Movie review: ‘Bugonia’ is often uncomfortable and darkly funny

It s the end of the world and our auteurs are making movies about it From One Battle After Another to Eddington to A House of Dynamite existential annihilation and how to face it are on the brain And our favorite Greek director of feel-weird cinema Yorgos Lanthimos has the starkest and darkest take with his alien invasion conspiracy freakout picture Bugonia Bugonia marks the filmmaker s fourth collaboration with star Emma Stone who levied her Oscar clout post La La Land to start making daring cinematic experiments with Lanthimos She earned her second Oscar for their film Poor Things and effectively established a mandate on their outr oeuvre In the past meager years Stone and Lanthimos have created a troupe of players with whom they have collaborated frequently including the actors Jesse Plemons and Margaret Qualley writers Tony McNamara and Efthimis Filippou who has been writing with Lanthimos from the start and composer Jerskin Fendrix Lanthimos films written with Filippou are dark odd and abrasive but unpredictable and anarchic in a strangely enchanting way McNamara s screenplays are equally strange and enchanting but also florid absurd and randy With Bugonia they bring a new participant into the company writer Will Tracy who co-wrote The Menu Tracy s script for Bugonia blends humor tragedy and absurdism in the way preponderance Lanthimos films do but this is more of a biting contemporary social critique drenched in sorrow Rather than worlds of fantasy period settings or outrageous schemes Bugonia hits close to home It is in a way despairing which is a new register for this master of tone It s remarkable how far Stone is willing to push audiences with her characters showcasing sharper more unpleasant sides of range This is perhaps her largest part unlikable character yet and she spends the majority of the movie with a shaved head covered in white grease paint Stone stars as Michelle a self-optimization-obsessed girlboss CEO of a large biomedical company We meet her through the eyes of her enemy Teddy Jesse Plemons a lowly employee in the shipping division of Michelle s company who is convinced she s an alien Specifically Teddy believes Michelle to be an Andromedon plotting to create a kind of colony collapse disorder as in honeybees among human beings on Earth queen dead worker bees blown to the wind atomized isolated buzzing alone without purpose Teddy has been doing a lot of reading online you see He s blasted through an array of political ideologies and now remains focused on his purpose of saving the planet by vanquishing or at least negotiating with the Andromedons The first thing he has to do is kidnap Michelle It becomes right away clear that Teddy is a man in emergency He s suffered traumas both fresh and as a child and his mother Alicia Silverstone is in a coma the outcome of a drug trial orchestrated by Michelle s company His only companion is his cousin Don Aidan Delbis a young innocent who just wants to help Teddy who serves as a Greek chorus audience surrogate and a representative of Lanthimos interest in childlike adults As Teddy explains his plans to Don he explains them to us the audience while Don asks the obvious questions and offers sympathy to the tortured Teddy Once the pair have Michelle in their lair the film becomes a chamber piece confined to Teddy and Don s claustrophobic home It s like a play as two titans of acting Stone and Plemons go toe-to-toe in the basement Michelle is more cunning figuring out how to play these two to her whims while Teddy struggles to prove her extraterrestrial origins He is a paranoid lunatic but to Stone s credit we waffle on if she is an Andromedon or not Locked in with these two Bugonia is often uncomfortable and darkly funny and the film plays an uneasy tournament of cat-and-mouse with its twists and turns It shocks but it also proceeds the only way it can go and somehow ends up in a profoundly goofy place For the majority of the run time Bugonia is the kind of film you respect more than you enjoy as the archness and absurdity of Stone s character is too dissonant with the sincerity of Teddy s sadness at the core of this story But there is a bigger intelligence at play here of class It s not until the final moments of the film in a series of truly Lanthimos-ian tableaus that everything snaps into crystal clear focus and it all makes sense While the end he imagines is starkly shocking it s also weirdly kind perhaps the best version of the end that anyone could possibly imagine In Yorgos Lanthimos end of the world as we know it it just might be fine Bugonia stars out of Running time hours Rated R for bloody violent content including a suicide grisly images and language Where to watch in theaters Friday Oct Related Articles Review Tessa Thompson is the ultimate restless housewife in a viciously updated Hedda At Twin Cities Jewish Film Festival local and global voices bring Jewish stories to the screen North Oaks girl represents Minnesota at Miss Teen 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