FILM REVIEW
BUGONIA
Rated R
120 Minutes
Released October 31st
Product Warning Label: Do not go to this film if you intend to have a lighthearted evening with family, friends, or a date, or if you are distracted by anything that will draw your attention away from what is happening on the screen. Be prepared – this movie will blow your head off, and the collective heads of your species. We humans think we’re so special. Bugonia will take our collective hubris down a few notches. You will be shocked repeatedly, and that will be a positive reaction. We need to stop and smell the roses of our environment. Many of us run from one task to another, barely considering our time here on this planet and our relationship with our surroundings, which are here recorded by cinematographer Robbie Ryan, sometimes fleeting, sometimes vivid, and “in your face,” always bold with deep colors.
The backgrounds and camera work set an out-of-body tone that pervades the path of the story. The soundtrack by Jerskin Fendrix is creative and unusual, often using sounds rather than music. Director Yorgos Lanthimos had given his composer only three words of instruction for his work: “Bees,” “Basement,” and “Spaceship,” with which to drape the visuals in sound. Bugonia is an English-language remake of the South Korean film Save the Green Planet! The English script was penned by Will Tracy, who wrote the 2022 dark satire The Menu, and was a writer on TV’s Succession and Late Night with John Oliver. Tracy began his career writing for the political send-up newspaper The Onion.
“Michelle,” played by Emma Stone, is the powerful, somewhat detached CEO of a pharmaceutical company, and Jesse Plemons’ “Teddy” is a beekeeper who is also an employee of one of the company’s fulfillment centers. Teddy believes religiously that Michelle is an alien, leading her race’s plot to destroy the Earth, starting by causing bee colonies to collapse. So, Teddy and his neurodivergent cousin “Don,” played charismatically by newcomer Aidan Delbis, capture Michelle and shave her hair, which they believe is the communication “wire” to her alien ship.
The idea that our hair possesses some unique form of power is not unique to this movie: Muslim women have been threatened with severe punishment for letting one strand of hair show from under their head scarves. Michelle and Teddy are both close to the proverbial edge, from opposing ends of society. The plot has a clear trajectory but diverges onto different paths and has a major twist of reality at the end. The story unearths questions about who we humans are and why we are here on this planet.
Lanthimos is one of the most groundbreaking directors of our time and has been nominated for five Oscars. Born in Greece, he attended film school there and began his career shooting dance videos and commercials. His second film, Dogtooth, won a prize at Cannes 2009. His most recent films, The Favourite (2018) and Poor Things (2023), were Oscar nominees. Such recognition is unusual for an artist who does not toe the line of normalcy, but rather goes for absurdist, eccentric, and disturbing.
The director has great instincts about small moments that bring big meaning: Teddy adjusting Don’s tie, Michelle pretending to use a hand-held legacy calculator to contact her ship. Lanthimos has forged an unlikely collaboration with actress Emma Stone, who rose to stardom with her performance in La La Land in 2016. Bugonia is her fourth straight collaboration with Lanthimos. She is not only fearless, but she also revels in the bizarre worlds and characters created by Lanthimos and makes them her own. Stone, along with stars Plemons and Delbis, deserve Purple Hearts for their Olympic-level physical and mental fearless commitment to their roles here.
Plemons started as a character actor on TV when he was a child and has been working in film and TV since then. He won acclaim as the teen football player “Landry Clarke” in Friday Night Lights. He’s now one of the most sought-after actors in film and TV. Delbis was a member of his high school acting club in La Crescenta, where he performed in school plays but had never acted professionally. A neurodivergent actor himself, Delbis sent in an open call taped audition for the “Don” character who exhibits traits of autism. When Lanthimos met Delbis, he says, “I just thought: that’s him.” Stone notes that “Don is the audience’s window, the one who can see through the charade.”
Bugonia is a product of some of the greatest artists working in cinema today. It’s a poem, a symphony, an avant-garde painting in a film. There is no simple right or wrong being pushed, but there is comedy in this dark storytelling that inspires us to laugh at ourselves, which is one of Lanthimos’ greatest superpowers. The irony is that although we believe Michelle not to be an alien, Teddy and Don transform her into one. She becomes what they believe her to be, in a reverse form of Stockholm Syndrome.
Both Michelle and Teddy confine their philosophy about their world in a tight black box, so as not to have to consider alternative solutions and discussion. Many of our world leaders display that kind of hubris. The world that Lanthimos creates here is completely bizarre yet feels disturbingly close to our treatment of each other and our habitat. In the end, this is our world seen from the point of view of the bugs. How ridiculous we humans must seem, and how close we are to destroying their environment. Who is really the more advanced species – us or the bees?
Kathryn Whitney Boole has spent most of her life in the entertainment industry, which has been the backdrop for remarkable adventures with extraordinary people. She is a Talent Manager with Studio Talent Group in Santa Monica. kboole@gmail.com
