Film Review: “Bugonia” – A Delightfully Warped Night at the Movies – The Arts Fuse

By Michael Marano

There’s a profound catharsis in watching Bugonia, one that echoes the catharsis articulated by those who attended the ‘No Kings’ protests on the 18th.

Bugonia, directed by Yorgos Lanthimos. Screening in cinemas around New England

Yorgos Lanthimos’ Bugonia is a remake of the 2003 South Korean movie Save the Green Planet!, which, for the sake of journalistic integrity, I gotta admit I haven’t seen. So, while I can’t talk about the connections of Bugonia to Green Planet!, I can comment on its connections to the whole subgenre of “Women Held Captive by Nut Jobs” movies.

And to the captivity we’re all enduring, right now.

Bugonia concerns two dumbfuck cousins (Jesse Plemons and Aidan Delbis), who’ve had whatever scant IQ points they had at birth lobotomized out of them by QAnon-type online conspiracies. The oddly loveable and shaggy nitwits kidnap a high-powered pharmaceutical company CEO (Emma Stone), convinced she’s an alien using the levers of capitalism to destroy the planet. The pair demand an audience with Stone’s Andromedan superiors to negotiate for the survival of Homo Sapiens.

The vibe here, especially in the context of the cousins’ ever-nuttier conspiracy theories and the gender issues present, echoes William Wyler’s 1965 adaptation of John Fowles’ The Collector. A vibe maybe amplified by the recent deaths of the two stars of The Collector,  Terence Stamp and Samantha Eggar? The Collector, which nabbed the premise of Beauty and the Beast, added the motif of the captor being crazy, making the beautiful woman prisoner not just a captive held in her kidnapper’s physical space, but his broken mental reality as well. Think of the physical and mental imprisonments of Split, 10 Cloverfield Lane, Boxing Helena, Room, the made-for-tv classics, Sweet Hostage and Bad Ronald, and the gender-swapped Misery.

There’s another dimension to this the post-Collector riff on the Beauty and the Beast captivity motif…  the site of captivity becomes a microcosm of larger, current societal issues. The mental illness of the captor echoes the mental illness of the culture. Where does the insanity of the captor end, and the insanity of society at large begin?

And here’s where Bugonia gets really interesting. Our whole culture enables and encourages billionaire plutocrats to kill the planet. When it comes to the delusions of Plemons and Delbis in Bugonia, does it matter whether or not Musk, Peter Theil, and company are hostile aliens — if what they’re doing to our species and the Earth is exactly what hostile aliens would do? Ever see the Twilight Zone episode “The Monsters are Due on Maple Street,” in which aliens pave the way for their invasion by fomenting paranoia and distrust among Earth communities? How’s that different from what mutant, slug-boy dodgeball victim Mark Zuckerberg does with 3 billion Facebook users a month? Stone’s character allegedly approves the use of unauthorized and untested methods and procedures on unsuspecting subjects and consumers. How’s that different from what Elizabeth Holmes did to trusting schmucks via her scumbag Theranos grifts?

By making the alleged crimes of Stone’s CEO plausible, Bugonia dodges the issue that hampered Evan Peters’ tech bro villain in Tron: Ares and the last two movie iterations of Lex Luthor. No supervillain tech bro can compete with the insanity and malignancy of the real things. Stone plays a person of real villainy… not someone trying to get their hands on a hunk of kryptonite.

So, if society nurtures these corporate aliens (and it doesn’t matter a whit that they’re not extraterrestrial aliens) to spread destruction that would be the envy of H.G. Wells’s Martians, who’s to say these dim bulb cousins are nuts? Yeah, they’re acting crazy. But the world is crazy, so maybe their responses aren’t? The actions of oligarchs and corporate assholes are making their lives unlivable. And desperate times do call for desperate measures.

This ambiguity creates a kind of Stockholm Syndrome among the kidnapping cousins and the abductee and the audience. For most of its runtime, Bugonia is a work of theater. The story is mostly contained in a couple of rooms. Outside that theatrical space, real-life tech bros are making our lives just as unlivable as are the lives of those kidnapping cousins. If Bugonia is a play, then current events lend it a Brechtian Alienation Effect. The fourth wall is broken and on some level, the audience of Bugonia is made to think as they watch the film, to consider the insane ideas and issues being raised — and to weigh whether or not they really are crazy.

Everyone’s a hostage in Bugonia… the dum-dum cousins, Stone’s pharmaceutical CEO, and the audience. It’s an Absurdist movie, and the absurdity it envisions isn’t the goofy absurdity of Alfred Jarry’s Ubu Roi. It’s the sadistic predicament of millions of people whose lives have been imperiled (in some cases ended) by a self-proclaimed DOGE master, a transphobic, apartheid, sci-fi obsessed nepo baby with a breeding kink who wants to die on Mars, whose obscene wealth is based on slave labor imposed in a jade mine owned by his incest-obsessed daddy.

All these weighty and thought-provoking factors feed into the utterly twisted black humor that makes Bugonia such a delightfully warped night at the movies. There’s not a lot of hyperbole in Bugonia (for the most part). Stone hilariously fakes empathy for her employees while telling them they can leave work at 5:30 while at the same time telling them they really shouldn’t rings painfully true for anybody who’s had to deal with a shitty job and a sociopathic boss (which is everyone).  There’s a profound catharsis in watching Bugonia, one that echoes the catharsis articulated by those who attended the ‘No Kings’ protests on the 18th. In part, the attendees responded to not feeling alone in their horror and dismay at what Trump is doing. I got the vibe that the people at the screening of Bugonia I attended felt the same way watching the twistedness of the movie reflect the twistedness of the world outside the movie theater.

The sharing of that kind of catharsis is a very human empathy, of a type that the CEO (and/or alien?) that Stone plays is incapable. Rush out and see Bugonia and share that empathy, before the tech bros and oligarchs make you pay a subscription fee for the oxygen you’ll burn nervously laughing at the cruel inanity it depicts, and that we are all living in.

Novelist, editor, writing coach and personal trainer Mike Marano has a new story called “Land of the Glass Pinecones” in the GenX-themed anthology 120 Murders: Dark Fiction Inspired by the Alternative Era.