Bugonia (2025) * * *

 

Directed by:  Yorgos Lanthimos

Starring:  Emma Stone, Jesse Plemons, Aidan Delbis, Stavros Halkias

I wasn't a fan of The Favourite or Poor Things, which were both beautiful to look at and unpleasant to endure.  Bugonia, even with its pessimistic or sometimes downright nihilistic approach, is a better, more involving movie than the previous Yorgos Lanthimos efforts mentioned.  And this is a film about a conspiracy theorist wounded by life who kidnaps a CEO because he believes she's part of an alien race sent to destroy all of humanity.  

Bugonia isn't the most fun movie to watch, but it's still engrossing because Michelle Fuller (Stone), the sleek CEO of a biomedical company spends the movie with a shaved head (the kidnappers believe she transmits messages to the mother ship through her hair) and trying to reason with the two men named Teddy and Donny (Plemons and Delbis) who are convinced of her alien origins.  Michelle of course believes they're insane, and there are issues below the surface which suggest that Teddy and Donny were damaged long before they ever set eyes on Michelle.  

Michelle's life as a CEO is far from glamourous.  She lives alone in a modest mansion in the middle of nowhere.  She awakes at 4:30am, undergoes a vigorous exercise routine, and then drives into the office where she tells her subordinates they are free to leave at 5:30pm unless they have work that needs to get done.  We have quotas after all.   A funny scene involves Michelle recording a company announcement discussing diversity and the speech uses the word "diverse" every other sentence.  "You need to diversify your language," she tells her speechwriter.  

Michelle is a cold CEO who just seems out of touch with humanity, which is something CEO's of often accused of.  She doesn't scream or cry or beg her captors to appeal to their emotions.  She approaches it coldly and logically, like Spock would.  She's very calm, and you wonder why.  Teddy is easy to dismiss as a nutcase, and when he and Donny chemically castrate themselves in order to lessen the distractions to their cause, then it's hard to argue that point.  But when the local sheriff (Halkias) tells Teddy he's sorry for what happened when he was Teddy's babysitter and that "I never did that with anyone else" as if that's supposed to comfort Teddy, we see the deep wounds which drive him.  We also learn of Teddy's drug-addicted mother who was made comatose by Michelle's company's experimental treatments, so we question whether his crimes against Michelle aren't personal too.  

Bugonia, like other Lanthimos' efforts, holds us outside with people who seem cut off from ordinary cheer.  The actors capably keep this tone up through the violence and plot twists which aren't all that surprising but are still chilling.  This movie wasn't made to please audiences, but it's still satisfying on its own terms.