Bugonia review: incendiary and out of this world

In director Yorgos Lanthimos’ latest bizarro world, Bugonia, it’s the end of the world as we know it and bee-keeping conspiracy theorist Teddy (Jesse Plemons) does not feel fine.

Teddy’s been scrying the internet and can tell the tells. There are aliens amongst us, Andromedans intent on destroying the Earth for their own nefarious goals. Even worse, they’re masquerading as soulless corporate girl bosses, leaning into empty claptrap language to conceal ‘intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic,’ as HG Wells once put it. Aliens who look exactly like big pharma CEO Michelle (Lanthimos regular Emma Stone).

The Greek weird wave director has teamed with acerbic The Menu writer Will Tracy, who plays up Michelle’s vacuously callous tone fantastically. When she cracks it at a speech writer for using the word ‘diversity’ too much, she suggests he diversify the line. Subtly referencing a previous staff meltdown, she also enacts a must-go-home-at-5pm rule, unless, of course, there’s still work to do.

Teddy’s going to do something about it

Setting his sights on Michelle, his employer, he ropes in his trusting, neurodivergent cousin Don (Aidan Delbis) and crowbars rather than necessarily convinces him that they are humanity’s last hope to prevent Michelle from annihilating humans. They must kidnap her. But is he unhinged? Or on to something?

Neckbeards attack

Star Emma Stone’s dynamite cinematic partnership with Lanthimos has blown the doors off her already prominent but now crazy and brave career.

First teaming up on The Favourite, Lanthimos cast her as the real-life Abigail Hill. A down on her luck English woman of previously decent means, she claws her way back up from the kitchen to become courtier and then courtesan of Olivia Colman’s Queen Anne. Sweary and sexy and saucily queer, it was a revelation for an actor who had previously chosen much safer bets.

Even still, The Favourite’s farcical comedy of ill manners is decidedly mainstream compared to their next collaboration, the black and white, silent short 35mm film Bleat. Bringing Stone to the Greek island of Tinos by way of Bergman, this surreal collaboration with the Greek National Opera roared with the elemental forces of sex and death.

As did Poor Things, which secured Stone her second Best Actress Oscar after La La Land for her depiction of the Frankenstein’s monster-adjacent feminist hero, Bella Baxter, a haunted woman reborn against her will with the brain of a babe.

If the far too-long triptych of shorts that followed, Kinds of Kindness, ran out of steam, it still has its morbidly magnificent moments. It paired Stone with Plemons, an actor abundantly capable of icy menace, as demonstrated in Alex Garland’s heart-palpitating Civil War.

In Bugonia, his portrayal of Teddy is disconcerting, particularly as he tries and fails to rally the employees at Michelle’s company into unionism and manipulates the too-trusting Don to his cause. He insists Don undergo a chemical castration so as not to be tempted by Michelle’s alien wiles. It’s left tantalisingly ambiguous if Teddy has done likewise or not.

They undergo battle training but Michelle is no easy mark. She fights back when they pounce, leading to a spectacularly staged assault sequence in her austerely palatial home. She most definitely has the upper hand against these schlubs until a tranquiliser dart settles things.

Watch the Bugonia trailer

Bugonia’s battles soar

Lanthimos relishes in Bugonia’s queasy claustrophobia as Michelle is restrained in the basement of Teddy’s tin foil-clad remote farmstead. Forcibly shaving her hair, he alleges it will block her ability to contact her Andromedan emperor on their concealed-from-detection mothership somewhere in orbit.

Stone is incendiary, showing Michelle’s steel as she calmly explains how it’s only a matter of time until a vast array of authorities circle in on their location, and how badly it will go for this pair of neckbeards unless they release her on her terms. Teddy’s having none of it, convinced its curtains for the planet if they aren’t granted an audience with her leader.

All the while, local cop Casey (Stavros Halkias), Teddy’s former schoolmate with whom something awful but unspecified went down, it trying passively aggressively to make amends while his suspicions simmer.

Watching Plemons and a stubbled Stone wrestle psychologically is even more thrilling than their physical head-to-head, and Delbis’ doubt spiralling is queasy in the extreme, with a touch of Adolescence.

Fake news, paranoia and misguided violence are the harbingers of our end times. Bugonia, with shades of Eddington, presses the doomsday button with maniacal glee.

End of?

Avoid the original if you can, as the film plays best if you don’t know whether Michelle is up for planetary genocide of the intergalactic invasion kind, or just the more mundane chemical spills in our water sources and bee colony collapse kind.

Poor Things composer Jerskin Fendrix exacerbates the anxiety with a sonorously oppressive synth score, epically contrasted with Stone doing car karaoke to Chappell Roan’s Good Luck, Babe!

There’s a magnificently Melancholia-like countdown to disaster, with startling imagery of a crackling-with-energy-flat earth. It’s counter to Robbie Ryan’s flatter cinematography, which grounds us in the ordinary, barring some fun shadow play in that sorry basement.

Have we hit rock bottom as a species? If so, Lanthimos and his mercurially imaginative filmmaking is shooting for (and at) the stars.

Bugonia releases nationally on 30 October.

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