Why do I go to Yorgos Lanthimos movies? Honestly, I have no clue. I don’t hate them or anything, but they are fundamentally weird movies. I’ll say more about that below as I get to my thoughts on his latest, Bugonia, but for now, let me take a moment to say that Alicia Silverstone has a small role in this one as Jesse Plemons’s mother. She doesn’t have a lot of lines, but she’s become one of those actors who, when she pops up in something, I always think she looks familiar and never can quite remember who she is until the credits roll and I get a reminder.
Anyway, yeah, she’s in this one. She’s come a long way from Clueless.
Teddy Gatz (Plemons) is a part-time beekeeper and full-time conspiracy theorist. Living in a small house in the middle of nowhere with his developmentally disabled cousin Don (Aidan Delbis), he’s convinced there are forces hidden among the human race that are doing something to the world, using the idea that bees appear to be dying out as proof of that sort of thing. He naturally wants to blame someone for the bees and what he sees as the decline of the human race, and for that, he targets Michelle Fuller (Emma Stone), the CEO of a pharmaceutical company, someone whose life is very much the opposite of Teddy’s. With only Don for help, Teddy sets out to kidnap Michelle, but his demands may be a bit beyond her ability to give.
See, Teddy thinks Michelle is an alien from the Andromeda galaxy, and he thinks her people will be back in four days time, all set to arrive during a lunar eclipse, and he wants to negotiate with them on behalf of the human race because, Teddy believes, he is actually one of the few people smart enough to actually deal with these aliens. Now, this is a Yorgos Lanthimos movie, so it’s really hard to say whether or not Teddy is right until the credits roll, but in the meantime, he has a CEO in his basement, her head shaved and covered in lotion for reasons that only make sense to Teddy, and in four days, well, there might be an alien mothership showing up. Or there might not. Is Teddy right, is he crazy, or is he somewhere in-between?
That, in essence, is what is going on here. The movie largely seems intent to suggest Teddy is just in a really dark place, and his own behavior isn’t exactly helping there. But then something will pop up that might make it look like he’s not entirely wrong either. The movie is told largely from his perspective for most of the runtime. It helps, perhaps, that Stone (in at least her fourth collaboration with Lanthimos) does look very different with her rather distinctive red hair. Combing her shaved head with her large, expressive eyes does make her look perhaps more alien than human.
Now, this is still a Lanthimos movie, and my general belief on his work is he mostly makes two types of movies: ones set in what looks like the modern world but all the actors speak in a monotone, and ones set in other times and places where the actors can emote a bit but the world is clearly not the present day, or in the case of Poor Things, a world that never really existed. Bugonia arguably splits the difference in that it looks like the real world, but while Plemons especially doesn’t show a lot of emotion when he speaks, the movie isn’t devoid of it. This may be Lanthimos’s least-weird movie on many levels, and it’s still pretty odd at times. What I know for certain is I always feel the same at the end of his movies in that I am vaguely unsettled by whatever conclusions the narrative comes to while still realizing the movie is, in fact, quite good. It just isn’t what I would call something you should take the uninitiated to. This is a movie for people on Lanthimos’s wavelength, but then again, so are all of his movies.
Grade: B+
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