Yorgos Lanthimos’s macabre and amusing new film has a predictably strong performance from Emma Stone, an intestine-shreddingly clamorous orchestral score from Jerskin Fendrix and, most importantly, a wonderful montage finale – but frankly it’s a very, very long run-up to that big jump.
Added to which, there is the question of whether this bizarre if sometimes heavy-handed black comedy has fully earned its eventual pivot to serious tragic issues in the ending. Does the globally traumatised finale succeed in retrospectively upgrading the significance of what has preceded it? Do these avowedly important images and moods quite match up with the single-joke-single-punchline movie with all its violent slapstick grotesquerie that went before?
Working with screenwriter Will Tracy, Lanthimos has remade the 2003 Korean film Save the Green Planet!, changing the gender of the corporate character. Audiences might also be reminded of the great Danish provocateur Lars von Trier by the tongue-in-cheek portentous chapter headings, or even M Night Shyamalan’s widely derided mystery drama The Happening from 2008, which features the disappearance of honeybees.
The title refers to a myth about bees emerging from a dead ox; our seething antihero Teddy, played by Jesse Plemons, is a beekeeper, devastated by the progressive diminution of the honeybee population and blaming this on eco-devastation caused by a vast retail/pharmaceutical conglomerate run by dead-eyed corporate ice queen Michelle, played by Stone. Her company also gravely injured Teddy’s troubled mother, Sandy, played by Alicia Silverstone, with its experimental opioid withdrawal drugs.
Mistrustful of mainstream media, Teddy has been doing his own research on the internet about capitalism and elitist conspiracies, and he now believes that Michelle is an evil space alien. With his trusting, innocent cousin (played by Aidan Delbis) he sets out to kidnap and torture Michelle in his basement until she and her fellow Andromedans promise to leave earthlings alone.
Stone is lethally cold and heartless as Michelle; she gets up at 4.30am every day for various workouts and comes in to the office to assure her cowed staff that – after bad publicity about an overwork-related crisis – they can leave work at 5.30pm if they really think they have earned it. Her seven-stages-of-grief-type reaction to finding herself chained to a bed in a scuzzy house cycles through imperious demands and threats, wary diplomacy, pleading, followed by humouring Teddy by agreeing that, sure, yes, OK, she’s an alien. (Although for all its confrontational gross out, the film flinches from the lavatorial realities of her imprisonment.)
Plemons himself delivers an efficient punch as the fanatical Teddy and there is something subtle and unexpected in his relationship with the local cop Casey (Stavros Halkias) who comes to see him, inhibited in his investigation by some painful shared memories of their childhood.
Bugonia is a very well made film, and while it is not true to say it is less than the sum of its parts, it is less than that final and very powerful part. Like Ari Aster’s recent film Eddington, it also shows how difficult it is to make internet conspiracy obsession interesting. For me, Bugonia doesn’t have the ingenuity and elegance of Lanthimos’s previous film Kinds of Kindness, nor the emotional generosity and audacity of his steampunk fantasia Poor Things. It’s a spiny, prickly, hothouse flower.
• Bugonia screened at the Venice film festival.
