Review: Bugonia

Director:  Yorgos Lanthimos

Stars:  Jesse Plemons, Emma Stone, Aidan Delbis

Jang Joon-hwan’s 2003 cult oddity Save the Green Planet! is an offbeat choice for a westernised remake; a film that often zigs when you think it’ll zag and one fizzing with a streak of darkly comic humour and biting sociopolitical commentary that often felt quite specific to its South Korean origins. But if anyone had the tenacity to do it justice, it was likely Greece’s premier oddball Yorgos Lanthimos, who uses the text as a template for a further creative flourish with recurring actors Emma Stone and Jesse Plemons. Though not the same text. Screenwriter Will Tracy has made some notable adjustments which will help fans of the OG find new angles of appreciation for this icily spirited remake.

Tracy is a new collaborator for Lanthimos, whose prior films have notably been written by either Tony McNamara (Poor Things, The Favourite with Deborah Davis) or Efthymis Filippou (most of the remainder). Tracy certainly upgrades here from his prior major screenwriting effort, but his characterisation is relatively restrained by Lanthimos standards. The wonderfully curt, on-the-spectrum exchanges that typify the director’s oeuvre are approached but not matched, which has the curious effect of making Bugonia feel, on occasion, like a Lanthimos facsimile. Which, given that it’s a remake and given the story, is curiously appropriate.

Teddy (Plemons) is a conspiracy theorist, beekeeper and corporate grunt at local Big Pharma corporation Auxolith. One day, with the aid of his doting younger cousin Don (Aidan Delbis), the pair kidnap the company’s CEO, Michelle Fuller (Emma Stone). Bundling her into the back of her own car, they whisk her away to their rundown, isolated farmhouse, shave her head and tie her up in the basement. Their motivation? Teddy’s confident assurance that Michelle is, in fact, an alien from Andromeda who can get him a seat at the table with her race’s emperor at the next lunar eclipse (merely days away).

One of the main deviations from Jang’s original is how Bugonia downplays the outside investigative angle. There is a cop character (Stavros Halkias) whose effect on the story is roundabout the same, but without any comparable level of agency. This iteration feels more hunkered down with the events unfolding at the farmhouse, in the process cooking up a riveting performative interplay between Plemons and Stone. Garlanded with best actor honors at last year’s Cannes for his multi-character work in Lanthimos’ Kinds of Kindness, Plemons is arguably even more impressive here. His Teddy is a wounded, blinkered but assured breed of maniac, tightly bound but capable of sudden threatening outbursts, making him provocatively unpredictable. Stone’s Michelle is persistently on the backfoot, though tries to weaponise her nous and corporate vocabulary to open ‘a dialogue’ with this fireball. She’s submissive, but only when she thinks it’ll suit her survival odds. Both characters are playing roles and through them perpetuating a high-wire stalemate. Delbis’ Don stands in the midway, eliciting our sympathies.

Changing the corporate CEO’s gender from male to female can’t help but add an extra dimension to a tale that is, fundamentally, about frustrated impotency. Ostensibly that impotency is of us 99%ers who feel powerless in the shadow of billion dollar corporations that dictate not just our working lives, but the state of the planet we live upon. A powerlessness with both micro and macro implications. Bugonia adds a further complex dynamic, making both kidnappers male and their captive female. Teddy has taken extreme measures to protect both himself and Don from any play Michelle might make, and he is adamant that the language used to define her is dehumanised. ‘It’, not ‘she’. When Michelle doesn’t play ball, Teddy takes out his rage with futility inside a car in the driveway. It’s a tragicomic image but it acutely visualises this additional commentary on the emasculated American male, isolated and emotionally inarticulate.

It’s unusual to consider Lanthimos restrained, but in comparison to some of the gonzo manoeuvres made by Jang in Save the Green Planet!, coupled with the bizarreness of Lanthimos’ most recent offerings, Bugonia comes out relatively unostentatious. Returning DP Robbie Ryan continues to show himself as one of the best in the business, here most keenly in his wide compositions, making the film feel handsomely distant. Bugonia carries over the sun-blushed beauty of Kinds of Kindness, making one wonder if this might be the middle chapter in some unofficial Southern States trilogy. Georgia is rendered hot but rotten; a decaying garden of Eden in line with Teddy’s perspective of a planet being deliberately decimated by outside forces.

If the first two-thirds are magnetically contained, fear not, things break out in the final act as revelations come out of the closet and characters are lured into others. If Bugonia initially felt underplayed, this was evidently a ploy to render these final moves all the more out-there (and again, splitting off some for those over-familiar with the fable). But Lanthimos and his creative team have plenty of fun along the way. Tilting toward the online conspiracy nut culture that the film heartily lambasts, the intertitles that countdown to the eclipse feature a fab additional conceit. Bugonia is playful wherever it can be.

I promised myself I wouldn’t just make this review a comparison piece but I’ve kind of failed in that respect. But the headline is that Lanthimos and his team have managed to carve out their own creation, respectful but independent to its progenitor. You needn’t know or care that this is a remake. It is crafty, wily and weird enough all on its own, with global concerns that ultimately outstrip any regional specificity. Even if the swipes at online extremism and fragile masculinity rendered here feel particularly rooted in isolationist Americana.