Bugonia ★★★★
- 2filmcritics
- 4 minutes ago
- 4 min read
Availability: Showing widely in theaters nationally and internationally. Streaming and other purchase options not known at this time. Estimates range from mid-November to January. See JustWatch here for complete availability options.
Will the Real Alien Please Stand Up?
One can almost imagine Yorgos Lanthimos’ “Bugonia” on Broadway. There are only 4 characters of any note, and only 2 really matter.
With her white and tight skin and visual intensity, Oscar-winner Emma Stone is perfect as Michelle Fuller, the archetype corporate CEO: powerful, aggressive, self-assured, in control—characteristics of “lean-in” Facebook COO Cheryl Sandberg, qualities that made Michelle Obama so unpopular in certain working-class circles.
Emma Thompson is perfect as the soul-less Big Pharma CEO,
spouting diversity and corporate caring while not meaning either.
While authoritative, Fuller is also a master of corporate double-speak, telling employees they can leave at 5:30 p.m. (because the company cares about them and their families), “unless you have work to do.” And abruptly stopping a taping of her talking about diversity because “there’s too much ‘diversity’ in here.” Fuller heads Auxolith, a pharmaceutical bioengineering company—that is, Big Pharma, a common target these days, and a stand-in for inhumane corporate America—housed in a sleek corporate park container that’s mostly glass, a double-speak surface that at once suggests openness and opacity.
Teddy: “I don’t get my news from the news.”
In other words, not entirely trustworthy. Except that the other main character, Teddy (a wonderful, charismatic Jesse Plemons, in a career role), is a nut-job, a greasy-haired, disheveled, bug-eyed, anti-corporate conspiracy theorist who’s been on the dark web feeding his obsessions: “I don’t get my news from the news.” As if to confirm his lunacy, Teddy’s back story is a nightmare of victimhood: a missing father; his mother in a coma caused by Auxolith’s drugs; and sodomized by a male baby sitter, now the sheriff (Stavros Halkias), who apologizes to Teddy more than once for what he did long ago, reinforcing the idea that Teddy is screwed up because he was/should have been damaged by abominable acts of child abuse.
Teddy (Jesse Plemons, right) talks his reticent cousin Don (Aidan Delbis)
into going along with his conspiracy plans.
Teddy’s rather slow and overwhelmed cousin Don is not unimportant to the drama and how it plays out, but he is essentially a script device: someone Teddy can explain everything to (for the audience’s benefit) as well as Teddy’s alter ego—expressing the doubts and concerns that Teddy might have were he to be completely forthright and self-aware.
Teddy mostly he blames the aliens, of which he believes Fuller is one, an Andromedan, come to earth to kill the bees.
A beekeeper, Teddy understands the importance of bees to the food supply and knows they are dying world-wide. For this and everything else he could blame corporate America. But mostly he blames the aliens, of which he believes Fuller is one, an Andromedan, come to earth to kill the bees—and to eliminate the human species. He’s done the research.
...an epic confrontation, on a par with Clarice Starling’s conversations with Hannibal Lecter in 1991’s “The Silence of the Lambs."
In sharp contrast to Fuller’s Auxolith headquarters, Teddy lives with Don (the marvelously effective autistic actor Aidan Delbis) in semi-squalor (intended to reflect Teddy’s disordered mind) in a remote house—with a basement, where he and Michelle will have their tête-à-tête. (Production designer James Price, who won an Oscar for his work on Lanthimos’ 2024 “Poor Things,” built these eye-catching sets from scratch.) Tête-à-tête hardly does justice to this epic confrontation, on a par with Clarice Starling’s conversations with Hannibal Lecter in 1991’s “The Silence of the Lambs,” with just as much at stake.
Michelle (Stone, left) and Teddy (Plemons, right) face off as Don (Delbis) silently observes,
in, where else, the basement.
Curiously, it’s possible that both Teddy and Michelle want to save the earth, or humanity, or both, each in their own bizarre way, each in their own echo chamber. With the theater audience ringside, the boxers spar over the facts—and over the nature of truth, and truthiness: Teddy: “Lies.” Michelle: “Truth. What’s the difference?” You’ll wonder which one of them, if either, is telling the truth (“with her head shaved, she sure looks like an alien”/”he’s just a whacko”). And how one might distinguish one from the other when both parties have been shown to be less and more than what they seem.
Stone, right: "with her head shaved,
she sure looks like an alien."
As the show goes on, Stone’s alabaster skin gets covered and mottled with various creams and bodily substances. Lanthimos has cleverly eliminated any possibility that the face-off could turn sexual; both Teddy and Don have been chemically castrated (making Don the perfect incel), the former by choice, the latter through his cousin’s persuasion.
Lanthimos brings the story to an end with powerful, message-laden, artfully arranged tableaux, while the soundtrack is Marlene Dietrich’s version of “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?” In its first and last scenes, “Bugonia” reveals its preachy ambitions that have been hiding in plain sight all along. There’s plenty in between that’s just damn good cinema. Scary and fun. Enjoy the ride.
He says: Anton Chekhov wrote that if there’s a gun it will be used. The same could be said of basements.
She says: “Bugonia” has ties to Lanthimos’s 2017 “The Killing of a Sacred Deer,” which, along with Lanthimos’s last, “Kinds of Kindness,” was too creepy for me. This one works. Maybe it’s the humor, or the message.
Date: 2025
Director: Yorgos Lanthimos
Starring: Jesse Plemons, Emma Stone, Aidan Delbis, Stavros Halkias
Country: United States
Languages: English
Runtime: 118 minutes
Other Awards: 3 wins and 4 other nominations to date