Have you noticed that the world is falling apart? That corporations wield enormous power? That the mega-rich are infiltrating the government to advance their own agenda at the expense of the working poor? Teddy has noticed. More than that, he’s determined that our ongoing societal collapse stems from a particular form of unchecked immigration—one that has nothing to do with national borders. That’s right, according to Teddy there’s a more insidious invading force at work: aliens.
Bugonia is the latest whatsit from Yorgos Lanthimos, the fiendishly inventive filmmaker of such marvels as Poor Things, The Lobster, and The Favourite. It isn’t as great as those movies, lacking their conceptual ambition and their ravishing craftsmanship. But it is nonetheless a potent and arresting work—an intimate, suspenseful thriller that also tackles modern discontent with satirical ingenuity and sobering clarity.
Do you know anyone like Teddy? For your sake, I hope not. He’s completely insane, feeding on a diet of internet paranoia which convinces him that a malevolent extraterrestrial race called the Andromedans is manipulating humanity. But as played by Jesse Plemons, Teddy isn’t your garden-variety conspiracy theorist. To begin with, he’s smart and educated, with detailed knowledge of apiology (the opening shot finds a honeybee pollinating a flower) and a confident command of the English language (even if he mispronounces “shibboleths”). He also possesses an unusual degree of willpower, going so far as to chemically castrate both himself and his intellectually disabled cousin, Don (Aidan Delbis), so that they aren’t susceptible to intergalactic pheromones. (Don worships Teddy, which makes his pre-injection remark of “I thought I might meet somebody, someday” all the more heartbreaking.)
The target of Teddy’s derangement is Michelle (Emma Stone), a high-powered pharmaceutical executive whom he insists is secretly an alien. We first meet Michelle striding through her office in a blazer and heels, plastic smile frozen on her face, and it takes all of 30 seconds for Stone to make the character contemptible; the brief scene where she attempts to record a promotional video touting her company’s diversity confirms that she’s a virtue-signalling fraud. (“It has too many ‘diversities,’” she snaps at an underling. “Can we diversify the language?”) You can’t stand her, but that doesn’t mean you’re on board when Teddy and Don show up at her art-deco residence with masks and chloroform spray, eventually—following an amusingly hectic chase sequence—subduing her and bringing her back to their basement, at which point the movie begins in earnest. (They also shave her head to prevent her from remotely contacting her confederates in outer space. You get it.)
Bugonia is a remake of Save the Green Planet, which I haven’t seen, but the film it most readily recalls to me is Roman Polanski’s Death and the Maiden. As in that chamber piece, most of the action unfolds in a secluded location, where an abductee repeatedly pleads that their captors have snatched the wrong person. The key difference is that, whereas we didn’t know whether Ben Kingsley’s mild-mannered academic was actually an authoritarian rapist, Teddy’s accusations toward Michelle present no such ambiguity, which means the movie operates less as a fraught mystery than a psychological drama.
Lanthimos is rightly revered for his perversity, but he is also a gifted stylist, which is part of why the demented turmoil of The Killing of a Sacred Deer carries so much pop. Bugonia is a well-made picture, with crisp visuals and an engrossing score from Jerskin Fendrix, but it isn’t as forcefully constructed as most of his movies. (The exceptions: A haunting flashback in which a woman tethered to metallic cables is floating in midair, and a chilling torture sequence set to a ’90s Billboard hit.) Instead, Lanthimos allows his actors to steer the film’s energy and build its momentum; Stone and Plemons are smart performers playing smart (if disturbed) people, and their dynamic—a cerebral war of wills between two sneering foes who each considers the other their inferior—courses with palpable hatred and tension.
Bugonia’s oddball setup is vintage Lanthimos (the screenplay is by Will Tracy, who co-wrote The Menu), yet its burgeoning suspense and cramped confines recall M. Night Shyamalan, which means it’s both pleasing and limiting. The movie is briskly paced and consistently absorbing, but it boxes itself in, leading to a haywire third act—complete with explosions both figurative and literal—that’s satisfying but oddly predictable. As twisted as it is, it lacks the true absurdity of Kinds of Kindness, to say nothing of the utter rapture of Poor Things or the lingering melancholy of The Favourite.
Where Bugonia does endure is its portrait of contemporary America, which it depicts as a “polarized” land that seems to be composed entirely of either disaffected lunatics or paralyzed office drones (an abusive cop is thrown in for good measure). It takes little imagination to envision the stringy-haired Teddy as a mass shooter—a virulent loner who can’t make sense of his surroundings and who poisons himself with toxic online media as a result (see also: Eddington). For her part, Michelle is an eerily recognizable embodiment of corporate venality; watch her tell employees that they’re free to leave at 5:30 “if you’re comfortable with that,” and you’ll be flooded with cringeworthy memories of your own post-grad boss.
Does Bugonia’s dyspeptic satire square with its hairpin narrative? It’s hard to say. But even if its themes and its plot clash rather than harmonize, it is watchable, with two memorable characters whose respective neuroses are individuated rather than purely symbolic. Teddy and Michelle may be at each other’s throats, but they also deserve each other. Humanity has nothing to fear from the Andromedans; once they get a look at these two broken souls, they’ll want nothing to do with us.
Grade: B
Jeremy Beck is the editor-in-chief of MovieManifesto. He watches more movies and television than he probably should.