The Greek-born director Yorgos Lanthimos likes to make movies that trap his characters in confined spaces where a different set of rules applies from those in the outside world. In his early feature Dogtooth, three adult siblings are trapped in an eternal childhood by their brainwashing parents. The Lobster imagines a bizarre dystopia where all newly single people are given 45 days to find a life partner or face being transformed into animals. The Favourite tracks the power struggles between two dueling ladies-in-waiting at the court of a rapidly deteriorating queen. Even the globe-trotting libertines of Poor Things are boxed in by that film’s deliberately artificial soundstage exteriors. Lanthimos enjoys pinning his characters in place and watching them wriggle their way toward escape as best they can.
The director’s latest, the unremittingly grim black comedy Bugonia, takes entrapment as both its explicit theme and its guiding aesthetic principle. This tale of a pharmaceutical-industry CEO who’s kidnapped by a low-wage worker at her company was inspired by the 2003 South Korean comedy Save the Green Planet!, a movie it structurally resembles enough to qualify as a remake. But in our current era of widespread social-media brain rot, the notion of a conspiracy theorist driven by his delusions to commit a violent crime hits different than it did at the turn of the millennium. Like Ari Aster’s Eddington earlier this year, Bugonia invites us inside the internet-poisoned imagination of a lonely male protagonist who has “done his own research”—and, as with Eddington, the result is an allegory about contemporary life that’s as nauseatingly gory as it is thuddingly obvious.
The belief system that drives the fanatical Teddy (a startlingly gaunt Jesse Plemons) and his subservient cousin Don (Aidan Delbis) to abduct Teddy’s boss, Michelle Fuller (Emma Stone), and chain her up in Teddy’s basement is just one twist of the dial away from the woman-hating incel mindset familiar to anyone who’s spent time on social media since the days of Gamergate. Clearly, what motivates these needy, housebound losers is tied up with their anxiety about masculinity: As part of the cousins’ preparation for the abduction, Teddy even persuades the ambivalent Don to join him in undergoing chemical castration, so as to subdue any carnal urges that might distract them from their task. But Teddy’s ultimate goal is not just to hurt and traumatize the cold, self-sufficient Michelle, though he certainly gets that done along the way. In this young man’s algorithmically pickled mind, the evils his employer has wrought upon the world—which include pushing an experimental drug that has put his mother (Alicia Silverstone) in a yearslong coma—can only mean one thing: Michelle must be an alien from the Andromeda galaxy, sent to Earth to bring about societal and environmental collapse. Teddy’s plan is to torture her until she agrees to take him to the mother ship, where he will negotiate the Andromedans’ withdrawal from Earth, thereby saving the planet.
All of this is swiftly set up in the first 15 or so minutes, leaving the audience locked in that grody basement with three hard-to-like people for what feels like much longer than the movie’s two-hour runtime. The screenplay, by Will Tracy, who penned the 2022 foodie satire The Menu and has also written for Succession, can be funny taken line by line: Entreated by the handcuffed and shackled Michelle to engage in a “dialogue” about the possibility of setting her free, Teddy snaps, “This isn’t Death of a Salesman.” And there’s some gladiatorial fun to be had in watching Stone’s icy girlboss and Plemons’ deranged recluse try to outsmart and out-strategize each other, while the feckless Don struggles to keep up with their ricocheting chatter. But the film’s exploration of ideas, like Teddy and Michelle’s debates, spends most of the movie’s duration running in circles around the same narrow track. She is a soulless corporate dealmaker willing to promise anything in order to effect her own release; he is an unhinged dirtbag who clings to grandiose conspiracy theories as a means of maintaining control over his tiny, miserable world. Though their relationship grows increasingly enmeshed as her days in captivity pass, this dynamic never changes, making what was already a claustrophobic movie feel even more unpleasantly hothouse-like.
In last year’s anthology film Kinds of Kindness, Lanthimos cast Stone and Plemons as a frighteningly codependent couple in one of the movie’s three chapters. Here, the dynamic they explore is similarly in thrall to the Plemons character’s twisted alternate reality, and Plemons plays Teddy’s wild-eyed conviction to the hilt. As for Stone, she has become a key player in Lanthimos’ company, appearing in all four of his most recent feature films, plus one short. Though these parts have on occasion given Stone a chance to explore her tremendous range as an actor—she was unforgettable as the adult woman with a transplanted infantile brain in Poor Things—it’s more often the case that she seems overqualified.
Although Stone’s native intelligence and physical inventiveness allow her to continue to find nuances in the familiar character type she embodies in Bugonia (a chilly sociopath not unlike the exploitative real-estate developer she played in the TV series The Curse), there’s something upsetting about how much Lanthimos seems to enjoy making Stone suffer. In one extended scene, Plemons’ character attaches electrodes to his captive’s head and delivers mounting jolts of electricity as she sits, bound and gagged, in a chair. It’s excruciating to watch (or more accurately to listen to, since the camera stays mainly on the torturer) and brings us little new information about either character. Lanthimos and his collaborators might think they’re crafting a critique of Teddy’s internet-bred misogyny, but I found myself wondering whether he was taking a bit too much pleasure in exploring it.
Perhaps, to be fair, the disdain Lanthimos is expressing here is more for humanity itself than for any one subset of it; he’s less a misogynist than a misanthropist. (Major spoilers follow.) Bugonia’s last 10 or so minutes introduce a series of twists that would seem to undermine the message and even the basic logic of everything that came before: Michelle, it turns out, really is an extraterrestrial, the queen bee–like leader of her home planet, to which she flees after both Teddy and Don die by their own hands (thus ruling out the possible reading that Michelle’s true status as a space alien exists only in their minds). If Teddy flubbed a few of the facts, at the expense of a mere handful of innocent human victims, he was at least, as the defenders of our conspiracist in chief often put it, “directionally correct” that his choice to kidnap his boss and chain her up in his basement represented a last stand for the survival of the human race.
Lanthimos’ intent is apparently to pull the rug out from under the viewer with a closing cosmic joke, as the Andromedan council ultimately decides that humanity doesn’t deserve to live. But a final montage, in which Marlene Dietrich’s version of “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?” plays over images of an Earth that’s seen its entire human population snuffed out in an instant, also reaches for a tone of tragic irony that the preceding movie is quite far from having earned. In the most generous reading, Bugonia, which begins with a voice-over from Teddy about colony collapse disorder, makes a last-minute swerve into an ecological warning about how, by destroying the Earth, we will ultimately destroy ourselves. At worst, this parable about feverish, web-fueled paranoia suddenly risks becoming an endorsement of that same conspiratorial thinking.
If Bugonia had stuck to being a well-acted, down-and-dirty exploitation movie about Stone’s and Plemons’ characters facing off in a grimy basement, it could have been an entertaining if minor entry in the Lanthimos canon. By straining in its closing moments toward philosophical grandeur, the film instead does a disservice to both its characters and its audience. If Lanthimos holds the fictional world he’s locked us all into for the past two hours in such contempt, I can be forgiven for being sorry I ever set foot in it at all.
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