Cynically Pessimistic Bugonia is a Cruelly Alienating Social Commentary of the Absurd
Two men, Teddy (Jesse Plemons) and his younger cousin Don (Aidan Delbis), have kidnapped Michelle (Emma Stone), the high-powered CEO of a pharmaceutical research company. They believe she is an alien, an “Andromedan,” and are certain she is intent on bringing about humanity’s demise. They have shaved her head, slathered her with lotion, and shackled her to a cot in the large basement of Teddy’s secluded childhood home. They want Michelle to admit who (and what) she is. They also want her to take them to her orbiting mothership and allow the pair to negotiate for the Earth’s survival. Their demands are nonnegotiable.
Inspired by the wonderful 2003 Korean science fiction cult favorite Save the Green Planet, director Yorgos Lanthimos (The Favourite, Poor Things) once again does not play it safe with his latest freewheeling genre mashup Bugonia. Working from a script written by Will Tracy (The Menu), the five-time Academy Award nominee takes direct aim at the current cultural and political climate, refusing to pull his punches or soften any blows in the process.
The result is a freewheeling, deeply cynical what-if scenario that will confound, enthrall, and polarize audiences in almost equal measure. It showcases Lanthimos at the height of his imaginatively creative powers. The director crafts an atmosphere of omnipresent dread that’s laced with pitch-black humor and intelligently nuanced insights into the human condition that, while not novel, are still disturbingly powerful in their accuracy. As goofy as this one can be, nothing that transpires is uplifting, and the picture’s bleakly flippant nihilism is intensely unsettling.
That makes this the dour foster child to Lanthimos’s similarly acid-tongued descents into horrific madness Dogtooth or The Killing of a Sacred Deer. But, as much as I sang the praises of those two wildly ambitious endeavors, Bugonia rubbed me the wrong way. While the director has never been one to revel in society’s sunnier aspects, as arsenic-laced as his storytelling frequently is, I still can’t say I’ve ever found any of it to be truly callous. Dark? Yes. But cruel? That’s not been my analysis.
Yet, that’s how I read the majority of this comedic sci-fi melodrama. Teddy is a wounded soul; working a dead-end job, his addict mother Sandy (Alicia Silverstone) lying in a coma, obsessed with interstellar conspiracy theories, and determined to pull a trusting Don into a never-ending rabbit hole of sadness, regret, and recrimination right alongside him. He’s a common man pushed to extremes whose anger and depression have made him even more determined to resolutely stand inside a claustrophobic bubble of his own blowing.
Plemons gives a sensational performance overflowing in evocative emotional depth and built on a foundation of indescribable internalized pain. Unfortunately, as strong as he is and as undeniably distressed as his character may be, Teddy’s actions are treated with such incredulous indignity that I couldn’t tell if Lanthimos was laughing at the man or chuckling with him at any point during his journey. I couldn’t pity him, I couldn’t like him, and, most importantly of all, as common and as universal as some of the issues he was doing a terrible job dealing with may have been, I could not relate to him, either. The level of contempt tossed Teddy’s direction made my skin crawl. This made watching him self-destruct far too much of an endurance test for my liking.
But this is nothing compared to my reaction to Don. I can’t say too much, as that would be spoiling some of Lanthimos and Tracy’s more unexpected ideas, but there is a key turn of events regarding the young man that made my blood boil. Don — who may be autistic, it’s never spelled out, but Delbis’s monosyllabic, intuitively hushed, flawlessly haunting performance allows for that interpretation — ends up being a pawn in Teddy’s machinations, and watching him figure that out is purposefully upsetting.
The thing is, the filmmakers are using Don exactly like his single-minded cousin is. He’s a cog, a piece of the larger puzzle, and a character who only exists to expand the emotional horizons for Michelle and Teddy. Don isn’t allowed to be his own person, and watching him go down an excruciating path of potential doom and gloom made me increasingly angry. I hated what Lanthimos and Tracy did with him, and their treatment of the young man substantially coloring my overall feelings towards the finished feature quite negatively.
I understand that this is a metaphorical exercise, the whole thing like some uniquely and unwieldy acerbic combination of Dr. Strangelove, On the Beach, Miracle Mile, The Cabin in the Woods, and Melancholia as seen through the eyes of someone who finds little that is redeemable about the current human condition. I love that Lanthimos and Tracy haven’t just manufactured an English-language retread of the Korean source material but have instead expanded on and playfully twisted many of its best themes and ideas for 2025. The film is also a technical marvel; the production design, editing, costumes, score, and especially the cinematography are all exemplary.
And yet, I still do not care. As talented as Lanthimos is, the director’s latest did not deliver the goods. This may be the end of the world, but nothing about it made me feel fine. I found Bugonia to be an unrelentingly miserable journey into pessimistic darkness, its viscerally sardonic malice more than I could bear.
Film Rating: 2½ (out of 4)
