The divisive third act of Bugonia is worth the price of admission. When the blood, guts and crazy twists start to fly, it becomes a true black comedy. The final scenes are pure cinema. you’ll need it as catharsis for surviving the unrelenting tragedy of the first hour, where laughs are scant.
Emma Stone and director Yorgos Lanthimos have reunited for their fourth outing (having already worked together for The Favourite, Poor Things and Kinds of Kindness), a remake of 2003 Korean film Save the Green Planet about a conspiracist determined to save the Earth from aliens in the run-up to a lunar eclipse. As the title suggests, Bugonia is less interested in the eco-saviour narrative and more about strange ritual violence; bugonia was a belief system that involved beating an ox to a pulp to spontaneously generate bees.
Teddy (Jesse Plemons) is a unnervingly unstable hobby apiarist fretting over CCD - colony collapse disorder. It could be pesticides or habitat destruction, but he is convinced he’s uncovered the truth and the conspiracy to hide it. Aliens. Specifically from the neighbouring Andromeda galaxy, who have targeted Earth to destroy it from the inside in a hostile takeover. His own colony has collapsed, too. Living alone in a tumbledown farmhouse that’s a few human skin decorations away from the Texas Chainsaw Massacre apart from his one and only best friend, his trusting autistic cousin Don (Aiden Delbis). His deadbeat dad left, his opiate addicted mother was irreparably damaged by a drug trial meant to help her.
Their plan is fixated on one particular alien suspect, Michelle (Emma Stone) a bio pharmaceutical CEO who certainly seems inhuman. Waking early in her stark modernist mansion, running on an expensive treadmill in an oxygen mask, terrorising her staff with catch-22 work/life balance endorsements, and singing along to Pink Pony Club in her shiny black hummer. Teddy insists his homebrew conspiracy isn’t personal, but Michelle is the queen bee at the centre of the hive of to his misery. It was her medical trial that took his mother, she owns the Amazon-style packing warehouse where OSHA violations are rife and the worker bees’ bodies are breaking down.
Watching Stone inhabit a character who approaches her own kidnapping as a business negotiation is mesmerising, a woman who can command a room even when shorn of her hair, chained to a grimy camp bed and slathered in anti-histamine cream (all the better to block her communications with the fabled mothership). She tries every trick in the book, constantly re-affirming her captors’ intelligence while sowing discord and winding them up to breaking point in between torture sessions. Michelle is convinced the FBI are looking for her, but while the police are sniffing around, it’s just the useless local sheriff who is Teddy’s former babysitter, clumsily trying to atone for something terrible he did to his young and vulnerable charge.
It’s a surprisingly restrained and naturalistic film for Lanthimos, with flights of fancy restricted mainly to flashbacks in black and white. These couch the loss of Teddy’s mother in classic alien abduction imagery, freaky experiments with long probe-like needles, her body eventually suspended as though raised by a tractor beam tethered to her son by an IV line like a macabre balloon.
Unfortunately, the cat-and-mouse game between captors and captee goes on a fraction too long. There’s a scene over spaghetti and meatballs scene that’s dragged out so long you wonder if it’s a satire of the continuity problems created by filming actors eating. Barely a mouthful of pasta is taken before the hard left turn of the final act explodes in a gory arc, no Alien franchise chestbursters required.
Alien, of course, asks what’s worse — monsters from beyond the stars or corporate greed that controls you via your share. But Bugonia has a far more nihilistic take on the human instinct for survival. In that overlong spaghetti scene Stone posits the movie’s central thesis, that despite the bees work ethic, perhaps a species simply winds down. The bleak vision of human exploitation and atomisation presented here makes you wonder what Teddy was fighting just so hard to save.
Bugonia is in cinemas on October 31
