[31 Days of Horror XII] Day 25

Director: Yorgos Lanthimos
Cast: Emma Stone, Jesse Plemons
Screenplay: Will Tracy
110 mins. Rated R for bloody violent content including a suicide, grisly images and language.

If nothing else, Emma Stone (La La Land) deserves Oscar consideration for her character’s resting HR face throughout the movie.

Bugonia follows Teddy (Jesse Plemons, Killer of the Flower Moon), a radicalized conspiracy theorist who, with his cousin Don, decides to abduct Michelle Fuller, CEO of the pharmaceutical company Auxolith. Teddy has convinced himself that Michelle is secretly part of an alien species called “Andromedans,” and this alien species has completely infiltrated human life in an effort to control and possibly extinguish humans. When she awakens in Teddy’s basement, Michelle has to convince these two abductors that she’s not an alien and needs to be released, but Teddy’s conviction to his ideas and plans will not be easy to change.

Bugonia is largely a film with three characters talking in a house as Michelle tries to work her way around Teddy’s psyche in order to escape, but Jesse Plemons is really the protagonist of the film, and it’s fascinating to watch the proceedings through a mainly villainous and unhinged character. We’re viewing a good amount of the film through his lens, and he carries most of the action, even though we would normally be attached to the Michelle character, which is such a Yorgos Lanthimos (Poor Things) decision to subvert the traditional experience. Even stranger, it kind of works. This is a scaled-down experience for the most part, not as heightened as Poor Things or The Favourite, but that scaled-down feeling makes the tension work pretty damn well all the way through.

Lanthimos and screenwriter Will Tracy (The Menu) give Teddy a rather tragic and, more importantly, pathetic character arc that allows us to follow him, and Plemons is incredible here. He juggles so many tones and emotional beats, and he’s doing what he’s doing for the right reasons, but he lives in a world of his own making, alone and looking for meaning, molded by the ravings of his mother. There’s never an excuse for what he does, but we can understand that his radicalization is practically hereditary in the film, passed down like a dominant trait.

Emma Stone has less to do here than in previous works, but she is victimized, forced to play along until an opportunity presents itself, and it’s the moments of character work she does before being abducted that contribute to her performance and elevate the rest of the film. Including her aforementioned resting HR face, Michelle has business heart, only really caring when it matters to her or when there’s a PR opportunity. Like Teddy, she has her own echo chambers, and she propagates her own narrative, the one that suits her and her situation best.

Bugonia is more straightforward than I anticipated, but it’s more commercially accessible for general audiences and the script is a lot tighter, too. Lanthimos builds tension steadily, and while it has an expected ending, the way it gets there is unexpected. Plemons and Stone are excellent as always, and I think Plemons carries the film well for what is essentially his first leading role. This is Yorgos Lanthimos’s Misery, and I wouldn’t have it any other way.

4/5
-Kyle A. Goethe

• For my review of Yorgos Lanthimos’s Poor Things, click here.