Review: BUGONIA

 by Rob DiCristino

“Do you have the time to listen to me whine?”

Colony collapse disorder is a phenomenon in apiculture — or beekeeping, for ignorant fuckers like me who had to look that up — that occurs when a majority of a hive’s worker bees abandon their queen, leaving Her Majesty and all the helpless baby bees to fend for themselves. Apiologists — or bee scientists (I’m learning so much this week!) — aren’t sure why colony collapse disorder occurs. Some believe it’s due to irritating pesticides, while others think pathogens are weakening bees’ immune systems. It’s probably climate change, though. Everything is. Anyway, CCD is just one symptom of a wider environmental decay that inspires another worker bee, of sorts (Jesse Plemons as Teddy), to take drastic measures to save his planet: Namely, enlisting his dim-witted cousin (Aidan Delbis as Don) to help kidnap pharma giant Auxolith’s CEO, Michelle (Emma Stone), whom he blames for his mother’s (Alicia Silverstone) paralysis. Oh, did I mention Teddy also thinks Michelle is an empress from the Andromeda galaxy? Yeah. It’s like that.

Based on Jang Joon-hwan’s Save the Green Planet! and written by Succession alum Will Tracy, Yorgos Lanthimos’ Bugonia trades Poor Things’ humanist technicolor wonderland for the callous, malevolent cynicism that defined earlier Lanthimos films like The Lobster and The Killing of a Sacred Deer. Teddy is the prototypical red-pilled culture warrior from backwoods middle America, a factory drone with no future and limitless time to “research” his pet conspiracy theories. Like all of these delusional jagoffs, Teddy has convinced himself that a seedy industrial cabal is responsible for his poor lot in life. Like all of these delusional jagoffs, he believes that cold, exacting corporate titans like Michelle are sucking the lifeblood from the planet. Like all of these delusional jagoffs, he’s roughly 50% right about all of that. He’s certainly right about Michelle’s performative wokeness — framed photos with the Obamas, etc. — which is masking an utter contempt for humanity that comes through with every breath she takes.

But can she drum up enough empathy — especially bound to a chair with a forcibly-shaved head — to convince Teddy and Don that she really cares about them? That she’ll really help find a cure for Teddy’s mother’s ailments? That she’ll actually bring them all along when she finally returns to the Andromedan mothership? It’s a tricky situation, and it’ll take every bit of Michelle’s sociopathic savvy to fool these rubes into letting her out of their MAGA murder basement before their electroshock treatments — which will reveal her true Andromedan form, of course — melt what’s left of her brain. For someone with no apparent interest in her fellow man, she actually does surprisingly well: As his madness and desperation grow, Teddy becomes more and more ensorceled by Michelle’s tales of Andromedan supremacy, how her race guided the Earth’s evolution from the time of the dinosaurs through the present day. Humanity is indeed doomed, Michelle assures him, but Teddy can still save himself if he just lets her go.

Fresh off her Poor Things Oscar win, Emma Stone expertly sells this deception — or is it even deception? — swapping Bella Baxter’s wide-eyed caprice for a more measured pragmatism that helps Michelle get the upper hand in any given situation. It may not be the kind of performance that critics typically hail as “fearless” or “unflinching,” but it’s infused with a wisdom and confidence born of the essential trust Stone and Lanthimos clearly have in each other. The bulk of Bugonia belongs to Jesse Plemons, however, or at least the lanky, disheveled version of Jesse Plemons here playing a note-perfect personification of the Male Loneliness Epidemic. A self-professed ideological wanderer — he dabbles in everything from the Alt Right to Marxism — Teddy is less of a cultural revolutionary than he is a lonely boy who misses his mom, and his legitimate beef against the soulless conglomerate that stole her life is ultimately subsumed by the same impotent rage that has driven so many like him to the darkest corners of the internet.

Bugonia is decidedly less exuberant and baroque than The Favourite or Poor Things — Lanthimos’ stalwart cinematographer Robbie Ryan leaves his fish-eye lenses at home for a change — giving any viewers who are exhausted by Lanthimos’ Whole Thing a chance to focus on his sharp satire and, it has to be said, his deep frustration with the lengths to which the human race will go in order to waste its own potential. Yorgos can’t resist letting his freak flag fly by Bugonia’s final movements, of course, but a madcap ending that imagines Dr. Strangelove as told by Terry Gilliam doesn’t so much deflate our existential dread as it does multiply it tenfold: Violent conflicts, global pandemics, voter apathy, corporate malfeasance, AI-driven suicides — they’re all part of our collective colony collapse disorder. Could we fix it? Could humanity come together to recognize its inherent value and affect real change? Absolutely, Bugonia insists. The universe is a beautiful place, and we have the power to save ourselves. But, you know. We won’t.

Bugonia hits U.S. theaters on Friday, October 31st.