The Greek prince of feel-bad satires, Yorgos Lanthimos, has grown a troupe of wildly talented craftspeople and performers, drawn by the chance to play in his imaginatively designed dollhouses. His female Frankenstein riff, Poor Things, marked an ascension in his appeal to popular audiences, while cementing his relationship with Emma Stone, as both muse and producer.
Bugonia, an English language remake of 2003 Korean film Save the Green Planet!, is his first film since the early Greek ones to be set in something approximating recognisable modern times. Here, in an armpit of smalltown America, Stone and Jesse Plemons go head to head, delivering bravura performances that put a shine on what, at its core, is a high-concept exploitation movie.
Teddy (Plemons) is a greasy-haired, beekeeping, tinfoil-hat wearing obsessive who recruits his sweet-natured cousin Don (Aidan Delbis) into a plan to kidnap the CEO of a big pharma biotech company. Because he believes, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that sleek girlboss Michelle Fuller (Stone) is an alien from the planet Andromeda.
Lanthimos is at the peak of his powers when it comes to production-design led set pieces. Teddy and Don’s comically overlong and deeply flawed kidnapping plays out on the grounds of Michelle’s McMansion. The farce of it all is highlighted with shots from various vantage points, as Stone repeatedly demonstrates greater athleticism than her abductors.
Once Michelle has been caught and transferred from the sterile luxury of her usual habitats to the basement of Teddy’s grim homestead, the film plays with the ambivalence of having two ethically compromised lead characters, distinguished mainly by a wealth gap. Teddy interrogates and tortures Michelle, seeking a confession that she is an Andromedan. Michelle has relative sanity and victimhood on her side, however the inhumanity of her professional activities invites the reading that, at least on a spiritual level, Teddy has her bang to rights.
Lanthimos’s storytelling only has violence up its sleeve
Stone and Plemons’ verbal battles of wits are worth the price of admission, even if the script co-written by Will Tracy (The Menu) is overly reliant on culture war jargon.
A deeper and more gnawing problem is that Lanthimos’s storytelling only has violence up its sleeve. Every punchline is pain. Even a breathtaking climax that superficially expands the film’s scope draws from the same extinctionist well.
This has often been the case with Lanthimos, however Bugonia is particularly evocative of the Lars von Trier approach: build an intricate dollhouse and then smash it to pieces. But at his prime, the Danish auteur cared about his characters, while Lanthimos is ruthless about dispatching anyone as required. Looking at the world, it’s not that he’s wrong to offer a shot of nihilistic despair. Still, at a certain point, it becomes wearisome to step over the threshold into a cinematic property so wired with death traps.
In cinemas worldwide Fri Oct 31.