‘Bugonia’ Review: Yorgos Lanthimos’s Damning, Bonkers Indictment of Our Fractured Times

Yorgos Lanthimos’s Bugonia finds the Greek Weird director working in a more grounded mode than usual. Adapted by Will Tracy (who co-wrote The Menu and did three episodes of Succession) from Jang Joon-hwan’s environmental satire Save the Green Planet, Lanthimos’s latest doesn’t depart too markedly from 2003 film, but it unearths new depths of existential anxiety engendered by the increasingly tumultuous 2020s.

Teddy (Jesse Plemons) is an obsessive conspiracy theorist living with his cousin Don (Aidan Delbis). The two spend their days training to abduct Michelle Fuller (Emma Stone), the high-powered CEO of a major pharmaceutical company responsible for a medical trial that left Teddy’s mother (Alicia Silverstone) in a coma. After snatching, shaving, and slathering her in antihistamine cream, Teddy accuses Fuller of being an Andromedan—a high-ranking official of an extraterrestrial race and a direct threat to life on Earth. Though Fuller attempts to talk Teddy out of his delusion, he insists that she confess and provide an introduction to the Andromedan top brass to negotiate the alien force’s withdrawal from the planet…or face the consequences.

In Lanthimos’s Kinds of Kindness, Plemons ably showcased his range playing three distinct characters across a trio of increasingly bizarre storylines. Here, though, Plemons is freed from the mannered dispassion that the filmmaker so often demands from his performers. Indeed, the absolutely terrifying Teddy stands in stark contrast even to the far more charming and somewhat empathetic character that Shin Ha-kyun played in Save the Green Planet.

Tracy, who wrote Bugonia during Covid lockdown, draws from the real-world pressures that made extremists and conspiracy theorists of family, neighbors, and friends. Though there’s comedy to be found in Teddy’s ridiculous assertions as to Michelle’s alien nature, the line between humor and horror is razor thin here as Teddy convinces Don to join him in chemically castrating themselves or a goofy line of questioning becomes a harrowing torture scene.

The meat and potatoes of the film is the interplay between Teddy and Michelle as she attempts to reason her way out of a potentially deadly situation but finds her consultant-approved corporate niceties to be fragile against his conspiratorial fervor. Teddy’s oily conviction masks a jejune fear and rage that should be familiar to anyone clued into the antisocial impulses and grievances that have become endemic to a certain subset of economically marginalized American male.

Stone’s performance is so expertly calibrated that even those familiar with Save the Green Planet may find themselves questioning whether Tracy and Lanthimos will actually stick to that film’s third-act twist. That Bugonia hews so closely to the original is key to its strength as it shows just how much that film’s concerns have sharpened in the intervening two decades plus.

Bugonia has us consider a different cultural context, but the story’s overriding worries about corporate malfeasance, climate change, and wealth inequality remain universal. Add into this an even greater focus on the fever logic of the conspiracy-addled brain and it wouldn’t be too early to label Bugonia one of the key cinematic texts of the 2020s alongside Ari Aster’s Eddington and Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another, films that bring a similar overheated energy to their unpacking of our irrational, agitated cultural moment.

It’s a common saying that tragedy plus time equals comedy, and Bugonia is a sick inversion of the idea. If humans 23 years ago were foolish, short-sighted, and prone to comic self-destruction, the exact same story only feels nervier, darker, and more desperate now.