It’s the end of the world and our auteurs are making movies about it. From “One Battle After Another” to “Eddington” to “A House of Dynamite,” existential annihilation and how to face it are on the brain. And our favorite Greek director of feel-weird cinema, Yorgos Lanthimos, has the starkest and darkest take, with his alien invasion conspiracy freakout picture “Bugonia.”
“Bugonia” marks the filmmaker’s fourth collaboration with star Emma Stone, who levied her Oscar clout post “La La Land” to start making daring cinematic experiments with Lanthimos. She earned her second Oscar for their film “Poor Things” and effectively established a mandate on their outré oeuvre. In the past few years, Stone and Lanthimos have created a troupe of players with whom they have collaborated frequently, including the actors Jesse Plemons and Margaret Qualley, writers Tony McNamara and Efthimis Filippou (who has been writing with Lanthimos from the start) and composer Jerskin Fendrix.
Lanthimos’ films written with Filippou are dark, odd and abrasive, but unpredictable and anarchic in a strangely enchanting way. McNamara’s screenplays are equally strange and enchanting, but also florid, absurd and randy. With “Bugonia,” they bring a new player into the company, writer Will Tracy (who co-wrote “The Menu”).
Tracy’s script for “Bugonia” blends humor, tragedy and absurdism in the way most Lanthimos films do, but this is more of a biting contemporary social critique, drenched in sorrow. Rather than worlds of fantasy, period settings or outrageous schemes, “Bugonia” hits close to home. It is, in a way, despairing, which is a new register for this master of tone.
It’s remarkable how far Stone is willing to push audiences with her characters, showcasing sharper, more unpleasant sides of range. This is perhaps her most unlikable character yet, and she spends the majority of the movie with a shaved head, covered in white grease paint.
Stone stars as Michelle, a self-optimization-obsessed girlboss CEO of a large biomedical company. We meet her through the eyes of her enemy, Teddy (Jesse Plemons), a lowly employee in the shipping division of Michelle’s company, who is convinced she’s an alien.
Specifically, Teddy believes Michelle to be an Andromedon, plotting to create a kind of “colony collapse disorder” (as in honeybees) among human beings on Earth; queen dead, worker bees blown to the wind, atomized, isolated, buzzing alone, without purpose. Teddy has been doing a lot of reading online, you see. He’s blasted through an array of political ideologies and now remains focused on his purpose of saving the planet by vanquishing—or at least negotiating with—the Andromedons. The first thing he has to do is kidnap Michelle.
It becomes immediately clear that Teddy is a man in crisis. He’s suffered traumas both recent and as a child, and his mother (Alicia Silverstone) is in a coma, the result of a drug trial orchestrated by Michelle’s company. His only companion is his cousin Don (Aidan Delbis), a young innocent who just wants to help Teddy, who serves as a Greek chorus/audience surrogate (and a representative of Lanthimos’ interest in childlike adults). As Teddy explains his plans to Don, he explains them to us, the audience, while Don asks the obvious questions and offers sympathy to the tortured Teddy.
Once the pair have Michelle in their lair, the film becomes a chamber piece, confined to Teddy and Don’s claustrophobic home. It’s like a play, as two titans of acting, Stone and Plemons, go toe-to-toe in the basement. Michelle is more cunning, figuring out how to play these two to her whims, while Teddy struggles to prove her extraterrestrial origins. He is a paranoid lunatic, but to Stone’s credit, we waffle on if she is an Andromedon or not.
Locked in with these two, “Bugonia” is often uncomfortable and darkly funny, and the film plays an uneasy game of cat-and-mouse with its twists and turns. It shocks but it also proceeds the only way it can go, and somehow ends up in a profoundly goofy place. For the majority of the run time, “Bugonia” is the kind of film you respect more than you enjoy, as the archness and absurdity of Stone’s character is too dissonant with the sincerity of Teddy’s sadness at the core of this story.
But there is a bigger intelligence at play here, of course. It’s not until the final moments of the film, in a series of truly Lanthimos-ian tableaus, that everything snaps into crystal clear focus and it all makes sense. While the end he imagines is starkly shocking, it’s also weirdly kind, perhaps the best version of the end that anyone could possibly imagine. In Yorgos Lanthimos’ end of the world as we know it, it just might be fine.
‘Bugonia’
2 1/2 stars out of 4
Running time: 2 hours
Rated R for bloody violent content including a suicide, grisly images and language.
Where to watch: in theaters Friday, Oct. 24
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