Director – Yorgos Lanthimos – 2025 – US, Ireland, South Korea – Cert. 15 – 118m
****
A man with a grievance against a corporation kidnaps its CEO, believing her to be an alien with hostile designs on the human race – out in UK cinemas on Friday, October 31st
As Teddy (Jesse Plemons from Civil War, Alex Garland, 2024; Kinds of Kindness, Yorgos Lanthimos, 2024; Killers of the Flower Moon, Martin Scorsese, 2023) explains it, they live among us. While he and his autistic bother Don (Aidan Delbis) eke out their very ordinary lives with Teddy working in a warehouse for big pharma company Auxolith, the company CEO Michelle (Lanthimos regular Emma Stone) has her life on a platter: expensive home outside which she works out on the landing every morning, expensive SUV to get her to corporate HQ and back, and an army of corporate minions around her to ensure her every order is carried out. Even so, she still has difficulty speaking complicated lines for a corporate video. But that’s nothing compared to the ordeal Teddy has planned for her.
Teddy and decidedly unsure about the whole thing sidekick Don ambush her when he car arrives home from work and, after a struggle, for Michelle is used to getting her own way and is not a woman to be trifled with, overcome her after injecting her with a sedative. At their house they shave off her hair to prevent her communicating with the alien mothership. The pair – well, Teddy because he has convinced Don to keep quiet and let him, Teddy, do the talking – is quite open about the fact that Michelle is an alien, something the understandably shocked Michelle has to take on board and use in conversation with her captors.
An uneasy bond develops between Michelle and her abductor, with her identifying him as the son of a woman named Sandy (Alicia Silverstone from The Killing of a Sacred Deer, Yorgos Lanthimos, 2017; Clueless, Amy Heckerling, 1995) in a coma in a nursing home as a direct result of failed Auxolith experiments. Sandy is not an isolated case – there are apparently many other such victims. Michelle says she can help: in her car, disguised as a bottle of antifreeze, is a bottle containing the cure. The hapless Teddy takes it, cycles frantically to the care home, and administers it to his helpless mother.
Teddy must also contend with a visit from the local cop Casey (Stavros Halkias) with whom he has an unfortunate history. He is forced to leave Teddy alone to guard their prisoner, which proves to be his undoing since Michelle is nothing if not verbally persuasive.
Bookended by images of bee colonies – in addition to his other activities, Teddy keeps bees – this feels very different to Lanthimos’ other English language films, in part because of the US rather than British feel observable in Poor Things (2023), The Favourite (2018), The Killing of a Sacred Deer and The Lobster (2015), and in part thanks to isolated locations in large vistas of landscape typical of the-non urban US (his sole prior US film Kinds of Kindness has a definite urban feel to it). It’s surprisingly talk-y – not something one associates with the director, never one to eschew the visual element – although its reliance on dialogue never becomes a problem.
Stone is surprisingly good as the corporate exec shorn of her power and forced to play along with the clearly demented idea that she is an alien, while Plemons as her nemesis is suitably unkempt and loopy.
While one can imagine other directors making what is in effect a corporate kidnap story, Lanthimos’ trademark off-kilter strangeness makes it his own. That’s an uphill struggle, actually, because the film is a remake of South Korea’s arguably even odder Save the Green Planet!, (Jang Joon-Hwan – 2003) following much the same path (minus the kidnapper wearing a colander on his head and switching the role of the corporate captive from male to female).
If the property has changed quite a bit in translation from a South Korean milieu to a US one, the biggest change of all is something else again, worked out in the ten-minute coda at the end of the new film which ups the ante in taking the story to a place the original never went. If you described this coda to me in detail (I don’t want to give it away), I would think it a mistake, as it completely changes your perception of what has gone before (and also ups the production budget); yet watching it, to my complete surprise, it works – and is very effective too.
In short, whatever your expectations might be for another Yorgos Lanthimos film with Emma Stone once again one of the leads, this one breaks the mould and makes you wonder what he’s going to do next.
Bugonia is out in cinemas in the UK on Friday, October 31st.
Teaser Trailer:
Trailer: