Review: Bugonia – Alien abduction

Directed by Yorgos Lanthimos
Starring Jesse Plemons, Aidan Delbis, Emma Stone

8.5/10

Yorgos Lanthimos is certainly excelling in the field of weird cinema. In just the past two years, he’s given us the oddities of Poor Things, which embellished its bizarre concept even further through such cinematic strangeness, and Kinds of Kindness, where he treated us to three stories of increasingly bizarre human behaviour. What may be strangest of all is how he’s still able to maintain some sort of mainstream success, with Poor Things doing decent business at the box office and during the awards season.

And on the surface of Bugonia, it seems he’s delivering the weirdness again, with the simple concept of this film certainly seeming out of this world. Yet, from this outlandish launching off pad, Bugonia actually has a fairly grounded sensibility, particularly with portraying these oddball characters in a surprisingly realistic and even respectable manner.

The weird story here is adapted from the 2003 South Korean movie Save the Green Planet. Teddy (Jesse Plemons) and his cousin Don (Aidan Delbis) kidnap wealthy CEO Michelle (Emma Stone) because they suspect she is an alien trying to destroy humanity. So far, so strange. And Bugonia heightens all this with its off-kilter framing, highly dramatic opera-esque music, and the very peculiar alien feeling of how it presents modern humans.

The way these three main characters act within their situation actually seems realistic—Michelle displays some confidence about how she can be rescued from her situation due to her high-profile status, and Teddy also keeps himself so mannered despite his insane interrogating, actually coming across as a smart dumb guy rather than just merely a dumb guy.

There would be the temptation to make a character like him entirely comedic and unlikable. There’s definitely still some comic relief from him and his ridiculousness, but there’s also troubling context given to his life that suggests how pressurised his emotional state is. His mother (Alicia Silverstone) is in a coma, which has an association with Michelle’s company, giving him personal grief with this alleged alien, as well as an allusion to abuse he suffered as a kid by his babysitter, who’s now a cop (Stavros Halkias) trying to make amends for this history. It may not be explicitly mentioned, but this is all very likely why he’s delved so far into such a bonkers belief.

After what feels like such a claustrophobic, tight-knit story in a confined space with very few characters, the ending does blossom out to take all of humanity into consideration. It’s an extraordinary ending sequence, perhaps the best ending of a film this year, that ties things up with such playful reconsideration for everything that’s just come before it.

Bugonia is another winner for Lanthimos and arguably one of his better films because of how committed it is to its premise, with each step that it carefully takes feeling as satisfying as it is surprising. It’s a head trip as to be expected, but done so in such a startling way, it’s sure to make you feel a newfound appreciation, and disdain, for our planet and all the creatures on it.

DAVID MORGAN-BROWN