Emma Stone shines in a savage, surreal fable where delusion and ideology swarm
By James Verniere/Boston Movie News
Another cracked, modern-day fable from Aristophanes-like Yorgos Lanthimos (“The Lobster,” “Poor Things”), in this case based on the 2002 cult film “Save the Green Planet!” by Korean Jang Joon-hwan, “Bugonia” is a madly topical riff on the QAnon-hatched crackpot alternative universe in which some of us live. Even the countdown shots to the “lunar eclipse” feature a flat Earth, floating in space.
Lanthimos’ muse Emma Stone (“The Favourite,” “Poor Things,” “Kinds of Kindness”) returns as Michelle Fuller, the single, super-hip, girlboss CEO of a high-tech biomedical corporation that the film’s crackpot protagonist Teddy (Stone’s “Kinds of Kindness” co-star Jesse Plemons) blames for the near-death of his beloved mother (Alicia Silverstone), an opioid addict hooked to a ventilator in a hospital. Teddy, who lives with his autistic cousin, played by Aiden Delbis, a young, experienced actor on the spectrum. Teddy has fallen down the rabbit hole of the internet echo chamber and is now convinced that Fuller is an alien Andromedan imposter, who has a meeting soon with her emperor onboard a space cruiser and that she communicates with the cruiser using her hair, which he shaves off after capturing her at her home. Before this happens, she manages to beat the stuffing out of Teddy and Don (martial arts are her thing, next to yoga, of course) and almost escapes.
Teddy, an apiarist with thriving honeybee hives in a field outside his family’s house in the country, works numbingly at a warehouse owned by Fuller, to which he rides his bicycle (the family’s boat-sized, vintage station wagon is parked outside the house like a beached 1970s spaceship). In fact, the endangered honeybee, whose “colony collapse disorder” might be connected to the neonicotinoid pesticides manufactured by Fuller, becomes one of the film’s most important metaphors. Yes, “Bugonia” is more than a little buggy.
Like honeybees, society is on the verge of collapse, and Teddy believes that if he does not stop Fuller and her fellow Andromedans, the world will be destroyed on the night of the next lunar eclipse, which is five days away at the start of the film. Clearly, Teddy runs things. Don, who seems to have no contact with the outside world except through Teddy, is Teddy’s thrall. Teddy convinces Don, whose head of curls makes him look like a confounded angel, to be chemically castrated by injection like Teddy before they kidnap Fuller to avoid sexual complications in their interactions with her.
Before being captured, we see Fuller prance nimbly to her office in red-soled Christian Louboutins and shoot a video in which she makes a perfectly reasonable case for a “diverse” workforce.
After capturing Fuller, Teddy chains her to a bed in the basement of his and Don’s house and begins a speech to her with the word, “Greetings.” She denies being an alien, of course, which enrages Teddy, and tries to negotiate with him. Of course, dealing with QAnon types may not be possible.
In a dream-like black-and-white sequence, a beardless Teddy tends to his mother, sticking acupuncture-like skewers into her as she lies fully clothed in her bath. Does he suffer from internet-induced neurosis? Do we all? The music in “Bugonia,” a Greek word related to bees, by Jerskin Fendrix (Oscar-nominated for “Poor Things”) is big, orchestral, dramatic; it hammers us. And so does the screenplay by Will Tracy, whose previous credit “The Menu” (2022) is more overrated than I can say.
At first, Teddy, who wears a suit in her presence, treats Fuller well. But he grows increasingly angry and violent when she denies being an alien and slaps her. Torture is next. A police officer, who was a former babysitter and who confesses to having done “something” to Teddy when he was “little,” offers to pay Teddy a visit. Fuller’s imprisonment becomes increasingly Abu Ghraib- and “Silence of the Lambs”-like, including the specimen jars. The arguably predictable third act feels rushed. It features extreme violence and posits the idea that human greed and hatred have so screwed up the world that we deserve extinction. “Where Have All the Flowers Gone,” indeed. The message of “Bugonia” is viable, even arguably correct. But this creepy, gimmicky film is a bit of a dud. Alas.
‘Bugonia’
Rating: R for profanity, bloody violence and grisly imagery
Cast: Emma Stone, Jesse Plemons, Aidan Delbis
Director: Yorgos Lanthimos
Writer: Will Tracy
Running time: 118 minutes
Where to Watch: In theaters
Grade: C+
Boston Movie News 