Emma Stone and Yorgos Lanthimos’s quirky collaborations over the past seven years have been fruitful, to say the least. The Greek auteur and double Oscar-winning actor have given us fascinating oddities (the silent, black-and-white short Bleat, the divisive Kinds of Kindness) and awards heavyweights (The Favourite, Poor Things), and continue to surprise and delight with every new addition to their joint oeuvre. The latest is Bugonia, a defiantly weird remake of Jang Joon-hwan’s South Korean sci-fi comedy Save the Green Planet! from 2003, a conspiracy-theory caper co-starring Jesse Plemons, which just premiered at the Venice Film Festival.
Strange and slow, and then shocking and deliberately alienating, Bugonia isn’t designed to win over Lanthimos skeptics, nor those who prefer the director’s more recent, Hollywood-friendly, commercial-leaning work. It’s unlikely to have a sizeable awards season presence or attract big audiences in theaters, but if you’re a Yorgos-for-life-r, you’ll find much to enjoy in the heightened performances, pitch-black humor, bursts of gory violence, and bizarre twists, including a mind-melting final sequence. Across a tumultuous, sometimes bumpy two hours, it’s quite the ride.
This set piece, sometimes shot from an impersonal distance, is classic Yorgos—darkly hilarious, terrifying, breathless—and that taut tension remains as Teddy and Don pack Michelle into the back of her own car and drive away, taking clippers to her hair as they do it. Totally bald, bruised, and slathered with white antihistamine cream, she wakes up in their basement, strapped to a mattress. And we’re finally told why: Teddy and Don are convinced that she’s an alien intent on destroying the earth.
Seeing Stone in her new, otherworldly state, it’s hard to argue with them—and, far from losing her power along with her hair, Michelle arises more formidable than ever. Without the distraction of her auburn locks, her expressive face and emotive eyes come into their own as she lays out the stakes calmly and precisely: the world will be searching for her, and any kind of victory is totally out of their reach. The pair, in turn, reveal their demands: on the night of the approaching lunar eclipse, she must take them up to her spaceship for an audience with her emperor.
A countdown begins, but the trouble with Bugonia is that it doesn’t sustain this initial promise or pace. Whereas a film like Kinds of Kindness trusted the audience to put the pieces together, Bugonia’s script, penned by Will Tracy (a writer on other eat-the-rich romps including The Menu, Succession, and The Regime, who is collaborating with Lanthimos for the first time here) has a tendency to over-explain things and employ a few too many flashbacks. (Is this also a good time to ask why Alicia Silverstone, who is only a decade older than Plemons, is playing his ailing mother? Though, in Lanthimos’s wacky world, this is perhaps not as questionable as it would be otherwise.) There’s also an occasionally verbose, internet-speak-y style to the text that recalls Eddington, coincidentally a project Tracy was an executive producer on, though Bugonia is a better film.
As a result of all of this, it feels overdone in parts and half-baked in others, and the baggy scenes that play out in Teddy and Don’s house sometimes have the stasis of a stage play. Thankfully, Lanthimos enlivens proceedings now and again with injections of his characteristically cruel and nihilistic sense of humor, as well as brutal and explosive set pieces. These flashes of violence—one of which is set to Green Day’s “Basket Case,” which I’ve been humming ever since—are initially startling because they are few and far between, but then it all descends into a raging, unrestrained bloodbath.
It remains compelling throughout because you don’t quite know who to root for. In this post-Luigi Mangione world, when we’re increasingly aware of evil corporate, capitalistic structures, it’s strangely satisfying to see Michelle’s astonishment at not getting her way, but also excruciating to watch her suffer. And Teddy, in his chaotic, curmudgeonly doom loop, is no folk hero, either.
Their cat-and-mouse chase then ends with an outlandish finale that is the perfect litmus test for the kind of Lanthimos movie you can stomach. Yorgos fans will see it coming—I left the theater chuckling to myself—but many more will leave confounded.
In the end, Bugonia feels like something that could’ve worked better as one of the just-under-an-hour-long segments in an anthology film like Kinds of Kindness—a release, also starring Stone and Plemons, that had a very similar tone. Stretched out to twice that length, it’s one for Yorgos completists, something to be revived at future retrospectives, perhaps, and reassessed, but not exactly a viable entry point.
As with all of Lanthimos’s work, though, it’s intricately conceived and expertly shot, and Stone and Plemons are two big reasons to watch. The latter, who’s caught the eye of audiences and critics lately in everything from The Power of the Dog to Civil War, gives a lived-in, highly combustible and very convincing turn, but it’s Stone, in a more brittle part than she’s usually granted by Lanthimos, who steals the show. Unadorned and raw, she’s a total live wire who sends a shiver down your spine with every simpering smile. This talented trio have all been better elsewhere, but that doesn’t mean you should skip Bugonia.
Bugonia will be in theaters from October 31.
