BUGONIA
2025
Directed by Yorgos Lanthimos
Written by Will Tracy
For someone whose surname may or may not be rooted in the classical Greek word for "going unnoticed," Yorgos Lanthimos has made a movie that's almost auto-spoling, that to merely assert there could be a secret in it is to essentially give its secret away (and it may be obvious even without the prompt). In point of fact, he's remade such a movie, namely Jang Joon-hwan's 2003 film Save the Green Planet!, so we've actually spoiled two movies in one breath; and if while watching either this film or its predecessor it strikes you that Jang was already sort-of remaking Misery, then that's no accident, either, though for Jang that was a matter of being inspired by it, inverting it, and then riffing pretty loosely (and rather ingeniously) upon it, rather than ripping it off. Bugonia, however, is one strikingly faithful remake, and might have been even moreso had things proceeded without interruption; the film is the result of an adapted screenplay written by Will Tracy, and what may well have originally been a screenplay proofread by him after getting spit out of the autotranslate machine, that only later acquired Lanthimos's interest when its original director dropped out due to health reasons, because its original director was its original director, Jang himself, who'd aimed to crack into the American industry by repeating himself except now in English. (It would've been Jang's very first English-language film.) So maybe it's a wonder it's as different as it is, when, given its origins, it doesn't strongly argue for so much as a right to exist. (As for the new movie's name, not explained in the film, it refers to a semi-legendary ritual practice in the ancient Mediterranean, regarding beating animals to death in order to produce bees for apiculture, for despite figuring out many remarkable things, most of those savages weren't even any smarter than us; it has the more immediate effect, for the English-speaker, of sounding like "a land of bugs," but its actual meaning will also be appropriate.)
Anyway, it's actually streamlined from the original: Save the Green Planet! is already a fairly simple film, narratively—it has a cast of more-or-less just five—and while it swings around pretty wildly in tone, it is, like I said, an inverted Misery structurally, with a kidnapping A-plot and a detective B-plot. Bugonia has a cast of essentially only two: it's a remake that runs literally exactly as long as its predecessor and, even so, is going to turn out to have less stuff in it. This is true viz. the detective B-plot, which is basically eradicated, and it's basically true for the sidekick kidnapper, but it's also streamlined for tone, too, with pretty much just the one rather than the several. That tone is—this is of course not any spoiler—arch contempt, and so, for this and other reasons, and also to get slightly ahead of ourselves, I am glad Yorgos Lanthimos remade Save the Green Planet! But going beat-for-beat and note-for-note with fewer beats and fewer notes, it does make it hard to talk about Bugonia without talking about its ending, so I don't believe I'll try, especially since I think talking around it would be, to no small extent, a failure to engage with the movie's unique strengths anyhow.
And it certainly has unique strengths despite anything you've inferred from my complaining, and while I will complain even more sourly when we're done, I don't think it's difficult to decide, here at the outset, that Lanthimos has made the better movie, even if he didn't make the more creative one. So here's what we have: somewhere in rural America persists Teddy (Jesse Plemons), effectively the heir to a piece of isolated real estate, though his mother (Alicia Silverstone) technically still lives, kept alive by machines following a botch of a clinical trial for a new drug; as the movie begins, he's already inveigling his cousin Don (Aidan Delbis) into committing a Mangionesque action against hotshot pharmaceutical CEO Michelle Fuller (Emma Stone), and these facts are of course related, but they're not the hook. The hook is that conspiracy-addled Teddy has convinced himself, and he has latterly managed to convince Don, that Fuller is an alien, one of numerous infiltrators who have donned convincing human suits to wear amongst us despite retaining their otherworldly powers, and she and her pharm company are one front of the war that these aliens—these Andromedans, to be precise—have been waging upon humanity and upon Earth, to weaken it until self-destruction. He provides the analogy of a weakened, collapsing beehive—he's a hobbyist beekeeper—though this is barely an analogy when the Andromedans are as responsible for the decline of honeybees, and the Earth's ecological as a whole, as they are for putting Teddy's mom into a coma for their sick experiments, or as they are for basically all of our 21st century ills. So they kidnap Fuller, and render her back to Teddy's basement, taking care to neutralize her "alien abilities" (especially by shaving Emma Stone's head), and generally torment her with the ultimate aim of having a hostage through whom they can negotiate a fairer shake for humanity going forward when the mothership arrives on the night of the lunar eclipse, an event which for some reason of importance to the advanced spacefarers that Teddy has postulated. So you can see that Fuller has a pretty lousy week ahead of her and, as the eclipse looms closer, it's likely to get even worse.
So pretty much is just The Green Planet!, besides some gender swaps and narrative pruning (sometimes both simultaneously: Don's role as a quasi-innocent sidekick was previously filled by our heroic kidnapper's girlfriend who's probably in that movie less but is definitely in it longer, and I'll give Bugonia this, as functionally-similar as those roles are this is probably the most overt and successful innovation to the plot here, when poor Don receives a probably-insincere overture from Fuller to turn on his cousin, and miscomprehends it as an invitation to join Heaven's Gate; as for what happened to the detective plot beyond the kidnappers' lair, that finds itself reduced to a bumbling local yokel (Stavros Halkias) whose sole real contribution is "amping tension" but who does come with a startlingly tasteless backstory connection to Teddy that I accidentally predicted in full fidelity while I was watching it with a tasteless joke, such as I'll leave it to you to decide whether it's "good" backstory or not).
But I do trust that—at least with the kind of prompt that a lot of people have seen no qualms about giving much more openly than my format demands—you will have identified what the "twist" here is, which fusses up Bugonia's blunt illustration of the problem of right-coded (though by his own estimation, Teddy is beyond left or right), Internet-fouled, and at least facially-misogynistic conspiracism that's brought Teddy to this point, by revealing, nope, the lunatic was right, she is a fucking alien. So while allegory's been trying to muscle its way into the proceedings the entire time, it's only right in the final stretch that allegory fully takes over, certainly more multivalent than the preceding but more-or-less coming down to the idea that, regardless of their nominal political alignment, elites have grown so incredibly divergent from the commonplace of humanity that you might as well consider them, for they surely seem to consider themselves, a different species from us, treating their lessers with about as much concern and care as you or I would have for a bee, especially inasmuch as we're bound to respect it only when it's about to sting. Of course, in the very final stretch it becomes a full-tilt misanthropic daydream, the moment where Lanthimos ties things up by reminding you that he has contempt for all his characters and the world entire and, presumably, also you the viewer, and where I have some problems with the mystifyingly bad Doctor Who production design, but not the disorienting shift to a global scale after spending a whole movie inside a basement, nor the particularly mordant imagery associated with Bugonia's montage of humanity getting what it, apparently, deserves.
I think you could reasonably problematize the foregoing, perhaps especially the way it goes about it, but it does what it does really well. (And as for whether it even matters if the twist is "a surprise," I guess I couldn't tell you if I'd like it more if I hadn't already guessed-it-unto-a-certainty going in, but it's possible knowing even helps. I will note that I think Lanthimos plays it better than Jang: my initial reaction to the absence of any illustrative imagery for Fuller's lean-in to the alien conspiracy was that it was a bit of a cheat; but Jang does provide illustrative imagery, and as goofy, low-budget, and film-referentially-jokey as it is, it actually does render it far too objective when, theoretically, it's meant to be not only possible but probable that it is just a canny kidnap victim making one last desperate play to save her skin from a dangerous but infinitely-credulous dumbass.) So Save the Green Planet! is a film of ideas, some big and important but most little and frankly zany; Bugonia is, I'd say, pretty definitively, also a comedy, indeed more of a comedy than its frequently-wacky predecessor, quite mirthful despite being almost entirely laughless for its entire runtime (it's absurd front to back but very straight-faced, and what it's making fun of isn't funny: probably the funniest thing here is the kidnapping itself, an "action" scene creatively shot from mostly fifty yards away from the action to better understand it as the scrambling of pitiful idiots, including the physically-peak and seemingly well-trained victim; though if your choice for "the funniest thing" was the part where the man with the cognitive disability played by a man with a cognitive disability shot himself in the face, Bugonia is such that I wouldn't say you were wrong about that, which is, I suppose, The Lanthimos Touch). It's a better comedy, then, as a function of being more precise in its satire, which is the real, and more pervasive, departure of Tracy's screenplay from its source, albeit effected mostly thanks to how that screenplay has narrowed its scenario down to what's barely more than a two-hander between a pair of terrifically sharp performances.
If I said it was the best performance I've seen Plemons give, that wouldn't mean all that much (I've seen him, I think, only in instrumental roles where I think he'd have had to have been actively bad to have made an impression), but I know he has his supporters and I could become a believer; he's the less interesting of the two leads by some margin, but his man stumbling confidently through a high-profile crime while loudly announcing his humanistic ideology sets a sturdy foundation for the other, and it is impressive how he gets suborned by his adversary without realizing he's been suborned. (I don't think there's anyone, no matter how eagerly they played it, who could completely salvage Fuller's gambit regarding Teddy's mother's "cure," which is the least-credible thing in either this movie or its predecessor—man, if I didn't think this was a one-for-one remake beforehand, the "no, it's totally different" substitution of antifreeze for benzene would've done it—but he nails the desperation of the lead-up and its aftermath.) But this is, by any metric, Stone's movie, and if I said it might be her best performance, that would mean a lot; I'm not sure I'd go to the wall for that, and I would not be certain it's my favorite of her performances, but "best" could mean something to the side of that, and anyway it is some excessively good and complicated screen acting (and can be very profitably compared against slightly-frustrating screen acting from Baek Yoon-sik in the same role in Jang's movie, which meets the needs of any given scene in that movie, but not, like Stone in her movie, the needs of the whole thing).
Anyway, it's a marvelous technical exercise of satirizing a strain of capitalist overlord, most (but crucially not all) of what it's getting up to not even that heavily dependent on the gender swap of the characters—I mean, without it, you don't get "starring Emma Stone," but you know what I mean, and aside from a few bibs and bobs (all good), we could start with the fascinating spin on the "ugly up, get awards" strategy where the head-shaving and being slathered in telepathy-neutralizing antihistamine under an unflattering treatment by cinematographer Robbie Ryan feels more like Stone issuing a challenge to Lanthimos to try, and he doesn't really succeed, and I don't know, I perceive it as more self-aware than the usual awards season hag transformation. As for the performance itself, it's very careful, and (with the singular exception of a misjudged expression of human triumphalism that's been transported almost verbatim from The Green Planet!, that doesn't make sense in context with either film's twist either, only with its class war tract), refusing to force you down any preordained lines about how exactly you're supposed to feel about Michelle Fuller, pharma monster, especially in how she permits her baseline calm in the face of the kind of deadly danger you might expect her to be weeping hysterically over to be frankly bad-ass, and admirable, trying to reason a couple of yahoos out of a position they clearly did not reason themselves into, while also letting it drag into something comically, almost disgustingly gutted of emotional response.
Throughout, there's the same current of self-taught sociopathy, like her entire existence is the result of training (and this is of course somewhat explicitly-visualized) to not respond to instinct, though instinct is still present, and that training is currently being put to the test. It's a generous performance, too: having correctly intuited that it's just going to reinforce what's off-putting and magnetic alike about Fuller, Stone is permitting an unusual amount of access—unusual, anyway, in a "good performance"—to all the acting machinery going into implementing those specific inhuman choices, and even the decisionmaking process itself. It's pretty great at rendering a character who's already weirdly and confusingly recursive: an alien pretending to be a human pretending to be an alien (a CEO) pretending to be a human who, thanks to her new situation, will latterly find it useful to pretend, on top of all that, to be an alien. (The caveat is I'm not entirely convinced that there's no point where Stone isn't remembering to act in preparation for the reveal, but she is doing so more than the script, despite being finessed, is written in preparation for it—I have a suspicion that I'd discover some unhammered nails in performance and screenplay alike on a rewatch—but still: the sense that she's doing so is throughgoing and persuasive, and it's very good.)
That is, anyway, the central thing, though Lanthimos is making a nicely grotty little thriller to house that performance in, and that's sometimes a double-edged sword—Lanthimos's film is not nearly as manic as Jang's, so while the remake with less content is paced better than the original, that itself is probably due to the performances, and it's very difficult to see why a shocker that has as simple a mission as this one, and only a few convolutions to get to along the way, must scrape against two hours—but the patience it has with its story is mostly rewarding, and it looks right. It's Lanthimos-y but downshifted a bit, objectively so from Poor Things but scarcely less than from The Favourite, so it's still bulbous and weird but not outright shoving your face into weirdness: the wide-angle, bug-eyed lensing has more in common with deep focus than with distorted nightmare without surrendering a nightmarelike quality, and the colors are sweaty and sick without being gratingly artificial; shot design refuses to take much of a side, fittingly enough (to the extent a side is picked, that's the lensing again: Fuller's regular old glass office is probably the most hideously-realized thing in the whole movie that mostly set in a secret torture dungeon and includes an even-more-secret adjoining alien morgue), without surrendering the cat-and-mouse thrills that it's still depending on (of course who "the cat" is in the story isn't entirely static, especially by the last third).
Altogether, it's great, except kind of depressing. Now, the ending is depressing, but that's not what I mean. There's just something sad here, not anything to do with the movie itself, but watching Save the Green Planet!, a movie that might have cost not even a million U.S. dollars, then subsequently learning that Bugonia cost $55 million when I was prepared to call it—even praise it!—for being as trifling a lark as gets made today (because like I said: it's basically a two-hander, it takes place in three locations if we're being exceedingly generous about what "location" means and agree a house and its basement count as two, and it looks like anyone ought to have been able to make it for $15 million) kind of crystallized the "why" for me. It's a container for a world-class performance from a world-class performer, and it's a lot of fun, and I am accordingly compelled to recognize it as one of my favorite movies of the year. That it gets there by regurgitating a twenty-year old cult movie almost one-to-one, and it's a remake of a cheap movie that arguably draws back on the original's production design, costume design, and location management but still cost a noticeable fraction of, like, a fucking Avatar, and nonetheless achieving buzz and legacy far beyond its original—well, it all makes me wonder if the movie's right, and we it should all be destroyed.
Score: 8/10
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