Review: Bugonia

Image courtesy of United International Pictures.

Despite his high profile in the world of cinema, Yorgos Lanthimos' films are still somewhat of an acquired taste. For me, there are some in which the brilliant madness results in something special - "Poor Things," "The Favourite," or "Dogtooth" - and other times, not so much ("The Killing of a Sacred Deer" and the second two-thirds of "Kinds of Kindness").

His latest, "Bugonia" is just as deranged as some of his best-known work and it's the first time the director is working with source material - in other words, it's a remake. The film from which it is adapted is the zany 2005 picture "Save the Green Planet" by Korean director Jang Joon-hwan. 

In the film, Jesse Plemons is Teddy, a conspiracy theorist whose mother (Alicia Silverstone) was left in a coma by tests run by a medical company. He lives in solitude with only his impressionable younger cousin, Donny (Aidan Delbis), and has become obsessed with the idea that aliens from the Andromeda Galaxy have taken over Earth. He believes that a particularly unpleasant CEO, Michelle (Emma Stone), who runs a company that I won't describe too much for fear of giving something away, is among the aliens and he concocts a dopey plot to kidnap her.

Despite the fact that I liked "Bugonia," for the most part, this is not a film with many people to root for, other than Donny, who has an innocence that doesn't allow him to see his cousin's plan for being as batshit as it is. Teddy seems to want to save the planet, but his views are nebulous and he has a violent streak that is only fully revealed until later, when another character surprisingly becomes the second sympathetic one in the film.

After kidnapping her, the two men shave Michelle's head and interrogate her during a series of scenes that start out ridiculous but become increasingly unsettling. Meanwhile, Michelle seems to be trying to play her own game, occasionally admitting that she is an alien and at other times calling out the insanity of it all. She clearly didn't climb the corporate ladder without some survival techniques.

Some might be put off by the film's mostly solitary location and the fact that much of it is conversational. Eventually, it all comes to a head and goes to some outrageous places and has a few surprises in store - that is, for those who haven't seen the original Korean film. The ending is among the most bleak I've seen in some time, but it has an anarchic sense of humor, much like Stanley Kubrick's "Dr. Strangelove," albeit gorier.

This has been a year with movies that have something to say about where we are heading as a society - some rank among the best of the year ("One Battle After Another"), while others deserve credit for the attempt even if they don't completely work ("Eddington"). 

Lanthimos' latest ranks second in that crowd. It's not among my favorite of his works, but it's well acted (Plemons is very good and Stone is fantastic) and it's a movie that is unafraid of going there. And it's at least as good as - if not slightly better than the original - which is a mostly rare thing.