Movies are an endlessly miraculous medium when it comes to getting us to identity with people we don’t like and don’t approve of, who commit actions that leave us appalled yet, at the same time, in a state of terrified awe. Yorgos Lanthimos, the director of “Poor Things,” “The Favourite,” and “Kinds of Kindness,” has become a squirmy master of this brand of violent-outsider filmmaking; let’s call it enlightened misanthropy. He’s working in the tradition of directors like Stanley Kubrick and the Oliver Stone of “Natural Born Killers,” but Lanthimos operates with his own dark playfulness. His new movie, “Bugonia,” is a heady and gripping experience, in no small part because it takes the form of a duel — tactical, philosophical, brutal — between two characters who might almost be locked in a contest entitled “Who’s the More Outrageously Spectacular Anti-Social Offender?”
Let’s start with Michelle Fuller. She’s the CEO of Auxolith Corp., a pharmaceutical company housed in a steel-and-glass edifice in what appears to be some leafy-green enclave of the Pacific Northwest. A cutting-edge star of the new corporate world, featured on the covers of Time and Fortune, Michelle is played, with impeccable crisp heartlessness, by Emma Stone, who invests her with a manic volubility that’s all about explaining, justifying, communicating, and all the other things that a proper 21st-century corporate suit does around the clock to create the image of “transparency,” even as her every word exists to obfuscate the fact that the agenda of her company is not what it seems.
Early on, we watch Michelle record an HR video about how committed her company is to diversity. When she complains, after a botched take, that the video script has her repeating the word “diversity” too often, she’s actually right, but her edge of anger cues us to the subtext — that she’d be happier not saying it at all. More tellingly, her description of the company’s new policy about work hours is hilarious, because she starts by saying that everyone is free to leave at 5:30 p.m. (“Up to you! Your call!”), but she adds that if you choose to stay later to get some work done, that would be just fine — in other words, anyone who chooses not to is probably toast.
Stone, as an actor, has often led with her empathy, and it’s that very quality that renders her cutthroat performance in “Bugonia” so ironically exquisite. She has caught the spirit of the new corporate duplicity, in which everything is engineered to sound like “We’re the company that cares,” an ethos that’s almost worse than the old “We only care about the bottom line,” since at least that one was honest.
According to the film’s design, Michelle, with her CEO-as-sociopath hauteur, her red-soled Christian Louboutin heels, her sprawling home and intense personal regimen of martial-arts training, is a character we’re set up to see right through and despise. We can already imagine that her company is up to some not very good things (that hunch proves to be correct), and that’s the reason that Teddy (Jesse Plemons), a beekeeper who lives on a dilapidated farm on the outskirts of town, plans to kidnap her.
He gives us a hint of motivation in the film’s opening voice-over, which is all about the natural wonder of bees and flowers and pollen, but with an oblique reference to CCD (colony collapse disorder), a complex phenomenon in which worker bees abandon the colony — a disastrous ecological syndrome that can be triggered by the use of pesticides. In other words: the pesticides manufactured by Auxolith Corp. But that’s just the tip of the toxic iceberg. The movie ushers us into that farmhouse, where Teddy lives with his cousin, Donny (Aidan Delbis), and where it takes us a few minutes to adjust to the fact that Jesse Plemons doesn’t just look a lot thinner than he used to. With greasy, stringy long hair and a wispy beard decorating a face that’s pasty and unhealthy-looking, he has changed his entire aspect. His Teddy is a skeevy, scowling hippie incel who seems to have burnt everything out of himself but the desire for vengeance.
He’s the ringleader of the two cousins, and that makes sense, since Donny, who has the bushy hair, glazed cherubic stare, and halting speech of a neurodivergent hobbit, is clearly the awkward follower who is just a damaged kid at heart. Their scheme, which they proceed to carry out with impressive ingenuity, is to drive up to Michelle’s house disguised in their beekeeper suits, then grab her in the driveway. After she fights them off with her martial-arts moves, they chase her down and subdue her by piercing her with a syringe full of sedatives; they then take her to the farmhouse and shackle her in the basement. But what is it they want?
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Teddy wants a kind of justice, and that’s partly personal. His mother, played in flashback by Alicia Silverstone, lies in a coma, all as a result of having used a flawed experimental drug that was designed to get people off opioids. The drug was put on the market before it was properly tested, and guess who manufactured it? Auxolith.
But all of that would make for a standard and rather reductive thriller. As much as he’s in a rage over what happened to his mother, Teddy is also a left-wing nihilistic eco-terrorist conspiracy wingnut, a young man who has soaked up every critique of capitalism and denunciation of corporate-political culture that exists. Is he a crackpot? It would seem so, though he’s a highly intelligent and enlightened one. Much of what he says about the new global authoritarian corporate culture — the new world disorder — is true. Yet he also appears to be a mentally ill extremist. He has abducted Michelle because he’s convinced that she’s an alien. That’s why they shave her head; Teddy thinks it’s through her hair follicles that she communicates with her alien overseers. And, in fact, his plan is to force her to talk to her alien “emperor” to make the world right again.
For a while, with Michelle imprisoned in the basement, and Teddy tormenting her with his righteous wacked conspiratorial obsessions, “Bugonia” suggests a kind of Antifa-vs-.the-corporation version of “Misery.” Yet the movie works by toying with our sympathies in devious and unpredictable ways. At first, the whole feel of it is intensely cold-blooded, since we seem to be watching the face-off of two characters we staunchly disapprove of, though in different ways. Michelle the lying CEO, who treats her workers and the world around her like garbage (but pretends otherwise), deserves some kind of comeuppance. As for Teddy the alt-left extremist desperado, he is also, in his way, contemptible. His paranoid vision is an extension of the very toxicity he says he’s against. And he’s fighting the power by trashing the rule of law to a degree that most us wouldn’t support.
Yet “Bugonia,” which is loosely based on the 2003 South Korean film “Save the Green Planet!,” grows more supple and fascinating as it goes along. In that way, I’d say that it’s the opposite of “Poor Things,” a movie that began audaciously but, to me, wore out its welcome around the time that Stone’s character became a prostitute for no good reason. The script of “Bugonia,” by Will Tracy (who co-wrote “The Menu” and did three episodes of “Succession”), creates an ingeniously witty and incisive exposé of the dueling mindsets it’s about. In its middle section, the movie could almost be an Off Broadway two-hander about today’s ideological wars (if that sort of thing still existed). The dialogue pings with perception, as when Teddy refers to college as a place to “launder privilege” or talks about how “activism” is itself now part of the problem. And the film moves the audience from a place of being alienated by these characters to being drawn into their entangled webs of self-rationalization.
Once Michelle, with her bald head and beaming eyes, has settled into captivity, she begins to engage with Teddy, if only to manipulate him. Her methods work on the audience too: She may be a scoundrel, but she’s a human being, and we instinctively don’t want to see someone treated this way. (Teddy, at one point, turns up the electro-torture, scoring it to “Basket Case” by Green Day — which, I’m sorry, does not make this the new “Stuck in the Middle With You.”) For a while, we’re implicitly on Michelle’s side.
As terrific as Stone is, though, it’s Jesse Plemons who gives the film’s most extraordinary performance. His desperate, lacerating Teddy is a character who has ruined his own life, who has martyred himself out of his devotion to The Truth. Yet he’s got a handle on where the world is heading. And the more that Plemons lays him bare, the more we connect to the tragedy of Teddy’s masochism. In a way, he stands in for an entire generation. This is acting on the high wire.
We want to see Michelle escape, because that’s part of the logic of how movies work. “Bugonia” turns into a wild and galvanizing suspense thriller of action and ideas; it’s a movie that encompasses blood-splattering suicide, death by antifreeze, and a cop who was once a sexually abusive babysitter. We can sense that Teddy’s master plan is doomed. Yet Plemons’ great performance is sealed by the film’s crowning joke, which I won’t reveal, though let’s just say that it shines a new light on Teddy’s madness (and Michelle’s heartlessness). And even as we’re giggling, or maybe just shell-shocked, the film transitions into something deeply cosmic and humane. It leaves us stunned by what happens to the world these two have been fighting over, by what a powerful and vulnerable place it is.
From Variety US