Crazy diamond Lanthimos shines again. Bugonia is as weird as it is thought-provoking.

Two cousins agree to kidnap a high-value pharmaceutical company CEO believing her to be an alien. Their plan: to have her confess, then contact her Emperor with demands to stop her species from destroying the Earth by systemic means.

Director Yorgos Lanthimos has divided mainstream audiences recently with the fantastical Poor Things, and the unorthodox Kinds of Kindness. Bugonia also stars Emma Stone and Jesse Plemons, as well as Aidan Delbis, Alicia Silverstone, and Stavros Halkias. Despite the synopsis sounding like a hair-brained comedy, the film is very much not that.
How does it stack up with Lanthimos’s recent projects?

The story follows Teddy and Don, two emotionally troubled and unsettled American cousins. Living alone in their rural house, Teddy (Plemons) convinces Don (Delbis) that his investigations and research confirms that aliens live among us on Earth. Aliens from the galaxy Andromeda. More than that, these aliens are actively ruining the planet, and are singularly responsible for all of our issues. Teddy plans to bring them to justice, simultaneously having them undo the damage they’ve caused. All of this begins with their abduction of Michelle (Stone) an influential voice in chemistry and pharmaceutical fields…

2024’s Kinds of Kindness didn’t agree with me. Lanthimos was being too weird and unorthodox with that movie, while Poor Things hit everyone with shock value. Bugonia is, arguably, better than both of them, mostly because it is by far the most conventional. But that isn’t to say it isn’t weird; it certainly has its moments. The vibe throughout the movie is disquiet and unnerving tension. Punctuated by occasional levity from its screenplay’s self-awareness.

The film has a small cast. Ninety percent of the scenes are between Plemons, Stone, and Delbis. The two men have excellent chemistry together; with Plemons fierce convictions delivered with dangerous agency, and Delbis meek, innocent compliance. This is compounded and only reinforced against Stone’s Michelle, who after her capture, rails against their unreality with logic and facts.

All of this, leads into the momentum of the film’s subtext, that we live in a post-truth society. Plemons’s Teddy, scrawnier than we saw him in Civil War, with slick long hair and delusions of control, is an example of worrying trends today. People who deny truth to accept simpler solutions. Magical, insane, unreal solutions. Stone’s character is a company CEO, someone who looks after herself, and operates under logical, realistic views. The perfect opposition for Teddy. But unfortunately, she is at his mercy.

The meat of the story is Teddy’s interrogation of Michelle. Restrained in the basement of his home, he will not accept her not being an alien. When she attempts to enter his fiction by giving him what he wants; a confession, he rejects it. She isn’t speaking in her own language. The situation grows more and more unstable. Michelle’s logic cannot break through the echo chamber of unreality Teddy has built around himself.
In the background, innocent and complicit Don follows Teddy’s orders through the sheerness of Teddy’s rhetoric.

The performances are what makes this movie, of course. Plemons and Stone shine together. Why do films always have excellent dinner table scenes? Anyway, the two performances are excellent, the energy and confidence is clearly built from working together with Lanthimos in the past. They can go from taking emotional lumps out of each other, to having weirdly comedic beats at a moments notice. Such as Teddy’s “I tried to replicate what food you might have”, as he hands Michelle a plate of spaghetti and meatballs. Absurdity.

Is there a “but”? It wouldn’t be an objective review without one. However, I cannot get into any more details than I already have. The film leaves a lot up for audience determination. If you don’t like film’s that leave you with questions, or with a more ambiguous message… Bugonia might not be for you. It doesn’t rock the proverbial boat as much as Poor Things did, but there are a couple of ways of interpreting the story. I don’t believe any of these ways are as controversial as Poor Things, though.

Personally, I found the whole experience quite fascinating, if quite hard to watch at times. It can get intense and deeply unsettled, especially when you consider the real-world subtext. But the overall effect is completely solid, and I found myself invested in the characters, their stories, and what the movie was invoking.