Flasz On Film

Synopsis: When a pharmaceutical CEO is kidnapped by a deranged conspiracy theorist convinced she’s an alien infiltrator, a battle of wills unfolds in a basement prison—one that blurs the line between delusion and truth. As the lunar eclipse nears, both captor and captive hurtle toward a revelation that redefines who is really human—and who has been watching all along.

If you ever wonder what to expect out of a Yorgos Lanthimos movie, then you can safely bet on weird. The iconoclastic absurdist whose closest approximation of straightforwardness was his 2018 period piece The Favourite, which wasn’t technically all that straightforward either, has now come back with Bugonia. Based on a South Korean film Save the Green Planet! and written by Will Tracy, a former editor of The Onion who also wrote The Menu a few years back, this movie reunites the director and Emma Stone for the fourth time and for the second time with Jesse Plemons. And there isn’t really any other way to recommend it to anyone than by simply asking them to go out and see it while ensuring they’d keep their minds open to mild absurdity.

By any stretch of the imagination, Bugonia isn’t anywhere near as challenging or assaultive to the senses as Poor Things, nor is it as terminally absurdist as The Lobster or Dogtooth. In fact, it seems to me that Lanthimos understood that Bugonia is a film best seen by wide audiences because of the timeliness of its subject matter; thus, it’s weirdness is muzzled and kept at a reasonable enough dosage level to make the entire experience seem accessible enough to make sure viewers wouldn’t storm out of cinemas with their hands in the air and would do some thinking on the subject instead.

In many ways, Bugonia extends the rather popular trend of eat-the-rich satire, but it carves an intriguing niche for itself thanks to its perspective. It’s not really a rich versus poor tirade dressed in genre clothing, but rather a complex conversation probing the immediately recognizable mechanic forcing disenfranchised men to dig down online rabbit holes in pursuit of validation and belonging only to become completely radicalized and divorced from observable reality so much that they’d convince themselves that committing a heinous crime might be the right move for them. Equally, it is also perfectly positioned to suggest that billionaires might not after all have our best interest at hearts and at least from where we are sitting they might look completely alien to us.

Both ideas are explored literally in the film as Plemons’s character, who drowns in his many delusions, devises a plan to kidnap a high-powered executive (Stone), thinking she is a literal alien. Lanthimos then spares no expense in crafting an emotionally resonant and oftentimes absurdly Kafka-esque showdown of wills that puts the viewer in a rear naked choke and slowly suffocates with a progressively denser atmosphere. What is quite interesting about it is that in contrast to his other movies, Lanthimos plays much of his tricks rather straight which allows the viewer to make up their mind and establish a relationship with the narrative to a sufficient extent that they would take sides in this debate between (1) someone who’s completely off his rocker and (2) someone who doesn’t necessarily register the former character as a human worthy of empathy in the first place.

This way, Bugonia is both a fundamentally entertaining satirical comedy with a penchant for abrupt violence and an incredibly intelligent dissection of issues of utmost societal relevance. In fact, it eventually morphs into a de facto absurdist fairy tale with its radical final act turn, at which point the viewer will have hopefully invested in the movie enough not to be able to reject Lanthimos’s gauche weirdness on principle and will most likely see the wholy thing as poignant. Therefore, for a mind that’s open enough to engage with the story on a primary level, Bugonia is simply bound to resonate and might become a worthy companion piece to something like Parasite.

Simply put, Lanthimos succeeds in effortlessly crafting a masterclass of narrative subversion that ends up suggesting that the times we are living through might be humanity’s swan song and that maybe just because you’re crazy doesn’t mean you’re wrong. It’s a phenomenally dense and layered character study that probes the shifting boundaries between reality and fiction and furnishes an experience that is equally exhilarating, thought-provoking, and accessibly insane.

While challenging and upsetting in places, Bugonia remains most definitely one of those Yorgos Lanthimos movies you will be able to recommend to your colleagues at work without necessarily risking your reputation. It finds its place somewhere between Bong Joon-ho and Terry Gilliam, which is exactly where a movie needs to be in order to succeed as an emotionally effusive combination of strange, rogue and likeable.