The lates from Lanthimos imagines a CEO as a threat to humanity, but what’s the the weird part?
If you like your Yorgos Lanthimos films outré and boundary-pushing like “Poor Things” (2023) as opposed to something more rooted in the simmering edginess of the day-to-day – say, “The Killing of a Sacred Deer” (2017) or last year’s underappreciated “Kinds of Kindness” – “Bugonia” is your cup of crazy chai.
Lanthimos’ muse for his past four features, Emma Stone (she won gold for her portrait of a female Frankenstein’s monster discovering the power and pleasure of sex in “Poor Things”) stars as Michelle, the chief executive of Auxolith, a boffo biotech company outside Atlanta. We first meet Michelle making corporate messaging videos about diversity and workers’ rights. After one fumbled miscue and a retake, it’s abundantly clear that Michelle’s not a woke woman trying to raise others up, but doing a performative ass-covering for lawsuit prevention – “you can go home at 5:30 if you want,” she tells one employee, and then another, “but if you still have work to do …”
Roughshod management style aside, Michelle’s the target of Teddy (Jesse Plemons, who starred opposite Stone in “Kinds of Kindness”), a factory-level employee at the biotech, and his cousin Don (Aidan Delbis, a neurodiverse actor making an impressive debut who also boasts the film’s most fantastic head of hair), who believe Michelle is a member of an alien race looking to eradicate humankind. Their abduction goes sideways first because Michelle’s into kickboxing. Once subdued and tied up in the basement of Teddy’s family farmhouse, she switches to psychological manipulation, driving a slowly widening rift between Teddy and Don.
In the kidnappers’ science, the way to prevent Michelle communicating with her mothership is to shave her head (until she looks a bit like Maria Falconetti in “The Passion of Joan of Arc”) and slather her body in lotion. What’s going in larger terms remains murky beyond the “take me to your leader” demands by Teddy until we learn that Teddy’s mom (Alicia Silverstone, who seems to be Lanthimos’ go-to for small, quirky parts – she was in “Sacred Deer” too) is in a coma because she was part of an Auxolith drug trial. The tie-in isn’t a true “why” or “what,” but it is the thing that lights the fuse on a crescendoing of gonzo reveals – which I won’t spoil, but will say that dismemberment and tinfoil hats factor in.
The complex and idiosyncratic lead performances by Plemons and Stone are what we’ve come to expect in a Lanthimos film, but the story’s arc and character development come with such an affected and obvious bait and switch that the big “gotchas” don’t feel genuine or earned. Based loosely on the 2003 South Korean film “Save the Green Planet!,” “Bugonia” becomes a concept in search of a soul – something Lanthimos provided previously in “Dogtooth” (2009), “The Lobster” (2015) and “The Favourite” (2018). Here, however, the misanthropic provocateur, ever looking to go to 11, overdials to 12.
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