In a year with new Final Destination and I Know What You Did Last Summer installments, trust oddball Greek Weird Wave auteur Yorgos Lanthimos to one-up actual slashers in terms of brutal death sequences.
The filmmaker has built a career out of discomfort, staging absurdist, unsparing portraits of people and their power tussles, but think of his movies and you’ll find your thoughts invariably drifting towards dance rather than death — a childlike woman’s (Emma Stone) uninhibited, joyous flailing in Poor Things (2023) or the anachronistic voguing of the 18th century-set The Favourite (2018).
Not so in Bugonia, in which conspiracy theorist Teddy Gatz (Jesse Plemons) ropes his sweet, neurodivergent cousin Don (Aidan Delbis) into helping him abduct Michelle Fuller (Stone), the high-profile head of a major pharmaceutical company, convinced she belongs to an invasive alien species. The premise of a bound woman helplessly attempting to persuade her captors of her innocence (and their irrationality) has a layer of tension pre-baked into it, but Lanthimos turns up the dial with a number of startling deaths.
(Warning: Spoilers ahead.)
In one taut sequence, Casey (Stavros Halkias), a local sheriff looking into Michelle’s disappearance, shows up at Teddy’s house as an armed Don keeps watch over her in the basement. The action cuts between the upper and lower sections of the house, deriving suspense from their inevitable intersection.
While Teddy wisely puts physical distance between Casey and the house by inviting him outside to show him his apiary, Michelle reels Don in closer through mental manipulation. Overwhelmed by his loyalty to Teddy, the prospect of loneliness should his cousin be caught and incarcerated, and mounting unease at the situation they’re in, Don eventually tells Michelle he’s ready to leave…only not with her. He turns the shotgun on himself, drenching her in blood.
If Don’s death is tragic, however, it’s hard to feel too bad about Casey’s, given that he’s revealed to be Teddy’s childhood abuser. Reacting quickly once he hears the shot, Teddy thwacks him with the apiary’s board box. As agitated bees swarm the collapsed sheriff, relentlessly stinging his face, Teddy then bludgeons him with a shovel.
The next death relies on Michelle leveraging Teddy’s fragile mental state and his fervent belief in conspiracies against him, now that her hope of rescue has been thwarted. She tells him she is an alien, and the antifreeze jug in her car actually contains the ‘Andromedan medicine’ that will wake up his comatose mother (Alicia Silverstone).
It’s a testament to how far gone Teddy is that he frantically cycles to the care facility, jug in hand. Would Michelle really sentence an innocent woman to death so she could escape? Yes. As Teddy injects the blue liquid into his mother’s IV, desperately pleading with her to wake up, it’s clear that Michelle never intended for her to. Instead she planned to frame Teddy for murder, and to break free once he’d left the house.
By the end, she promises to take Teddy to her mothership via a teleportation chamber in her office, in what seems like a last-ditch attempt to get help and escape. In a dramatic heightening of the stakes, however, Teddy waits until they get there to reveal he’s wearing a suicide vest as a contingency measure.
As Michelle types a long string of numbers into a calculator—a way of contacting her alien race, she explains—Stone’s performance makes it seem like she’s stalling, making up desperate plans on the fly. It’s actually a calculated ruse. Having talked Teddy into entering the closet first, she activates the chamber, triggering his vest. The tension is punctured by a moment of dark comedy, in which Michelle is hit in the head…with Teddy’s decapitated head, hurtling towards her in the explosive aftermath.
Yes, Michelle is not only an Andromedan, but the empress of her species, one that concludes humanity is a failed experiment and must be terminated. As she pops a bubble over a model of the Earth, the film’s climax features an extended montage of corpses strewn over beaches, clubs, museums, set to Marlene Dietrich’s version of “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?”
What comes next gives the film its title. ‘Bugonia’ refers to the Mediterranean belief that bees generate from animal carcasses. Unlike Save The Green Planet! (2003)—the South Korean film Bugonia is based on—in which the aliens blow up the Earth, this film’s last shot is that of endangered bee colonies returning, now that the planet is free of its other pollutive inhabitants. It’s a surprisingly optimistic note on which Lanthimos concludes this disturbing tale of disillusionment.
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