Copyright independent
This typically bonkers swerve between arthouse self--indulgence and big-screen entertainment is the Greek eccentric’s sixth film with Dublin production maestros Element Pictures in a decade. It’s also the fourth in a row to feature his current major muse, Emma Stone. Awards nominations tend to be attracted to anything Lanthimos puts out, with The -Favourite (2018) and Poor Things (2023) marking a back-to-back high-point in adulation. It’s fair to say he has his audience at this stage, and they wait with anticipation for whatever next he puts out. If you’re not on board by now, there mightn’t be anything he can do to convince you otherwise. Bugonia is a case in point. Telling of a disgruntled hillbilly who kidnaps a high-powered business executive believing her to be an alien spy, it is perfectly adept at planting barking absurdity into an otherwise banal backdrop and blinding us to the seams. It mightn’t “go” anywhere or conclude with a firm full stop, but along the way Lanthimos is able to make us think the loony -colours he works with are perfectly apt for our loony society. Bugonia, in fact, might be one of the more focused efforts in this respect, sending up in darkly comic tones humanity’s bizarre reverence for a corporate class milking us dry. Here, we get two cousins living in a squalid, offbeat rural isolation with designs on changing the world. Beekeeper Teddy (Jesse -Plemons) and his neurodivergent cousin Don (Aidan Delbis) have seen better days. Their farmhouse abode has all the hints of a one-time homely abode that has slipped into neglect and filth. Greasy, unshaven and wearing stained clothes, the picture -Lanthimos paints is one of social outcasts with their own -ideas about the world. We almost don’t need to be told they have their own private tinfoil-hat -association. Teddy and the more subservient Don are preparing for a close encounter of the corporate kind. An extreme monastic lifestyle has taken hold, one so zealous that Teddy has convinced Don it’s a good idea to chemically castrate themselves in order to channel their minds on the mission. Their target is Big Pharma boss Michelle Fuller (Emma Stone), a no-nonsense, Louboutin-marching boardroom tyrant who sends underlings scurrying for cover. After a normal day of corporate double-speak and HR skulduggery, her carefully choreographed existence receives a jarring interruption. Teddy and Don leap from the bushes and kidnap Michelle, believing her to be an alien envoy for the “Andromedans”, a galactic race that walks among us. Michelle is drugged and -bundled into the back seat, before her head is shaven (Stone bid farewell to real hair for the role) so that she – duh – can’t send -distress signals back to the -cosmos. She comes to some hours later, tethered to a camp bed in Teddy’s basement with the two rednecks and their wacky theories and -demands facing back at her. But just how wacky are those conspiracy theories? Might it in fact be the case that Teddy and Don are the sane ones and the world outside their smallholding is instead the true domain of madness? The whole thing emerges as a corporate-skewering setup from writer Will Tracy, one that chimes with his previous work on the likes of Succession and The Menu (2022). Lanthimos doesn’t overwork the politics underscoring the tale and instead puts his considerable energies into the top notes – the monstering, low-down camera angles; the tight, grimy close-ups; those sudden, shocking slabs of clownish -violence. Things kind of paint themselves into a corner in the final throes, but it has been a lot of fun getting there. Naturally, this also extends to making Stone the axis on which the whole thing turns, all lightbulb eyes and betraying mouth ticks. She really is something special under the direction of a -provocateur like Lanthimos. Theirs has been, by and large, a fruitful relationship, but how much longer can it keep going? If it did conclude here, it’d be a -fitting climax. Three stars
