BUGONIA

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Storyline (warning: spoilers)

The world is dying, and Yorgos Lanthimos would like to hasten its end. His blunt instruments in Bugonia, a casually sardonic black comedy which might constitute his most approachable film to date, are a paranoid beekeeper and a craven biomedical CEO. The apiarist, a sweaty, dirty, and smutty Teddy (Jesse Plemons), teams with his impressionable cousin Donny (Aidan Delbis) to kidnap Michelle Fuller (Emma Stone), believing she’s an alien from the Andromeda species intent on destroying humanity. Their theory comes from conspiracy podcasts, crackpot online sources, and Teddy’s own experimentation. The pair’s plan will require them, in the words of Teddy, to cleanse themselves of their “psychic compulsions.” The success of the film requires the audience to make a similar sacrifice.
Bugonia is an enraged picture. It’s mad at the world; it’s mad at humanity. Nevertheless, the structuring to reveal the full scope of that anger is surprisingly deliberate. Teddy believes he and Donny need to break Michelle before the next lunar eclipse, which is in three days, if they hope to beam up to her mothership and negotiate for her species to leave Earth alone. Each day, therefore, is a single act, with a countdown card showing the earth becoming flatter and flatter. In black and white flashbacks, we see how Michelle connects to Teddy’s mother, Sandy (Alicia Silverstone), who undertook a drug trial that backfired. Teddy rants about the corporate class’s domination of our decision-making through techno enslavement and the poisoning of our world, particularly the destruction of bees.
We can, of course, read these characters through several lenses. There’s the anti-science approach to COVID, the erasure of rural folks, corporate greed, and culture war skirmishes happening. It’s telling that a film about aliens judging the rottenness of our species comes from a Greek filmmaker using America as a setting. That outsiderism intimates an acknowledgment of all sides while making the case that no force is as destructive as human selfishness. And if we cannot cast away that egotism, then perhaps we, as a species, simply deserve to peter out.