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DIRECTED BY: Yorgos Lanthimos
FEATURING: Jesse Plemons, Emma Stone, Aidan Delbis
PLOT: Aided by his autistic cousin, a troubled man kidnaps a corporate executive, certain she is an Andromedan alien in disguise.
WHY IT MIGHT JOIN THE APOCRYPHA: Since it improves on its canonically weird source material in every way (except ability to surprise), it has to be Apocrypha worthy, mathematically speaking.
COMMENTS: At first, Jesse Plemons’ Teddy seems like a relatively normal guy, even if his stringy, greasy red hair suggests a serious disinterest in hygiene. He is at least sympathetic in the way he takes care of his mentally-challenged cousin Don; that is, until he convinces Don to join him in undergoing chemical castration, so that the pair can resist temptation and better focus at the task at hand. Their goal? Nothing less than saving humanity from the machinations of our secret alien overlords. Their method? Kidnapping pharmaceutical CEO and “TIME” magazine covergirl Michelle Fuller. Teddy’s studies of subtle morphological clues have convinced him that Fuller is a high-ranking alien. After the abduction, the pair shave her head (to prevent her from using hair-based technology to signal for help) and slather her in antihistamine cream to dampen her psychic powers. The captured Michelle tries to use the powers of persuasion that serve her in the corporate world to threaten and cajole her way out of captivity, repeatedly asking to enter into a dialogue, ready to come to the bargaining table. But Teddy is prepared for her tricks; he’s anticipated every objection and rhetorical tactic she might try. If she tries to convince him he’s out of touch with reality… well, that’s exactly the tack an alien would take. He will accept nothing less than a full confession and an agreement to take Don and him with her on her spaceship at the lunar eclipse to meet her superiors and negotiate the Andromedans’ withdrawal from Earth. The canny Michelle adjusts her strategy to try to find a way to manipulate Teddy from inside his own warped reality. A clue suggesting a shared backstory between the two may provide the leverage she needs. A long second act of psychological cat and mouse games ensues, with the tension effectively relieved by laugh-out-loud moments from clueless Don.
The movie begins with the buzzing of bees from Teddy’s apiary, and the specter of extinction permeates the entire story. Chemicals from Michelle’s corporation may literally be responsible for a recent plague of colony collapse disorder. In Teddy’s view, aliens use humanity in the same way he uses his beehives to extract honey, with humanity no more conscious of their exploitation than his bees are. The problem, as he sees it, is that the aliens have no interest in the generational welfare of humans. As crazy he appears, Teddy ultimately has a point. Whether Michelle is an alien emissary or just a corporate overlord, she leeches off humanity; Andromedan or MBA, she’s a masterful manipulator who ultimately has only her own interests in mind. Teddy’s foil-on-the-windows paranoia may be misplaced, and may lead him to adopt inhumane methods, but his intuition about the imminent collapse of civilization strikes a chord.
Bugonia is Lanthimos’ most straightforward film since The Favourite. For most of the runtime, the story is grounded in reality, if reality of an extreme and outlandish flavor. He seems to have largely abandoned the affected, affectless acting that characterized The Lobster and Killing of a Sacred Deer: thankfully so, as it would have been a crime to hamper Plemons and Stone. (Aidan Delbis, an actor who is actually on the autism spectrum, does provide stilted line deliveries, but they are character-based and attributable to his neurological condition.) Lanthimos also restrains himself from adding the random ultra-wide fisheye lens shots that have proved distracting in his later films. Jerskin Fendrix’s score features the brief bursts of dissonant string quartet music the director is fond of, but the director mostly restricts himself to classical cinematic grammar here. He even uses needle drops from Chapell Roan and Green Day, pop flourishes that would have seemed unthinkably mainstream in his previous outings. He dabbles in some brief surrealism for two black and white flashbacks (that quote from Tarkovsky), and the production design in the final segment earns the appellation “bizarre,” but these pieces are not to really enough to brand the movie as obviously, stylistically weird. Rather, it’s the confluence of outrageous plotting and matter-of-fact adherence to the film’s psychotic worldview that creates the sense of strangeness here. Despite Lanthimos working in a stripped-down, more approachable mode, the material allows him to indulge his love of nihilistic plot twists. Parts will make you squirm, and parts will fill you with moral horror. The closing montage, scored to Marlene Dietrich singing “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?,” ends things on as beautifully bleak of a Lanthimosian note as could ever be imagined: a deep cynicism undercut by a yearning melancholy that testifies to the director’s genuine, bereaved humanism.
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