If you’re a diehard film fan like myself, you more than likely feel some way about the films of Greek auteur Yorgos Lanthimos. Whether you prefer his darker, edgier earlier work like Dogtooth and Alps, or of his more whimsical and experimental later films like The Lobster and The Favourite — or maybe you think he’s an overrated and pretentious hack — regardless, most cinephiles feel strongly one way or another about his work.
I’m a fan, while still aware that, as he becomes more and more renowned on the world stage as a filmmaker, he’s also susceptible to leaning into his worst impulses as a writer and director. Dogtooth is a good example, where Lanthimos tonally balances a brutal and violent fable with a darkly funny comedy and makes it work. With The Lobster, he flawlessly constructs an absurdist comedy from the ruins of a deeply sad rumination on loneliness and loss.
But once he became an Academy Award darling with the hilariously depressing The Favourite, I think Lanthimos decided he could get away with anything.
As much as I enjoyed Poor Things and Kinds of Kindness as visual and auditory theme park rides, I’m not sure either film exceeded the sum of its parts or binded into something with the same cohesion as his earlier work. I love that Lanthimos is still following the same weird muse instead of using his Hollywood cache to make a superhero movie or a Jurassic Park (although now that I say that out loud, I want it), but his storytelling isn’t as waterproof as it used to be.
With his new film, Bugonia, Lanthimos turns his lens on modern times in a way that not only feels astonishingly of the moment, but prescient for generations to come. We follow Teddy Gatz (a greasy, live-wire act from Jesse Plemons), a conspiracy-obsessed warehouse worker who, along with his intellectually disabled cousin, Don (real-life autistic actor Aidan Delbis) kidnaps Michelle Fuller (Emma Stone, once again proving there’s no upper limit to her range), who is a CEO of a large pharmaceutical company that Teddy believes to be the forerunner of an invasive alien species.
Much of the fun of the film comes from watching Plemons and Stone square off in a battle of wits where we aren’t sure whether to root for the possible alien or rage-fueled kidnapper. Working from a script by Will (The Menu) Tracy means there isn’t a ton of room for subtlety. So Lanthimos leans into the absurdism by constantly having the audience shift their allegiance between Teddy and Don and their scheme to “save the world” to Michelle, who is simultaneously the victim of a horrible crime and a completely heartless and unlikable CEO. Hitting theaters as we approach the first anniversary of Luigi Mangione’s assassination of the UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, this is some pretty fearless screenwriting.
Because Plemons and Stone are ultimately such charismatic and layered performers, they manage to play deeply sympathetic notes across characters whose flaws have flaws. Plemons instills Teddy with such wide-eyed certainty that he’s the only person who’s right in a post-truth landscape that he feels pulled straight from a flagged subreddit. He’s so desperate, and as he says, starving for answers, that he makes a meal of the far left, the alt-right, and anything in between that will give some meaning to the suffering his family has gone through.
Stone’s Michelle is cold, clinical, and removed enough that it’s easy for us to fall prey to Teddy’s belief that she’s an andromedan spy sent to destroy the human race on the night of the lunar eclipse, while also fully allowing for the possibility for Teddy to be completely mentally ill.
That is the biggest strength of Bugonia. Throughout its entire runtime, Lanthimos kept me on a razor’s edge about deciding whether I wanted Teddy to be insane or the only human who knows the truth. Do we want the paranoid conspiracy theorists to be right or would that mean the world is beyond the scope of repair?
Bugonia is just as darkly, absurdly funny as the best of Lanthimos’s earlier work, while feeling like a step forward for him as a technician and artist. Shot on stunningly gorgeous 35mm film, where the grain gives every single frame a swoon-worthy tactile immediacy, Lanthimos and brilliant Irish cinematographer Robbie Ryan have crafted Bugonia into their most elegantly composed work to date. Even if I wasn’t in love with all of Tracy’s choices as a writer, I respect that he created something that feels so sickeningly contemporary.
If you’re not on the same weirdo wavelength as Lanthimos and his team of madcap geniuses, Bugonia certainly won’t make you a fan. But if you felt he was losing the thread of what made him an interesting storyteller in the first place, this movie might bring you back.
It’s one hell of a weird movie that won’t necessarily move you emotionally like The Lobster, but will definitely send you out into the world questioning your place in the universe and whether your co-worker is a lizard person. And, really, isn’t that what a Yorgos Lanthimos movie is supposed to do?
Grade: B+