The human race is in a sorry state, and here comes Yorgos Lanthimos with an aggressively wicked black comedy, Bugonia—premiering at the Venice Film Festival—to tell us all about it. Haven’t you heard? Many of us no longer get our news from “the news.” We embrace conspiracy theories, the weirder the better, to justify our own beliefs. We blindly trust our corporate overlords even as they drain our lifeblood. Previously sane human beings are getting crazier and crazier. That, and the bees—who, the movie informs us, pollinate one-third of the world’s food supply—are dying. These are all good reasons to feel bummed out about humanity, but leave it to Lanthimos to express his dismay in the most arch and self-congratulatory way possible. To paraphrase an old Peanuts cartoon, Lanthimos loves mankind; it’s people he can’t stand.
Bugonia begins with a plot and a duo of plotters: Jesse Plemons plays Teddy, a sad-eyed individual with a soul-deadening menial job and a fondness for bees, which he keeps in the yard of his mildly shabby house. He’s a guy who knows the truth about things—he’s researched it all on the Internet—and he’s schooling his naïve, possibly mentally challenged cousin, Donny (Aidan Delbis), in his findings.
Teddy is a man in pain: he has watched his ailing mother (played, in a few brief scenes, by Alicia Silverstone) suffer through a supposed cure that has in fact put her in a coma, and seeing her in agony has sent him round the bend. But he has a plan to make things right. Together, Teddy tells Donny, they’ll save the world. He leads Donny through a grueling physical exercise routine for strength, and subjects him to a kind of pharmaceutical castration, explaining that neither of them must be distracted from their mission by normal sexual urges. Donny, hoping he might one day “be with someone,” is bummed out about that, but he goes along with the scheme anyway.
Teddy’s plan is to kidnap Emma Stone’s Michelle Fuller, the soulless head of a giant technocorporation that quite obviously puts profits over people. But he’s not motivated by garden-variety vengeance. Teddy believes that Michelle is an alien being from Andromeda, sent to Earth to destroy it. Once he and Donny have her chained up in their basement—after first shaving her head, so the Andromedans won’t be able to use their fancy technology to locate her via the DNA in her hair—all Teddy has to do is coerce her into summoning her mothership so he can gain entrance and negotiate Earth’s freedom with her overlords.
Maybe that makes Bugonia sound sort of fun—and the movie does contain some ridiculously over-the-top exploding-bodies gore—but Lanthimos goes out of his way to amp up the story’s ugly, brutish qualities. Bugonia is a reimagining of Jang Joon-hwan’s 2003 science-fiction comedy Save the Green Planet. (Its script is by Will Tracy, who has written for shows like Succession and Last Week Tonight with John Oliver; he also wrote the screenplay for the 2022 foodie satire The Menu.) And Lanthimos is working with actors he clearly likes, for good reason: Plemons and Stone both appeared in his last film, 2024’s tedious bummerama triptych Kinds of Kindness. They’re gifted performers who know what they’re doing.
But in Bugonia, Lanthimos lets his poker-faced sadism run free. It’s probably supposed to be grimly funny to watch Teddy send 400 volts of electricity coursing through the body of the bound-and-gagged Michelle, after putting on Green Day’s “Basket Case,” cranked up to 11 to drown out her screams. Lanthimos and ace cinematographer Robbie Ryan shoot the sequence discreetly, so you hear more than you see. But do we really want to watch any character played by Stone—or by any actor, really—be brutalized that way? Lanthimos just can’t help himself.
There are people who will tell you that you either get Lanthimos or you don’t, but the subtext is that if you recoil from his films, you’re just not sophisticated enough to get them. Don’t ever buy that argument. Lanthimos’ movies are rarely as deep or meaningful as he seems to think they are. And yet, he’s not a filmmaker you can write off entirely. Every once in a while, he can surprise you with a movie like The Lobster, which sidles up to some mournful truths about human loneliness with the wayward agility of a hermit crab looking for a home, or the strange and fanciful Poor Things, a grand showcase for Emma Stone’s intelligence and physical ingeniousness.
Stone is a bold, creative performer. She can do anything—but that doesn’t mean she should. She’s terrific in Bugonia, laceratingly funny in cold-blooded-executive mode as she rushes impatiently through the recording of a diversity-training video, and bracingly convincing, with her nubbly shaven head, as a wily Joan of Arc determined to outwit her captors. She gets her true shining moment in the movie’s surprise ending, which, largely because of her, feels tender and mournful. But Lanthimos allows us the grace of that ending only after he’s put us through the wringer, maybe even boring us a little along the way. The world isn’t pretty, and Lanthimos is sounding the alarm. If only he would tell us something we don’t already know.
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