The new Yorgos Lanthimos film Bugonia is a wild, delirious ride, with an ending that’s driving certain critics to ranting fury. But it’s starting strong with the public, giving Lanthimos his best opening weekend ever.
Which is only just, since this is the best Lanthimos film since The Favourite back in 2018.
Bugonia concerns a pair of rural men, Teddy Gatz (Jesse Plemons) and his autistic cousin, Don (newcomer Aidan Delbis), who abduct Michelle Fuller (Emma Stone), the CEO of the pharmaceutical company Auxolith, because they’re convinced she’s an alien come to destroy Planet Earth through corporate means. The cousins plan to force her to arrange a meeting with the “Andromedan” rulers on the mother ship, so they can negotiate a deal with the aliens to leave Earth in peace.
Teddy works for Fuller’s company as a lowly package shipper. His mother Sandy (Alicia Silverstone) was once an opioid addict who later became a test subject for an experimental Auxolith drug. This put her into a coma, and she lives in a local care center, still emotionally tethered to Teddy, a situation that appears in his mind as if her soul is a floating balloon he holds tenuously by its string. Teddy’s father deserted them long ago, leaving Teddy and Don as the last family members living in unwholesome isolation in a dilapidated farmhouse where God knows what has been going on for years.
There are definitely shades of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) here, that unforgettable tale of heartland horror about a rural family once employed in the local slaughterhouse that is now long since closed. Cross that with another admirable cinematic antecedent, They Live (1988), John Carpenter’s brilliant take on Reagan-era corporate yuppies as aliens secretly overrunning the earth, and you’ve got the seeds that sprout into Bugonia.
There’s an action-packed act one, including a hilarious abduction scene complicated by the fact that Michelle spends a lot more time in the gym than…
Auteur: Eileen Jones
