Yorgos Lanthimos will forgive us if we evaluate his films on a sliding scale that ranges from the sub-zero alienation of early Greek work such as Dogtooth up to the Sunday-evening-telly-on-amphetamines near-normal of The Favourite. Kinds of Kindness, last year’s fitful anthology, was too busy to accommodate such glib categorisation. There was a sense of a project struggling to find itself.
With the entertaining – if only modestly ambitious – Bugonia, Lanthimos returns firmly to his artistic median. There is no shortage of weirdness in this adaptation of Jang Joon-hwan’s Korean eco-thriller Save the Green Planet! (2003). Isolated moments have a trippy lunacy that suggests diversions in the 1960s kids’ show The Banana Splits. But, for the most part, this is a taut chamber piece that could survive staging in a pub theatre. Nothing wrong with that.
Bugonia in the Old Red Lion would not, of course, look quite so fabulous (about the more phantasmagorical moments we will say no more). Robbie Ryan, Lanthimos’s regular cinematographer, is less free with the freaky lenses, but remains every bit as inventive. Early on he keeps his camera low to help Michelle Fuller (Emma Stone), CEO of a pharmaceutical company, emerge as just the wrong sort of heroic hypocrite. Once she would have been a man in a suit. Now, striding forward as if annexing disputed territory with her own stormtroopers, she is the sort of woman who – lazily heralded as a female role model – makes it on to the cover of Time magazine. She is the sort whose supposedly generous offer to loosen up working hours fails to conceal an expectation that employees will use this flexibility to spend more, not less, time at the virtual coalface. You know the sort.
Sitting at home in their battered shack, Teddy Gatz (Jesse Plemons) and Don (Aidan Delbis), his fragile cousin, sense something more fantastically threatening about Michelle. They believe she is an alien from an outer corner of Andromeda who, with cohorts in the skies, is set on annexing dear old Earth. Teddy has already decided that Auxolith, her company, is responsible for a decline in bee populations. (The film’s title references a Mediterranean belief that bees generate spontaneously from animal carcasses). The lads kidnap her, drag her to a basement and shave her head. The last operation is, apparently, to stop her communicating with the mother ship. “Hair are your aerials,” Danny famously said in Withnail and I. “They pick up signals from the cosmos.”
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Anyway, Michelle quickly reveals her talents as a shrewd negotiator. She starts out explaining how ludicrous are their delusions. Later, she suspects it might be better to play along with the madness. Does she gain anything by arguing? There is something of The King of Comedy about this kidnapping. The perpetrators are utterly clueless, but also touching in their pathetic derangement. The abductee is too baffled and outraged to bother being frightened.
All actors are at the top of their games. Of Stone’s many characteristic moods, the most compelling is the barely contained fury she exhibits here. Plemons remains a master at existential confusion. Delbis, as hapless victim of his cousin’s fantasies, proves a notable discovery in his first feature role.
Gouge away the carapace, however, and there is not much substance at the centre. We surely didn’t need to be told that life online has driven two or three generations to unhinged paranoia. The film’s ecological themes are stated without being much expanded or explored. No matter. This remains a careering exercise in mid-ranking Yorgosia that just about justifies its many indulgences. We should remain grateful that a talent so odd remains somewhere adjacent to the mainstream.
