In my review of his last movie, I said that unfiltered Yorgos Lanthimos was too much for us. Somebody must have heard me, because his new film Bugonia is a remake of the 2003 Korean science-fiction black comedy Save the Green Planet!, which I haven’t seen. (Yes, there are Korean movies that I’ve actually missed.) The framework of the original movie’s story helps keep the Greek filmmaker on track, as does a running time under two hours. So too does the fact that he has one of the world’s greatest actors starring in it, and she gives yet another stellar performance for him.
Jesse Plemons plays Teddy, a beekeeper who has, by his own admission, gone through every lost-young-man phase from alt-right to Marxist in the past five years and is now convinced that aliens walk among us. Namely, Michelle Fuller (Emma Stone), the world-famous CEO of a biotech company where Teddy also works in the shipping department. He and his dim-bulb cousin Donny (Aidan Delbis) plot to kidnap her when she gets home from work, which leads to a funny scene where she kicks off her high heels before fighting them off quite viciously. Nevertheless, they manage to shoot her up full of sedatives, drive her to their home, chain her up in their basement, and shave her head, because her hair is how she contacts her spaceship in the Andromeda Galaxy, obviously.
Lanthimos has a well-earned reputation for strangeness, but for a good long while, this movie offers the old-fashioned pleasures of a kidnapping thriller. Michelle mentions that she has a psychology degree to go with her biochem one, and Teddy is angry and unstable as conspiracy theorists tend to be, so she spends much of her time in captivity probing for his weaknesses and trying to drive a wedge between him and Donny. Teddy freely admits that he and Donny have chemically castrated themselves with female hormones to avoid being attracted to her, and she speaks for all of us when she responds, “Oh, Jesus Christ.”
He repeatedly accuses her of lying to him, and he’s right, because she’s willing to say anything that might make her captor release her. Unfortunately, he doesn’t believe her audiotaped confession that she is an alien, and so he tortures her via electrocution while blasting Green Day from his CD player. Teddy has to break off when the local sheriff (Stavros Halkias) stops by, and because the lawman shows no signs of wanting to leave after mooching a slice of coconut cake from the kitchen, we’re left to wonder whether Teddy will kill the cop who used to babysit him as a kid. The movie climaxes when Michelle takes Teddy to her executive office and tries to convince him that her closet is a teleportation chamber while her employees frantically try to break through her office’s glass door, and it’s a dread-laced piece of black comedy that’s worthy of Bong Joon-ho himself.
It is good that the movie makes Teddy out to be more than a mere nutcase. Rather, he’s a guy with a legitimate beef with Michelle’s company, whose products are responsible for his mother (Alicia Silverstone) lying in a vegetative state. Plemons is noticeably thinner here than in other recent roles, and he conveys Teddy’s struggles to keep it together every time he smooths back his long hair, which keeps coming out of his ponytail. For a conspiracy theorist, he’s a sadly credulous man who distrusts everything he sees on CNN but doesn’t ask questions when Michelle tells him that the liquid in her car’s antifreeze bottle is actually a magic cure for his mother. Even though we should despise Teddy for what his actions ultimately lead to — and Bugonia follows the plot of Save the Green Planet! pretty closely — Plemons finds the pathos in the character’s desire to believe that he knows things that no one else on Earth does.
As good as Plemons is, he’s swamped by Stone as a woman who never seems to lose control of the situation even when she’s crying alone in the basement. Michelle also delivers a late monologue where she conjures up an origin story for her alien race that involves evolution, the Biblical Flood, and the legend of Atlantis, and whether she’s making it up on the spot or not, there’s no doubting Stone’s absolute command of the scene.
When she won that first Oscar for La La Land, she could well have embraced the role of America’s sweetheart and headlined movies that tried to please everybody. This particularly seems to happen to young women who win the Best Actress Oscar. Charlize Theron, Reese Witherspoon, and Jennifer Lawrence have occasionally embraced challenging and potentially unlikable roles to varying success, but no one has done it with greater success than Stone, who absorbed the DNA of the self-promoting do-gooder she played on TV’s The Curse. Even when she starred in a Disney film, she went the antiheroine route in Cruella. As a producer, too, she lent her prestige to difficult films Problemista and I Saw the TV Glow. If only more Oscar winners leveraged their victories to be outré and take creative chances as Emma Stone has done, Hollywood would be a more interesting place. As it is, her career has been among the most rewarding to watch.
Bugonia
Starring Jesse Plemons and Emma Stone. Directed by Yorgos Lanthimos. Written by Will Tracy, based on Jang Joon-hwan’s screenplay. Rated R.
