Bugonia Review: Yorgos Lanthimos’ Sharp, Surreal Stinger
Emma Stone and Jesse Plemons buzz through a wickedly funny thriller of abduction, alienation, and apiculture.
You’ve heard of Chekhov’s Gun. Now consider “Chekhov’s Bees.” If a backyard apiary of bees is introduced at the beginning of the movie, the bees will be whipped into a frenzy by the film’s end, terrorizing some poor character.
Bugonia, the fiendishly funny new nightmare from Greek filmmaker/provocateur Yorgos Lanthimos (Poor Things, The Lobster), bears out this theory. The bees belong to our troubled hero, Teddy Gatz (a shaggy-bearded, greasy-haired Jesse Plemons), a conspiracy theorist and amateur beekeeper who lives in an old house with his young, neurodivergent cousin, Don (newcomer Aidan Delbis). Teddy spends his days working a menial warehouse job and his nights traveling down YouTube rabbit holes and obsessively developing theories involving Andromedan aliens who intend to destroy humanity.
The bees are dying, Teddy tells his cousin, and he fears humanity is on a similar path — turning into “a dead colony, atomized in a trillion directions, with no way home again.” Like many isolated male conspiracists, Teddy — who instructs Don that they must rid themselves of “psychic compulsions,” which includes chemical castration — is driven to extreme action. The two men abduct a high-profile biomedical CEO, Michelle Fuller (played as a glacial girlboss nightmare by Emma Stone), who runs a pharma company called Auxolith and whom Teddy believes to be a sinister Andromedan alien pretending to be human.
The two men shave her head, because hair is how aliens communicate with their mothership, apparently, and keep their captive shackled to a bed in their basement, where she awakes, shorn, disoriented, and slathered in antihistamine cream. Teddy peers down at her body in awe, remarking at how incredibly humanlike “it” looks. Thus begins a perversely funny chamber piece that touches on online radicalization, corporate feminism, electrical shock torture, apiculture, and a big-pharma tragedy which is revealed, in black-and-white flashbacks involving Teddy’s mom (Alicia Silverstone), to link Teddy and Michelle’s pasts.
Bugonia is loosely a remake of the 2003 South Korean cult film Save the Green Planet!, which Lanthimos contemporizes for the post-Covid misinformation age. It succeeds on many levels: as a commentary on how loneliness and grief can drive young people towards radicalization; as an acerbic corporate satire; as a sci-fi thriller with a suitably bonkers climax; and as a showcase for several remarkable performances, including the little-known Delbis, whose character, in his naïveté and gentle spirit, serves as a moral center in this twisted story. If you haven’t seen the South Korean film, which I hadn’t, it may be best to avoid reading about it and go in cold — there are some major third-act twists that subvert the captive vs. captor chamber-play rhythms Bugonia seems to be settling and shift it towards a deliciously grim finale.
Bugonia: Emma Stone – Photo: Atsushi Nishijima/Focus Features
Like much of Lanthimos’s oeuvre, Bugonia simmers with a bleak view of humanity, a pervasive sense of (at times literal) alienation, and an overarching unease with the human body. Unlike most of Lanthimos’s films, it was not written by the director and thus has a narrative discipline and concision that works to its benefit. The Onion editor-turned-screenwriter Will Tracy, best known for 2022’s surprise hit The Menu, wrote the script, which lampoons ruthless techno-capitalist culture with a keen eye for detail.
A lesser director might have overemphasized the grim brutality of this story, and there is a torture scene (set to Green Day, no less) that may be a dealbreaker for squeamish viewers. Lanthimos, to his credit, is equally attuned to the absurdist humor here. Bugonia pops with darkly comical images that he shoots from an almost passive distance: a shot of Teddy and Michelle wrestling in the bushes, viewed from the indoor swimming pool of her sleek, modernist home, for instance, or Teddy and his cousin leaping up and down clumsily after the abduction, or the awkward panic that ripples through Auxolith’s headquarters when Michelle and Teddy barricade themselves in her office, attempting to teleport to Andromeda.
Stone, it should be noted, has never been funnier, in a role that requires her to be shackled, shaved, bloodied, brutalized, and — well, I won’t spoil too much, but no, she isn’t swarmed by bees. Her collaboration with Lanthimos surely ranks among the greatest recurring actor-director pairings of the present century. There is something fearless about her willingness to risk humiliation onscreen. Bugonia weaponizes the actress’s natural charisma and polished charm and gives her some of the funniest lines in the movie, as when the kidnapping victim lectures her captors about the “optics” of abducting a “high-profile female executive.”
After directing Stone to her second Academy Award in the nympho-Frankenstein Victorian epic Poor Things, Lanthimos presumably had a blank check to make whatever he wants. What he wants to make, it seems, are yet more disturbing movies starring Emma Stone. We’re all the luckier for it. If humanity is doomed, we may as well go down laughing.
Bugonia (★★★★☆) is Rated R and now playing in theaters nationwide. Visit fandango.com.
More from Metro Weekly:
Support Metro Weekly’s Journalism
These are challenging times for news organizations. And yet it’s crucial we stay active and provide vital resources and information to both our local readers and the world. So won’t you please take a moment and consider supporting Metro Weekly with a membership? For as little as $5 a month, you can help ensure Metro Weekly magazine and MetroWeekly.com remain free, viable resources as we provide the best, most diverse, culturally-resonant LGBTQ coverage in both the D.C. region and around the world. Memberships come with exclusive perks and discounts, your own personal digital delivery of each week’s magazine (and an archive), access to our Member's Lounge when it launches this fall, and exclusive members-only items like Metro Weekly Membership Mugs and Tote Bags! Check out all our membership levels here and please join us today!
You must be logged in to post a comment.