You are an iron-willed CEO with Louboutins and a G-Class Mercedes Benz. You have the smooth face and athletic body of a woman a decade younger than your 45 years, thanks to the incredibly expensive anti-aging regimen you’re on.
You have martial arts training later, where you regularly beat the pants off men with 30 pounds on you. During the day, you run the powerhouse international company Auxolith Corp, employing a sizable portion of the surrounding town — with only a few hushed-up employee poisonings here and there.
You have a firm handle on the bad press connected to the chemicals you peddle; chemicals that no reputable scientific journal has (definitively) connected to beehive colony collapse around the world.
You have everything, you think, as you drive up the long stretch of driveway to the mammoth house you live in alone.
But if you really have nothing to worry about, who are those two masked men running out from behind your car, armed with a syringe and a bottle of… is that bug spray?
WATCH | Bugonia trailer:
So begins Bugonia, the bizarre conspiracist comedy from director Yorgos Lanthimos, loosely remade from South Korea’s Save the Green Planet! Though, to be fair, it really starts days before, where in a lonely, deserted family home that no longer boasts much family those two masked men hatch a plot to kidnap CEO Michelle Fuller (Emma Stone).
That plan is spearheaded by Teddy Gatz (Jesse Plemons), an amateur apiarist, professional conspiracy theorist and disgruntled employee of Fuller’s company with more than a few skeletons in his closet.
But hanging beside those skeletons is a clear, if radical, theory inspired by them: that Fuller is an alien overlord from the Andromeda galaxy, sent to Earth in disguise to subvert and control the human race.
According to Teddy, only he and his cowed, easily manipulated, neurodivergent cousin Don (Aidan Delbis) can stop her.
Sci-fi strangeness
However rompingly sci-fi that sounds, don’t get it twisted: this is no Stranger Things. Belying the bracing mix of absurdist humour and unsettling, banal violence Lanthimos is famous for, Don and Teddy’s strategy runs decidedly more Black Snake Moan than Black Mirror.
That strategy is simple: chain up Fuller in the basement, torture a confession out of her, then somehow barter a trip onto her mothership — set to arrive, Teddy is sure, during the lunar eclipse in a few days.
For an audience, the biggest hurdle in getting into Bugonia are the hazy layers of social commentary, cryptic character backstories and slapstick diversions of barbed humour bumping up and over one another.
Haven’t spent much time on QAnon message boards or watched the techno-feudalist documentary HyperNormalisation? Good luck making sense of Teddy’s worldview: that humanity is a “dead colony, atomized in a trillion directions,” misled by the “global Democratic order” controlling society through “hyper-normalized dialectic.”
Not a fan of confusing, low-concept, arthouse films? The dreamlike, monochrome visual excursions to Teddy’s past may be a bit much for you. For example, when you see him pulling his dying mother Sandy (Alicia Silverstone) through the air by a string like an escaping balloon, you may scratch your head. Because, wait, how much of that is Lanthimos saying what happened?
And, perhaps most importantly, what the heck is a Bugonia?
However confusing it all seems, half the fun with Lanthimos is figuring out what exactly he’s trying to say. Here, as in his past films, it is a simple human failing pushed to the logical extreme by comedically absurd circumstances.
Where in Kinds of Kindness it was how and why loyalty and love curdle into ownership, and The Killing of a Sacred Deer explored the terrifying realities of true justice and objective morality, Bugonia turns its lens from introspection to a kind of wide-eyed extrospection.
You see it in Michelle, when she reveals that no more will Auxolith overwork their employees: everyone can go home at 5:30. That is, assuming they don’t have any work to finish. Or that they’re not falling behind on quotas. This is a business, after all. But also a family. Use your best judgment!
It’s evident in Teddy, in the fact he’s so concerned with saving the world — or more likely, getting revenge against the corporatism that stole his family from him — that he’s willing to exploit and destroy his loving, trusting cousin to get it.
Early on, he coerces Don to not only participate in a life-destroying federal crime, but also to chemically castrate himself to resist any sexual ploys from the alien they’re about to kidnap. It’s an act he carefully coerces Don toward, shooting down his half-whispered protest that he still wants to have a family one day.
You see it mirrored in another character, the warmly bumbling local cop — and Teddy’s old babysitter — Casey (Stavros Halkias). Seemingly a concerned tether to reality for a young man drifting into psychosis, Casey makes frequent attempts to check in on Teddy. It’s just that he does so while throwing in the occasional, jovial apology for what he did when they were younger — strongly implying he sexually assaulted Teddy as a child.
And yes, it’s even there in the title: a reference to the ancient Greek belief that bees spontaneously formed from rotting ox carcasses.
While screenwriter Will Tracy has said the name was mostly chosen for its absurd, insect-like imagery, it’s hard to avoid making more concrete connections: that while we want to believe something good, beautiful and ordered can spring from the depths of something dirty, polluted and diseased, it’s more likely a fairy tale. Good luck, everyone!
For the Lanthimos fans, it’s all heady enough to satisfy. That’s despite a plot that never seems to become fully fleshed out: Stone and Plemons do brilliantly to act out their cat and mouse game, but — given all the other balls Lanthimos is juggling — it almost feels over too soon. That’s despite a bizarro ending that will likely inspire grins and groans in equal measure.
And it’s despite a flavour of humour that, while appetizing to certain awards voters, can get a little lost in the weeds for others. That humour was similarly present in Lanthimos’s royal comedy The Favorite, which, though set in the 18th century, featured a dance scene with vogueing, breakdancing and spanking.
A certain reviewer watched that scene in stone-faced, baffled confusion — only figuring out it was intended to be funny a full 24 hours later.
Given that, you can guess the number of laugh-out-loud moments Bugonia inspired. I’ll wait!
