Yorgos Lanthimos’ ‘Bugonia’ Stings with Paranoid Precision

Has the hallucinogenic absurdity of the real world caught up with cinema’s foremost practitioner of absurdism? Yorgos Lanthimos’ wild and weirdly too-plausible Bugonia gives a narrative bear-hug to all the anxious paranoid masses whose scorn for overpraised Fortune 500 companies, smug CEOs, and callous corporate greed have turned modern life into a society of conspiracy theorists.

Why trust these bajillion-dollar corporations anyway? “They’ll weevil into your brain box every chance they get!” declares enraged truther and amateur apiarist Teddy Gatz (Jesse Plemons). In this age of behemoth tech platforms granularly manipulating their users — tracking every move and micro-influencing every desire — he kind of has a point.

Bugonia ★★★★ (4/5 stars)
Directed by: Yorgos Lanthimos
Written by: Will Tracy
Starring: Emma Stone, Jesse Plemons, Aidan Delbis, Stavros Halkias, Alicia Silverstone
Running time: 118 mins

The hyperarticulate Teddy is focused on physical and mental purity. “We clear the psychic cache,” he explains to his impressionable neurodivergent cousin Don (Aidan Delbis). “Clear ourselves of psychic compulsions.” Which, to Teddy, means a strict diet, home-fashioned calisthenic regime, chemical castration to neutralize his sexual impulses, and a fealty to lengthy treaties about how humanity is in an internet-induced auto-hypnotic feedback loop.

They want to confront the powerful puppet masters controlling their world — people like Michelle Fuller (Emma Stone), the relentlessly driven CEO of cutting-edge biomedical giant Auxolith. A ferocious talent with a sharp curtness who conveys commands with an icy impatience, Michelle has that unworldly authority that power players exude. And so Teddy and Don hatch a plan to kidnap her, because, of course, she must be an alien. An Andromedan, to be specific, sent from a distant galaxy for the techno enslavement of planet earth.

“We have to fight for our self-worth,” insists Teddy, which leads to the duo capturing the alpha exec, shaving her head and smearing her face with antihistamine cream (so she can’t communicate with the mother ship, naturally), and tying her up in his basement. Teddy, the film later reveals, actually works as a low-level employee for Auxolith, and has an even more personal reason for the abduction: his ailing mother Sandy (Alicia Silverstone) is in a coma because of the reckless administering of Auxolith’s experimental drugs. “They sold me the sickness and they sold me the cure,” Sandy says in a searing bed-ridden flashback.

Is Michelle really a humanoid alien? Is Teddy insane? Does it even really matter? Bugonia operates in the world of podcast information bubbles, of move-fast-and-break-things business-leader entitlement, of belief-system echo chambers and rabbit holes. It paints a world where a grief-stricken son actually tortures his boss with 400 volts of electrical current because he feels it will liberate the human race.

Based on 2003 South Korean film Save the Green Planet! by Jan Joon-hwan, Bugonia mostly avoids that film’s manic goofiness, swapping it out for Lanthimos’ more cerebral approach and mixing his deadpan idiosyncrasies with flourishes of slapstick menace. Stone and Plemons, both Lanthimos regulars (this is Stone’s fourth feature film collaboration with him), completely commit to roles that are both easily despicable and also fundamentally sympathetic — not an easy task, but expertly executed in their hands.

Yorgos Lanthimos’ recent Oscar-lauded crowd-pleaser was the picaresque Poor Things, a swirling fable so far removed from reality that its metaphoric look at the rapid development of an independent woman was safely enthralling. Bugonia is its opposite, a tale of raging lunacy that, despite its many outrageous narrative turns, feels viscerally believable even as its main conflict begins to wear thin.

Being a Lanthimos production, the film is never completely realistic, right up to its outrageously febrile climax. But its drama is surprisingly rooted in so many relatable tragedies: broken homes, child abuse, big pharma exploitation, and an overriding sense of helplessness in a world that is increasingly feeling like it’s unraveling before our very eyes.

By its strangely tender end, Bugonia feels like simultaneously a condemnation of humanity and a plea for its salvation. The final images unfold while the soundtrack plays Pete Seeger’s proto-hippie folk ballad “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?” with its choral refrain: “When will they ever learn?”

It’s a potent question.