Bugonia: Is the Real World Getting Too Weird for Yorgos Lanthimos to Stand Out?
By Jim Slotek
Rating: B
A five-time Oscar nominee, the world’s most successful film weirdo, Yorgos Lanthimos is now established enough that no one can walk into one of his films not knowing what to expect.
In a word, weirdness.
When he hits the sweet spot, as with last year’s Poor Things, the weirdness is propelled by the darkest humour and over-the-top characters. That movie set his bar.
Jesse Plemons, Aidan Delbis and an alienated Emma Stone in Bugonia
On paper, his newest film Bugonia should be funny as hell. A conspiracy theorist named Teddy (Jesse Plemons) and his sweet, socially maladroit cousin Donny (Aidan Delbis) kidnap a celebrity CEO named Michelle Fuller (Emma Stone) on suspicion of being a malevolent alien.
But in this age when no belief is too absurd to thrive on social media, the premise just seems, well, too normal to be funny. After a while, I wanted to introduce Plemons’ Teddy to someone I know who believes interesting things about clones-among-us, so they could talk shop.
But who’s to say he’s wrong? (Although the aliens are supposed to be from Andromeda, which is a whole other galaxy, an unimaginable distance for first contact that seems counterintuitive).
Still, for most of the movie, Bugonia plays like a variation on generations of the captive-movie genre in which the captive tries in vain to talk sense into the captor, from The Collector to Misery. Teddy’s family turns out to have been done wrong by human testing of something or other by Michelle’s conglomerate, and the more Michelle tries to present apologetic facts, the closer Teddy comes to cognitive-dissonance inspired violence.
(All this while Michelle’s disappearance dominates the news cycle).
As usual in Lanthimos’s films, Stone gives the best performance. Her Michelle is a control-freak of the highest order, who finds herself in a situation where control is just beyond her grasp. We see enough of her in her normal environment to know that her helplessness is tearing her up inside, even more than the shaving of her head or the electrical torture Teddy employs to try to get her to admit she’s an alien.
Plemons and Delbis do have their comic moments, particularly in their bungling execution of the initial kidnapping. And Delbis gives Donny a sweetness of character that softens Teddy’s psychosis and makes us a little more sympathetic to these two social outliers.
Bugonia does take a last act detour, of course, which is probably a lot less of a surprise “reveal” than Lanthimos thought. I will say that, after the claustrophobia of the first two acts, what happens in the third is shot with verve, some nerve and imagination.
As is often the case in captive movies, the captivity generates its own tightness of mood, peppered with a few almost-escapes, none of them groundbreaking in presentation.
Bugonia is not Lanthimos’s best, but it is likely off-kilter enough for fans, or maybe introductory-weird for newcomers to his genre.
The real question is whether real-world weird will eventually do to fictional weirdness what it’s done to satire.
Bugonia. Directed by Yorgos Lanthimos. Stars Jesse Plemons, Emma Stone and Aidan Delbis. In select theatres October 24, and in wide release October 31..