The twisted filmography of Yorgos Lanthimos has by now trained us to expect darkly comic visions of contemporary life, both savage and mundane. His movies have perhaps inspired the most “What?!” reactions of the last decade, partly because they’ve tried so hard to do so.
His movies — farces, fables, experiments — reside in surreal worlds of their own. But his latest, “Bugonia,” is thrillingly, if tragically, tied to our reality. It might even be his best film. Though I’ve been apprehensive about the flamboyant severity of Lanthimos’ movies, I found “Bugonia,” a chamber-piece gut punch, hard to shake. For starters, it’s difficult to resist any movie with a line in it like: “There’s Andromedan code all over your Instagram.”
That’s one of the things that Teddy (Jesse Plemons), an incel eco-terrorist, says to Michelle (Emma Stone) after kidnapping her with his neurodivergent cousin Donny (newcomer Aidan Delbis) and tying her up in their basement. Teddy and Donny live together in fairly remote, rundown old house. There, Teddy tends to both his bees and to unhinged conspiracy theories.
But as Plemons so deftly plays him, Teddy doesn’t seem like a lunatic. He might reach wildly insane conclusions, such as that Michelle, a pharmaceutical company chief executive, is an alien. But he’s thoughtful in nature and sweetly cares for his cousin. It’s a feat of Plemons’ innate good nature that we kind of like Teddy, even as he shaves Michelle’s head, to prevent “it,” as he calls her, from contacting the mothership.
The opening moments of the script by Will Tracy (“The Menu,” episodes of “Succession”) cast these demented shenanigans in an apocalyptic light. The fate of bees is much on Teddy’s mind; colony collapse disorder, often caused by pesticides, is one of his talking points. It’s a phenomenon that, in “Bugonia” — a movie reckoning with, or maybe just lamenting, humanity’s fate — isn’t just for the bees.
While Stone’s abilities alone might legitimize extraterrestrial suspicions, there’s more to why Teddy has pinpointed Michelle. She’s a lauded corporate leader; her office includes a framed Time magazine with her on the cover and a photograph with Michelle Obama. Her company, Auxolith, operates out of a sleek office building where Michelle presides over her workforce like a queen bee. She has the corporate lingo of “transparency” and “diversity” down pat, but whether she actually adheres to any of those ideals is dubious, at best. Before Teddy and Donny jump her, she announces a “new era” at Auxolith where employees leave at 5:30 p.m. But not if they haven’t met their quota, she adds. And not if they’re, you know, busy.
In that way, Michelle is a camera-ready cover for whatever Auxolith is up to, which, as the movie goes along, teases out a poisonous history, including opioid manufacturing that affected Teddy’s mother (Alicia Silverstone).
The bulk of “Bugonia” is the ideological dialogue between her and Teddy back in the basement. It’s a conversation, laced with contemporary divides, that is comical for its impossibility. One is addled by paranoia and extremism, the other knows only heartless corporate speak. Understanding each other is futile. Watching Stone, as Michelle, attempt to reason with Teddy is part of the movie’s dark fun, just as is seeing Plemons’ Teddy resolutely stick to his certainty that Michelle is part of an alien infiltration of Earth that he wants gone by the next lunar eclipse.
The source of such a wild narrative can only come, of course, from South Korea. “Bugonia” is loosely based on the 2003 Korean film “Save the Green Planet!” All of Lanthimos’ most notable films before have been written with either Efthimis Filippou (“Dogtooth,” “The Lobster”) or Tony McNamara (“Poor Things,” “The Favourite”). But, otherwise, “Bugonia” has the feel of a quick follow-up to last year’s “Kinds of Kindness,” a black-comedy triptych also led by Stone and Plemons.
Yet what could easily be mistaken for a tossed-off, in-between movie — there are only a handful of characters and a few scene locations — ends up feeling like a culmination-slash-nadir for Lanthimos. Having made a dozen films darkly satirizing the sad, primal folly of humankind, it’s comeuppance time in “Bugonia.”
The movie drags in the middle, when it’s locked in a prisoner drama that grows a little tiresome and predictable. But the payoff is immense. Teddy calls his torture chamber “the headquarters of the human resistance.” By the time “Bugonia” reaches its unforgettable finale, it’s made chillingly clear just how feeble any such movement might be, and the movie’s apocalyptic air of resignation, of fait accompli, sounds a chastening death knell.
“Bugonia,” a Focus Features release, is rated R by the Motion Picture Association for bloody violent content including a suicide, grisly images and language. Running time: 118 minutes. Three and a half stars out of four.
