You have to love Yorgos Lanthimos’ commitment to one-upping himself when it comes to alienating crowds. He sees that Poor Things and Kinds of Kindness weren’t enough to scare off the audience he acquired following The Favourite — he just couldn’t stop winning Oscars for his actors! — so he goes out and makes his Only God Forgives with his latest feature, Bugonia, which is as nightmarishly fucked-up as the carnival barkers at the boutique studios wish their summer horror movies actually were. This is Lanthimos strolling into S. Craig Zahler territory (albeit without the baggage that name brings with it in certain circles), the feel-bad movie of the fall, and I have absolutely no fucking clue how this will play should Focus push it as wide as possible. It was enough to elicit laughter both well-earned and tenuous from the crowds I saw it with — the latter being of the type where, should some moron choose this as a first date activity, side-eye glances will be thrown their way from the seat next to them, their jacket quickly moved from the back of the seat to their lap should they need to make a quick exit — as well as a certain amount of true shock value, which seemed to crackle in the theater air, everyone anticipating more thunder to come. That’s an exciting feeling to have during a movie, and it’s even crazier when it comes from a remake, where anyone (especially the nerds in the audience) could have found out what happened ahead of time and presumably been a little less astonished. No dice. Jaws will hit the floor, no matter what.
It all starts calmly enough, with Teddy Gatz (Jesse Plemons) and his cousin Don (Aidan Delbis) tending to the bees they keep on their family farm. Teddy loves these little animals, and he’s horrified by what he’s been hearing about colony collapse, communicating his fears to Don, who is somewhere on the autism spectrum and relies on Teddy for help and company. They haven’t had the best time as of recently — or, well, they just haven’t had the best times anytime, but things feel even more apocalyptic in their isolation out in the sticks. Sure, Teddy’s got a warehouse job packing up goods for shipping at a local pharmaceutical company, but that’s all a front. What he really wants to do is to save the planet, and not in the “performative” way that he sees activists doing each day from his computer. No, he’s got the true story: Earth is in danger of being annihilated by a race of aliens from the Andromeda galaxy, and he’s got all the proof he needs to take some drastic direct action. He’s marinated Don in the same conspiracy sauce, though he isn’t as enraged and aggrieved by the idea that these aliens have taken everything from them as much as Terry is, and the two of them set out to kidnap the person that they think is responsible for all of this, who can grant them an audience with the Emperor.
It just so happens that this person is the CEO of Terry’s company, Michelle Fuller (Emma Stone), a girlboss type who has pics of her posing with Michelle Obama on her desk, does krav maga training on the deck of her modernist compound, and goes off on her employees for including the word “diversity” too much in their… diversity training packages. The snatch-and-grab operation run by the cousins goes about as poorly as you think it would, given that they’re going up against a trained adversary, but they’re somehow able to pull it off. The next thing she knows, she’s chained to a small cot in Terry’s basement, clad in a red overcoat, some cream that Teddy believes has anti-allergy properties smeared on her skin, head shaved totally bald because that’s how the Andromedeans communicate with their mothership. She tries her hardest to intimidate Teddy at first, but he shrugs off the idea that he’ll get caught in a flash of deluded heroism, and then she starts to plead with him. But she’s up against a true believer, and nothing she’ll say to him can change his mind. He knows the aliens are coming and that she’ll have the chance to take them to the mothership during the coming lunar eclipse, only a few days away. So, she decides to play his game, and, boy, what a bad idea that turns out to be for all involved. After all, he might be on to something…
Lanthimos and writer Will Tracy hew closely to the original tale told in Save the Green Planet!, Jang Joon-hwan’s 2003 cult classic that Uncs from the BBS age will remember as once being cited alongside Oldboy as must-see Korean cinema. Joon-hwan wasn’t as prolific as his contemporaries (his second feature came out a decade later) and never pursued crossover status, so his name isn’t as well known as it should be on these shores. One might think they’d have seized upon the opportunity more, given that they didn’t have the same gigantic burden that Spike Lee took on when he tried to remake Park Chan-wook’s classic, but they wisely understood that only a few cosmetic touches were needed here. The engine still ran and, weirdly enough, seemed to work better when brought out of storage. One could see how Joon-hwan’s work might have taken on airs of prophecy in the twenty-two years since its release, and it feels almost as if we’re living in the world he established in his film (well, barring the back half). What they do isn’t so much an update as a localization job, preserving the meaning in translation to better suit the needs of the local audience and the authors’ style. In this case, it means that Lanthimos is able to paint a portrait of modern American life using the same paints, enhancing the work’s meaning and its capacity to surprise so that it feels totally novel.
His imagery is as mundane as it was in Killing of a Sacred Deer – aside from the splashes of natural beauty and the richness of Robbie Ryan’s cinematography, the surroundings are kept as mild as possible to contrast with the oddity of the behavior shown on screen – until it isn’t, the weird bursting through with an astonishingly vivid yet visceral quality. This mirrors the story, in which the façade breaks down over time, slowly revealing the raw otherworldly emotions contained within placid exteriors. What’s remarkable about Tracy’s script is that it isn’t as didactic as I would have expected from the guy who wrote The Menu and, before that, jokes for John Oliver. It’s a remarkably empathetic film, especially given the brutal paces it puts its characters through, though it comes with caveats, ensuring that we never like anybody too much. Each time Tracy notices us straying too close to full-on identification with a member of his ensemble, he pulls us back to baseline with a new and deliciously macabre detail that complicates our vision of them. Feel too bad for the circumstances that Plemons’ character is in? Well, just wait until you see what’s behind the false wall in his basement. Feel like Stone is getting treated too well as a power-hungry CEO? Well, what she’s got in the closet of her office might make you think twice. The only character that remains innocent is Don, who grows increasingly more uncomfortable with what he’s witnessing, and, as such, his arc is the truly tragic one. Delbis’s work here is brilliant, squaring off with the likes of a fully-terrifying Jesse Plemons and a steely, otherworldly Emma Stone, and I can’t wait to see what he does next.
There’s so much juicy stuff I have to talk around in writing about Bugonia, because if you’re not one of the few who have seen Save the Green Planet! or at least read a synopsis of it, I genuinely don’t want you getting spoiled by some bullshit I wrote here. Part of the joys inherent in watching a Lanthimos feature is seeing how he escalates his plots, which slowly ramp up in surrealist intensity until you can barely believe you’re watching the same picture you sat down for an hour ago. It’s so well-crafted in how it escalates that it would be a goddamned crime to burst your bubble, but I will make one comparison. When Lars von Trier was doing some press for Melancholia – well, before that Cannes, at least – he said that there would be “no more happy endings” in store for the crowd, an ironic joke in that his movies never really ended happily, and that, given what happens there, everything would come to an end. Lanthimos presents us with the converse, in which our leads get everything they want without really understanding the cost of or exactly where they’ve been led on this journey. If you can withstand some of the harshest shit you’ll see on screen this year, Bugonia has plenty of rewards in store for you. Again, though: be warned. As someone should have said to Plemons’ character, you might not like where this leads.