-winners Poor Things and The Favourite, all recent collaborations with Emma Stone.
Bugonia feels like it could’ve been one of the individual stories in Kinds of Kindness, but taken on its own it doesn’t quite carry the same weight. Even if it’s not to the standard of the previous, if you consider it as one of a wave of films this year taking a hard look at the chasm between rich and poor in America, the insidiousness of corporate corruption, it deserves to be taken seriously. This even it gets increasingly gory and undeniably goofy as it goes along.
The bulk of the drama takes place in the family home belonging to Teddy — Plemons delivering a feverish portrait of obsession with dirty fingernails, and stringy, greasy hair. The house itself is a shambles, not a place you’d want to spend a lot of time in if your shots weren’t up to date. But Teddy and Don are capable enough to hold Michelle in the basement, locked to a cot, and Michelle is capable enough to manipulate both Teddy and Don, buying into their alien theory, even after they shave her head and slather her with lotion to keep her from communicating with her mothership.
I love the ongoing collaboration between Stone and Lanthimos. She’s an entirely deserving double-Oscar winner, and the work she does with the Greek filmmaker is testament to the fact that she refuses to play safe with her status as an A-Lister.
Bugonia does go somewhat off the rails in the last act with a plot development I won’t even call a twist — it’s more of a, “Yeah, sure, that tracks,” and something many in the audience will likely see coming. It does speak to and help sustain a particular surreality that’s a hallmark of Lanthimos’ work, which is delightful. I can’t get enough of his weird vision.
