Bugonia: ‘deranged, extreme and explosively enjoyable’

Emma Stone makes her character so layered, you can hardly take your eyes off her

(Image credit: BFA / Atsushi Nishijima / Focus Features / Alamy)

Yorgos Lanthimos’ films (“The Favourite”, “Poor Things”) tend to feature characters who have “untethered themselves from reality and accepted behavioural norms”, said Wendy Ide in The Observer. Yet even by his standards, “Bugonia” is an “unhinged and savage piece of storytelling”.

‘Deliriously preposterous’

A remake of a cult South Korean film from 2003, it stars Emma Stone, the director’s regular collaborator, as Michelle, the CEO of a pharmaceuticals company. On her way home one day, she is kidnapped by Teddy and Don (Jesse Plemons and Aidan Delbis) – a couple of “disenfranchised conspiracy nuts” who are convinced that she’s an alien intent on destroying humanity. They chain her up in their basement, shave her head and demand to meet her leaders, leading to “a battle of wits” that escalates into “a bloody standoff”. The storyline is both “deliriously preposterous and uncomfortably of the moment”, and the film is “deranged, extreme and explosively enjoyable”.

Not Lanthimos’ best film

Michelle may not be an alien, but she is a cunning “corporate bot” for whom every exchange is “transactional”, said Travis Jeppesen in Sight and Sound. Teddy, the underdog fighting against our anti-human overlords, is scarcely more sympathetic. All the characters are meant to represent “certain toxic typologies of the zeitgeist”, but they are saved from being “mere types” by the brilliance of the performances. Plemons makes Teddy seem sincere, even if he is wrong; as for Stone, she makes her character so layered, you can hardly take your eyes off her. It’s not Lanthimos’ best film, said Alissa Wilkinson in The New York Times. And it’s quite bleak. But typically, he never lets you get comfortable. You have to keep watching just to find out what the hell it’s all about.