A question is hinted at but never asked in “Bugonia,” the newest film from director Yorgos Lanthimos and the latest in a string of bizarre starring roles for Emma Stone.
This unspoken question has nothing to do with aliens, bees, corporate greed, experimental drugs, or any of the other stuff buzzing wildly inside this film’s feverish world. But it’s the only question that matters to the main characters, Teddy, played with unhinged devotion by Jesse Plemons, and Michelle, played with strange, frigid magnetism by Stone.
The question is: How far would you go to prove you’re right?
Turns out Teddy would go to the ends of the earth. The ends of the universe, if that’s what it takes. Teddy is polite but weird, and sometimes secretly funny, until he’s not. He and his cousin, Don (Aidan Delbis), raise bees behind a run-down house in Middle America, USA. They dine on microwave taquitos and hot honey. When they welcome royalty into their home they serve spaghetti with meatballs, apologetically, because Teddy admits it’s not exactly what royalty from another planet would eat. He’s done his research, after all. He knows these things.
Teddy’s apostolic belief that aliens live among us drives the plot of “Bugonia.” Not only are they here — they run the joint. It’s how he convinces Don to help him kidnap Michelle. Nevermind how the two easily hide in the bushes of her gated community to ambush her, or why she runs into her backyard instead of into the street, where someone might help her. Like Teddy’s theories, this film isn’t interested in what’s rational.
After kidnapping Michelle, the two unlikely criminals take her back to their secluded home, where they chain her in the basement and watch her on a baby monitor. Don, like the actor who plays him, is on the autism spectrum, and it’s sickening to watch Teddy manipulate him into playing along with his increasingly desperate attempts to break Michelle.
Teddy’s methods, at first, are harmlessly bonkers, like when he lathers Michelle with lotion to protect her alien skin. Plemons makes this look as tedious as possible, like waxing a car. There’s nothing sexy about reverse alien abduction. Soon, however, he gets frustrated and his methods turn abusive, even bloody. You learn his connection to Michelle’s corporation is personal, and you see he might be doubting his own conspiracy. The bees are buzzing in his brain.
But you also know he will never give up. In Teddy’s mind, Michelle must break before he does. She’s an alien, he reminds Don, and the only way to halt the inevitable demise of our world is to negotiate with the alien overlords. Teddy will save the world or die trying.
That’s the thing about conspiracies, isn’t it? The conspiracy theorists are the only ones who know. They’re the only ones who can break the code. They would love for you to believe them, to join them in their crusade, but you better not forget who first told you the truth.
It’s a shame Lanthimos seems to feel the same way about his audience because there is so much to appreciate about this film. His eye for the unusual and absurd is otherworldly. Michelle’s basement prison feels familiar and, fittingly, alien. When he lets us out of the house, he frames Teddy’s beehives like the doomed denizens of Amityville. He knows when to let his actors breathe. Stone and Plemmons suck you in with their shared but unspoken question.
Except I’m never quite sure what Lanthimos is asking. Are conspiracies dangerous? Are they laced with truth? If it’s all pointless, why even try?
I’ve got no problem with difficult directors – Stanley Kubrick, Terrence Malick, Werner Herzog. They demand and reward our attention. I’ve not seen Lanthimos’ other work, including “Poor Things,” which won Stone her second Oscar for Best Actress, but I’m sure “Bugonia” will be nominated for another batch of awards. Simply winning the attention of the Academy is enough to put you in the same room as the greats, even if Lanthimos isn’t quite ready to sit at the same table.
Why? Because, at the end of “Bugonia,” the director debunks his own theory. The nihilistic climax is shocking and surprising, when you realize you’ve come to care for these people. But most viewers will see it coming from a galaxy away. I wish it didn’t have to be that way. And maybe that’s what Lanthimos is trying to say – he wishes it didn’t have to be this way either.
But you know what they say about wishes, right? If this is where the world is headed, and the Teddys of the world were right all along, we’re up to our necks in it.
