PLOT

Director Yorgos Lanthimos

“Bugonia,” the new film from Yorgos Lanthimos, follows two conspiracy obsessed young men, portrayed by Jesse Clemens as Teddy and Aidan Delbis as Don. They kidnap the powerful CEO of Axiolith, Michelle Fuller (Emma Stone) because they believe she is an alien planning to destroy Earth. Cue the weird, the quirky and the bizarre: Lanthimos is back!

THE KIDNAPPING

Michelle Fuller (Emma Stone) in her office at Auxolith, where she is CEO.

The kidnapping sequence itself is worth the price of admission. Kidnapping Michelle Fuller (Emma Stone) is no easy task! She puts up one hell of a fight. That doesn’t prevent her from being restrained in the basement of Teddy’s ramshackle ranch house or from having her head shaved. (Teddy believes that it is through her hair that Michelle can communicate with the Mother Ship of her Andromeda alien Emperor and people.) The lunar eclipse is fast approaching and Teddy wants Michelle to take him aboard her Mother Ship to meet the Emperor of the Andromedans.

Teddy’s firm belief in how right he is and how wrong everyone else is rivals the MAGA movement’s acolytes. Trying to have a civilized debate with him can end in violence very quickly and often does. We are acutely aware of the danger that Michelle Fuller is in at all times. We worry for her every second that she is captive in Teddy’s basement.

Michelle Fuller (Emma Stone) held captive by Teddy and Don in “Bugonia” at the 61st Chicago International Film Festival.

One interesting promotional sidelight: the Culver Theatre in California offered free admission to anyone bald or willing to become bald (hairdresser on the premises beginning at 6 p.m.)  on October 20th to see “Bugonia.” Culver Theatre also had a treadmill screening of “The Long Walk” when it opened, another creative concept.

Michelle outside her home, just before being kidnapped by Teddy and Don.

DIRECTOR

Yorgos Lanthimos honed his skills as a director working for television and has since released “Kinetta” (2004), “Dogtooth” (2009, which won “Un Certain Regard” recognition as Cannes), “The Lobster”(2015), “Killing of a Sacred Deer” (2016), “The Favourite” (2018) and “Poor Things” (2013). “Dogtooth”was nominated for the Best Foreign Language Film at the 2011 Oscars.

His films earn well-deserved adjectives such as tense, darkly funny, absurd, odd and weird. All apply to “Bugonia.” Lanthimos has said, “Me, personally, what I want is to allow people to be engaged actively in watching the film. I like to construct films in a way that makes you feel a bit uncomfortable, be able to enjoy them, be intrigued, start to think about the meaning of things – and hopefully by the end of it, you’ll have some strong desire to keep thinking about them.” There is a theme of the media’s power, as well as of the ability of large corporations to walk away from catastrophes they have created. He has amassed 5 Oscar nominations with 72 wins in other competitions and 193 nominations.

The film marks the fourth collaboration between Writer/Director Yorgos Lanthimos and Stone, with Emma Stone winning the Best Actress Award in 2023 as Bella Baxter in Lanthimos’s “Poor Things.”

SCREENPLAY/SOUND/CINEMATOGRAPHY

The writing, based on a 2003 South Korean cult film entitled “Save the green planet” is credited to Will Tracy and Jang Joon-hwan. Robbie Ryan is credited as the cinematographer and Jerskin Fendrix composed the score. I enjoyed the use of the Pete Seeger/Joe Hickerson song “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?” near film’s end, which ties into Teddy’s work as a bee-keeper and his obsession with saving the planet.

THE CAST

Teddy (Jesse Plemons) and Don (Aidin Delbis) in the basement of Jesse’s home, questioning Michelle (Emma Stone).

Jesse Plemons finally gets to sink his teeth into a lead role. He is a consummate supporting character actor, having started young, playing roles such as Philip Seymour Hoffman’s son in “The Master” in 2012. Plemons also played a younger version of Matt Damon’s character in “All the Pretty Horses” in 2000. A Mart, Texas native who is the great, great, great, great, great grandson of the sister of Stephen F. Austin (for whom Austin, Texas, is named), Plemons is in the Texas Acting Hall of Fame as of 2016.  He was nominated for the Best Supporting Oscar for his role in “The Power of the Dog” in 2021, a year when he also appeared in “Judas, the Black Messiah,” another Oscar-nominated film.

More remarkably, he has appeared in 7 films that were nominated for Best Picture at the Academy Awards, starting with “Bridge of Spies” (2015) and continuing through “The Post” (2017), “Vice” (2018), “The Irishman” (2019), “Judas and the Black Messiah” (2021), “The Power of the Dog” (2021) and “Killers of the Flower Moon” (2023.) Perhaps most memorably, for me, was his appearance as stone cold killer Todd Alquist in Season 5 of AMC’s “Breaking Bad” television series. His earlier television work was as Landry Clark on “Friday Night Lights” from 2006 until 2011. (He was the only cast member who had actually played football.) He had a small role as a bad guy in “Civil War,” which starred his wife Kirstin Dunst in the lead role.

Jesse Plemons with wife Kirsten Dunst.

Plemons is great in “Bugonia” as a completely over-the-top psycho who has been brainwashed into his weird beliefs by his mother, Sandy, played by a mature Alicia Silverstone (“Clueless”). Teddy (Plemons) is so convincing saying “We are not steering the ship. They (aliens) are,” that cousin Don agrees to be chemically castrated so that he can focus solely on the task at hand. (“It’s all neurons, Dude.  Kill  the urges and be your own master.”) His co-star, Aidan Delbis, described as “a young actor on the autism spectrum, Lanthimos and Plemens met when he was only 17.  Plemons said of him, “He brought so much to the movie and elevated it in a way that nobody else could have.” Considering the proficiency of  Jesse Plemens and Emma Stone, this newcomer in his first feature film role was a key component of the film and definitely held his own.

Teddy and Don make the “Dumb and Dumber” 1994 team of Jim Carrey and Jeff Daniels look like Fulbright Scholars. In between Teddy’s focus on his bee hives and CCD (Colony Collapse Disorder) we get a glimpse of a tragic home life that has essentially wiped out Teddy’s own family of origin, although his mother Sandy still clings to life in a care facility while attached to tubes and ventilators. Whether verbally sparring with  Michelle about who she truly is (Is Michelle human or an alien from Andromeda?) or convincing both his cousin Don and the Sheriff’s deputy Rick (J. Carmen Galendez Barrera) who babysat Teddy in his youth and admits to molesting him back then, Plemens’s Teddy is totally convincing.

Aidan Delbis as Don in “Bugonia.”

THE BAD

The script leaves us wondering about the totality of the back story of Teddy and Don. It is not completely clear who did what to whom. What, exactly, did the Auxolith Corporation do to Teddy and Don’s nuclear family? Who  were these family members, besides Sandy? There is the implication that a large payment for malpractice because of a drug administered to Sandy that had horrible side effects was paid.  Who were the others affected? There could have been a more transparent explanation of this important plot motivation for Teddy’s actions.

Similarly, Don’s exact relationship to Teddy (yes, he’s his cousin, but…) is only lightly explored. Even the nature of the hospital-like structure in which Teddy visits his invalid mother is not completely clear. Is it a rehabilitation hospital….a regular hospital…an asylum…what? These may seem like minor points, but much of what happens in Teddy’s attempt to “save the world from the aliens” seems born of a revenge motive, not unlike Luigi Mangioni’s recent actions against the United Health Care CEO. Shouldn’t we have a better understanding of who did what to whom, when, and why? The themes of truth in the media, lying versus truth, people locked inside echo chambers of belief who cannot break out of their closed belief systems because of the hype of  Infowars- like sites: all topics are relevant and timely.

I also share the concern that  Emma Stone of “La La Land” (1988) not be lost forever in a symbiotic partnership with just films in collaboration with Yorgos Lanthimos.  We don’t want to see a talent like Emma Stone confined to playing psychotic odd-balls in every film. She has gone to the wall in this one, shaved head and all. Her stellar performance speaks for itself. However, I’d still like to see her as a normal girl in somebody else’s future film.

THE FINALE

For me, the end, the finale, was the weakest part of this psychological thriller.  Select whichever ending you desire, but the depiction of the one ultimately chosen was hokey. It was staged in a less-than-convincing manner. More significantly, it  undercut the true real-world terror of Michelle’s lengthy captive ordeal.

Someone else expressed the sentiment, “I liked it, but I wanted to love it.”   Thinking back over Lanthimos’s body of work, I’d express a similar opinion about most of the  creatively odd plots from Lanthimos over the years, with the exception of 2013’s “Poor Things,” which I did love.

From the perspective of a demonstration of acting by two professionals at their creative peaks, “Bugonia” was perfect.