Teddy's thinking is a mixture of alarmism about saving the world, ordinary mental illness, unresolved trauma and single-minded revenge. He is a beekeeper and blames Auxolite's pesticides for accelerating the collapse of bee colonies; the precarious state of his hives becomes the film's main metaphor for a world on the brink of destruction. Teddy demands that Michelle take him and Don to her Andromeda leader in hopes of forcing the invaders to retreat. Michelle, unsurprisingly, says she is not an alien. What is The complete rationalism of her answer is surprising. She doesn't scream, scream or beg for her life; instead, she calmly lays out the unpleasant possible consequences of Teddy and Don's actions and advises them to free her while they still can. Stone's speech is so balanced that you begin to wonder if Michelle is really from Andromeda.
What's even stranger is that the answer hardly matters. After all, man and alien in Lanthimos’s films were always separated by the most porous membrane. Consider Buñuel's cool satire in The Lobster (2016), which seemed to look down on its hapless human characters from an alien distance—a distance visually magnified in The Favorite and The Poor Little Things, which peered down at their counterparts through distorting fisheye lenses. (Cinematographer Robbie Ryan wisely toned down the technique here, perhaps feeling it would have been overkill.) Or consider—if you must—Kindness of Kindness (2024), a triptych of dark stories with Stone and Plemons in various roles and psychological configurations; The result could be the work of a Martian experimenter subjecting the same human vessels to new injections of suffering. The film was a tedious experience, but it epitomized the unsettling coldness at the heart—or rather, at the core—of Lanthimos' work. Everything human is alien to him.
Putting Stone and Plemons back together, “Bugonia” might seem like a sequel to “A Kind of Kindness,” the fourth story that was cut and then expanded. It actually has a different writer (Will Tracy, who co-wrote the 2022 haute cuisine satire Menu) and is a remake of the South Korean thriller Save the Green Planet! (2003), which failed at the domestic box office but found new cult life and critical support at film festivals. “Bugonia” retains most of the narrative details, although with some gender reversals; The most significant changes concern the form. “Save the green planet!” It was director Jang Joon-hwan's first low-budget feature film and had a rough, gritty aesthetic. It may have been manufactured and not simply placed in the executioner's basement.
Bugonia is a much more intoxicating specimen. Lanthimos's gaze, so attuned to human ugliness, has rarely given us a glimpse of more beautiful things. The colors are very saturated, and when something catches Ryan's eye, like a bee landing on a wildflower, the images shimmer with an almost radioactive intensity. I remember the chemical smog that gives us such bright sunsets; who said the end of the world wouldn't be beautiful? The production design is by James Price, and what he and Ryan do with the interior space is wonderfully subversive: Teddy's farmhouse, although littered with lovingly detailed clutter, becomes a psychological warfare zone as vast and cavernous as Auxolit's headquarters. As a kidnapping thriller, Bugonia shows little interest in inducing claustrophobia, and Michel is neither a victim nor an easily identifiable object. Even when she's in shackles, she and Teddy are eerily equal distanced.
The same goes for Stone and Plemons. The threat of runaway conspiracy theories is a sharper, less funny pain now than it was twenty years ago, and Plemons delivers the venom in an unusually concentrated form. Teddy, as ruddy and scruffy as Michelle is pale and bald, has a polished manner that masks an unpredictable penchant for violence, and it's hard to imagine an actor better equipped than Plemons to understand this contradiction. Teddy can be methodical in his cruelty, such as when he subjects Michelle to prolonged electric shocks; he can also completely lose his temper, jumping over the dinner table and attacking her in a murderous rage. What, ironically, unites Teddy and Michelle and makes them formidable enemies is a matter-of-fact cynicism about politics. Teddy says he tried every position under the sun—alt-right, alt-left, Marxist—before he decided he was done with labels for good. “Ninety-nine point nine percent of what is called activism,” he tells Michelle, “is actually personal exhibitionism and brand endorsement in disguise.”
“Bugonia” is its own deft exercise in brand maintenance – perhaps more of a cleverly designed Lanthimos product than a full-fledged Lanthimos triumph. But this is more than enough. Tracy's dialogue, while lacking the staccato non-sequiturs of the director's earlier work, contains a bracing malevolence; Every visual effect and every menacing sound of Jerskin Fendricks' score heightens the intensity of Stone and Plemons' bravura duel. The film offers an oddly satisfying dive into hell, and for that reason, I suspect it will evade the criticism that has been leveled at two other recent provocations, Luca Guadagnino's After the Hunt and Ari Aster's Eddington, both of which also satirized performative politics and were attacked as venomously reactionary. It's worth noting that Aster is the producer of Bugonia, and he cast Stone in Eddington to play a traumatized woman caught up in her own dark conspiracies. This was one of many poor choices in this film; I've rarely seen an actor of Stone's caliber so blatantly wasted. It's safe to say that Lanthimos would never do this. ♦
