I knew straight away this was going to be a volatile one.
Bugonia comes to us from Will Tracy, still primarily known as a co-writer of The Menu, which only looks more pretentious and shallow with hindsight. In the director’s chair is Yorgos Lanthimos, an eccentric and highly unpredictable director. Case in point: Lanthimos hit a career high with the transgressive and utterly batshit Poor Things mere months before he somehow faceplanted straight up his own ass with Kinds of Kindness. Last but not least, this is a Square Peg production, meaning it was produced by “Adam McKay on shrooms” himself, Ari Aster.
I went into this expecting something loud, pretentious, and high-concept. Whether it turned out to be legitimately genius or smugly obnoxious, at least we all knew well in advance that it wouldn’t be boring. So let’s dive in, shall we?
The premise begins with Teddy Gatz and his cousin Don, respectively played by Jesse Plemons and Aidan Delbis. The two are recreational beekeepers, deeply concerned to the point of radical outrage with regard to ecological damage. To address this problem, they kidnap Michelle Fuller (producer Emma Stone), the CEO of a major chemical manufacturing conglomerate.
Trouble is, Michelle is shown to be more of a figurehead than a competent leader. Pre-kidnapping, pretty much all we see of her is her morning skincare and workout routine. When she finally comes in to work, we mostly see her flubbing line reads for PR spots and instituting a new policy that employees can clock out at 5:30pm unless they have work to do and trouble making quotas so everyone use their best judgment and don’t bother her with any decisions, okay?
That said, while Michelle is hardly a world-class mastermind, she’s clearly done her training to prepare for the unlikely event of a kidnapping. She’s saying and doing everything she’s supposed to, in the interest of not antagonizing her kidnappers, trying to appease them and maybe get them to turn on each other if possible, and so on.
With me so far? Good, because this is where things get weird.
The kicker here is that Teddy is convinced — firmly and resolutely, beyond any shadow of doubt — that Michelle is an alien. Specifically, he knows for an unshakeable fact that Michelle is an extraterrestrial from somewhere in the Andromeda galaxy, sent here to exploit and eventually destroy the human race. After all, why else would Michelle and her fellow corporate suits put so much time and effort into killing off everything that life on Earth depends on? For that matter, is Michelle really so perpetually young and good-looking, or has her typical makeup/workout/healthcare routine altered her to the point where she’s physically and markedly different from the lower-class humans who can’t afford regular care of the same quality?
I can’t possibly stress enough how far Teddy has bought into this alien conspiracy theory. If he had even an ounce more of ambition, he could start a cult. Teddy and Don are acting on the belief that late-stage capitalism is the Andromedans’ weapon of humanity’s destruction, so they’re not after money. They chemically castrated themselves, so they’re not after sex. (Yes, I’m totally serious about that last sentence. Read it again if you have to, I’ll wait.) Teddy is so thoroughly brainwashed into knowing that Michelle is a mendacious and manipulative extraterrestrial menace that he won’t hear a single word that won’t confirm what he already knows. And Don is such a simpleton that he doesn’t have a brain to wash in the first place.
The bottom line here is that while Michelle trained for what to do if she was ever kidnapped, she was specifically trained to deal with killers, rapists, and ransom attempts. In essence, she was trained to deal with kidnappers who want something logical. She sure as hell never trained to deal with this whackadoo bullshit. As such, she needs a bit of time and effort to adjust, and it’s entirely possible she may not have that time.
On the surface, what we’ve got here is a fascinating premise that takes class warfare to its furthest possible extreme. With Teddy and Michelle, we’ve got two people so thoroughly warped by late-stage capitalism, so far removed from each other on the socio-economic spectrum, that neither one of them recognizes the other as human. And in between the two is Don, a poor dullard searching desperately for any glimmer of hope in a world that doesn’t seem to have any use for him.
All told, it’s a good and solid conflict. But of course it can’t be that simple. Not with these goddamn filmmakers in particular.
See, there comes a point when the film seems to lose track of the notion that Michelle is not a sympathetic character. She is, in fact, a self-serving woman of tremendous power who’s come into exorbitant wealth and power through the exploitation of her workers, without any apparent skills or talent of her own. Yet her opponent is a domineering lunatic who — Guess what?! — is in fact doing all of this out of a personal vendetta that has precious little to do with his purported global concerns. It’s almost like the filmmakers are trying to make us sympathize with the greedy corporate executive getting wealthy from the destruction of our planet, and remember, one of these filmmakers produced freaking Death of a Unicorn! Half a year ago!
Oh, and let’s not forget Casey (Stavros Halkias). He’s the local police officer in this rural town, so of course he’s technically responsible for helping to track down Michelle, even though nobody has any reason to suspect Teddy or Don. More importantly, Casey babysat Teddy a couple decades ago, and it seems like Casey took advantage of that position to abuse Teddy in some unspecified and unspeakable way. At any rate, Casey still feels guilty about it, so he checks in on Teddy at inopportune times to make sure everything’s okay. And this guy is our comic relief.
To be clear, I get that any kind of kidnapping/ransom plot requires a fluctuating balance of power. We can’t have either side taking too much power for too long or the plot gets boring and predictable. But with the whipsawing tug-of-war between Teddy and Michelle, it got increasingly difficult to interpret any kind of consistent theme or tone. I kept waiting for the ending to tie it all together and deliver some kind of coherent statement.
Boy, did it ever. And not in the way that I expected.
Gentle readers, to put this as simply and spoiler-free as I can… this movie is a joke. And I don’t mean that it’s a comedy, though the film is darkly comical. And I don’t mean that the film is embarrassing or laughably bad, that wouldn’t be a fair assessment.
No, I literally mean that this film is a prank. This movie was clearly and expressly made to troll the audience. Sure, there have been times when I wondered if these particular filmmakers were getting away with something or secretly pranking the audience, but the ending for this one leaves no room for doubt. There is no sociopolitical commentary, no timely or relevant statement, no other rational or artistic explanation that makes any coherent sense.
(Side note: The film is a loose remake of the Korean film Save the Green Planet!, written and directed by Jang Joon-Hwan. Jang is a credited producer here, both films were produced in part by the Korean company CJ ENM, and the original film had a similar ending. Make of that what you will.)
By any conventional metric, Bugonia fails. It’s contradictory horseshit, everything about it is overblown (especially that score), and the film totally fails to make any kind of intelligent or interesting point suggested by the premise. But as a highly elaborate cinematic prank, it’s a goddamn work of genius. The filmmakers got me good, I’m not gonna lie.
Far be it from me to spoil exactly what happens. Just know that if you see this movie, the joke is on you. The harder you think about the movie, the harder these filmmakers will laugh at you. The more you try and make sense of this picture, the dumber you’re going to look.