Bugonia, the ninth and latest feature from Greek filmmaker Yorgos Lanthimos, distrusts the human body.
Bodies, for Lanthimos, are ill-fitting shells. Uncomfortable carapaces. We wear them, often awkwardly, because we have to, but we’re typically struggling with the urge to take them off, trade them out, or—having failed to control our own—control those of others. Bodies betray us, fall apart, stop working, or inadequately represent our true selves. Maybe, if we’re determined enough, we can inhabit a different body by taking someone else’s.
In The Lobster (2014), Lanthimos’s strange and unsettling rom-com, single people are given a short time to find a romantic partner or risk being transformed into an animal of their choice. If unmatched, David (Colin Farrell) wants to be a lobster, so he can outlive everyone he knows.
Dogtooth (2009), the director’s international breakthrough, is a strange and unsettling satire about a very bad dad who imprisons his family inside their walled home, rebuilding their society—down to the language they speak—on a foundation of authoritarianism and incestual nonsense.
Poor Things (2023), Lanthimos’s recent Frankenstein riff and lavish Oscar bait, is a strange and unsettling fable that’s pretty explicit about the interchangeable nature of bodies. A pig head is sewn successfully to a duck’s body, among the film’s menagerie of impossible freaks. And if that’s possible, then why not utilize an adult human skull for a baby human brain?
These are stories of people wrestling with the world for control over their own flesh. Fascinated with how fragile and unacceptable he finds the human body—how gross it is, how easily it can be overtaken—Lanthimos fills his strange and unsettling films with characters pushing against the physical limits of their lives. They are suspicious of these bodies they’ve been given (by their parents, God, genetics, luck, whoever) and so are suspicious of all the accessories that come with those bodies, like family, friends, social class, routines, talents, words, morals, magic, love, time, etc.
Bugonia is under the control of that suspicion. Scripted by rich-people-whisperer Will Tracy (writer on Succession, a TV show about rich people “working,” and also the author of The Menu, an extremely OK movie about rich people “eating food”), it follows the four-day kidnapping of tech exec Michelle Fuller (Emma Stone) by amateur beekeeper Teddy (Jesse Plemons), a drone at a factory owned by Fuller’s company, who suspects Fuller is an “alien” hiding under the skin of a powerful capitalist.
In the shadow of an unspecified tragedy concerning Teddy’s mom (Alicia Silverstone) and the aforementioned tech conglomerate—involving, it’s implied, pesticides, factory farming, and the effect of these environmentally devastating operations on the mortality of adjacent small towns—Teddy’s convinced himself and his cousin Don (Aidan Delbis) that their abductee is actually from the Andromeda Galaxy. She’s been sent to Earth by a more advanced species as part of a human extinction scenario decimating bee colonies and mass-poisoning vast swathes of modern civilization.
In several brief monologues, Teddy makes it clear that a chronic ingestion of online media has radicalized him into action, but Tracy’s script quotes everything from Q Anon to Adam Curtis without indicting anyone in particular. He’s done his own research and he’s only arrived at one truth: that aliens from the Andromeda Galaxy are real, and they are here, disguised as humans, to hurt us.
Regardless of who’s to blame for Teddy’s psychosis, Bugonia sets an obvious link between Fuller’s influence and Teddy’s grief, especially in surreal, richly black-and-white interludes that depict a young Teddy placated by a yammering Fuller and her team.
But any direct connection between the two characters isn’t needed in a post-Luigi-Mangione world, where CEOs have become very public supervillains masterminding widespread misery. The biggest difference between Bugonia and the film on which it’s based (Jang Joon-hwan’s 2003 Save the Green Planet!) is that modern audiences are much more primed than those from 20 years ago to accept that a tech CEO is a murderous space imperialist. Helplessness is rampant; feeling like you have no control over your life accompanies even the simplest tasks.
Mining that latent sense that the world’s out to get us, Plemons plays Teddy as a man who’s been able to hone his desperation into determination. Working with Lanthimos and Stone on last year’s Kinds of Kindness—an anthology film where actors play three different characters across three segments—Plemons is at home in Lanthimos’s simmering, exquisitely physical atmosphere. In Bugonia, when he rides a bike—dressed like the simultaneously wan and greasy ghost of Kurt Cobain—Jerskin Fendrix’s excessively orchestral score practically lights up the screen. The intensity of Plemons’ energy, just him pumping his legs and grimacing, is liable to split the frame in two.
Similarly, Stone seems to know exactly how to bend her body into the odd shapes that live in Yorgos Lanthimos’s head. Bugonia is her fourth film with the director, and she’s transcended any reservations she could possibly have about the way he conceives of the human body on film. She spends much of Bugonia bald and lathered in bone-white antihistamine cream, resembling Klaus Kinski’s Dracula but less plagued by centuries of loneliness. “I’ve become the human being I never dreamed I’d become,” she says, summing up her director’s entire filmography, and maybe even his life.
Stone stays fearless as an actor, and Plemons matches her with a lack of inhibitions—their whiplash dynamic perfect for when the film takes wobblier swings toward some grotesque slapstick. As they plead, bicker, debate, somersault over, and gnash at one another, the truth of what’s going on—the identities of the people on screen, the capabilities of their bodies—begins to unglue. Anything could happen; no one is safe.
Though cinematographer Robbie Ryan, who’s been with Lanthimos since The Favourite (2018), keeps the director from indulging his more confusing quirks—no flagrant fisheye lenses and/or stubbornly chopping off key parts of the human body when composing shots—Bugonia is as viscerally upsetting as Dogtooth and as bitterly tactile as The Killing of a Sacred Deer (2017). If this is the director at his most accessible, then his most accessible is still him rawdogging weirdness, wielding Green Day’s “Basket Case” with malice.
But what maybe makes Bugonia actually accessible, at least compared to the reputation of its director, is that Lanthimos has been able to take his distrust for the human body and amplify it into a strain of nervous but exciting cinematic anxiety. The guy’s strange and unsettling energy has never been so much fun.
Bugonia opens in wide release on Fri Oct 31, 120 minutes, rated R.
