Stone teams up with director Yorgos Lanthimos for another bizarre but brilliant film
Anyone who has seen a Yorgos Lanthimos film will by now know to expect something fairly deranged. Remember the euphoric mania of feminist Frankenstein reboot Poor Things, in which a baby’s brain was implanted into its mother’s body? Or the farcical palace intrigue of The Favourite? Or the curdling sexuality of The Lobster, where couples had to pair off or risk being transformed into animals?
In Bugonia, the Greek director and long-time Emma Stone collaborator flips this type of insanity on its head by making the kinds of wacko conspiracy theories that proliferate on Reddit start to appear, well, sane. And boy, is it entertaining.
This is Lanthimos’s fourth feature film with Stone, who here plays Michelle Fuller, the terrifyingly efficient CEO of a big pharma company. She’s the kind of woman who gets up hours before work to beat the hell out of her personal trainer and implement an eye-wateringly expensive skincare regime before click-clacking her way into the office in towering Louboutins spouting unconvincing platitudes to her employees about how they should all feel free to leave early “if you want”.
Meanwhile, on the other side of town, deadbeat Teddy (Jesse Plemons), mired in a sordid online echo chamber, is cooking up a plan to save humanity from alien invasion together with his guileless cousin Don (tenderly played by Aidan Delbis).
In a protracted chase scene that involves painfully shoddy combat by our two self-proclaimed alpha males, paper Jennifer Aniston masks and some hair clippers, they capture Fuller, whom they believe to be an alien (aliens, naturally, communicate via their hair – Stone really can rock a buzz cut) in the hope that she will lead them to the mothership. From there, they will instigate the withdrawal of the oppressive alien overlords from earth and the liberation of the human race. Naturally.
Lanthimos and screenwriter Will Tracy have adapted this from the South Korean film Save the Green Planet and have a lot of fun playing with its extraterrestrial aesthetic. Stone looks otherworldly with her fierce eyes and pinched nose, lit harshly and shot repeatedly from above by cinematographer Robbie Ryan (who also worked on Poor Things and The Favourite, but brings a grittier flavour to the screen here). She is constantly accompanied by the kinds of accoutrements of the uber-wealthy – oxygen-aided running equipment, cryo-therapy face masks – but which have the amusing effect of making her look unhuman.
But there’s also something more serious going on. As Teddy and Don bravely attempt bad press-ups on their dirty floor and eat freezer pancakes with ketchup lamenting insufficient healthcare, and Fuller swallows pricey vitamin supplements and lies smoothly about her company’s cock-ups, one wonders: don’t the rich and poor inhabit different planets after all?
Down in Teddy’s basement, things go downhill as Fuller tries to engage in practised corporate dialogue with men who simply cannot be reasoned with. Stone and Plemons are a tremendous double-act, with Plemons bringing a deep humanity to a character capable of appalling things (there are also moments where Stone may actually be too good at imbuing her character with the opposite, so deeply unlikeable and robotic does she make Fuller).
There’s more than a whiff of incel culture here (Teddy and Don have sensibly chemically castrated themselves to avoid the fairer sex’s malign influence), and also of the QAnon notion of lizards inhabiting human bodies (“They’re easy to spot when you know what you’re looking for,” says Teddy.).
Perhaps it’s best not to look too closely for a wholly coherent narrative. There’s a lot going on, some of it very on the nose, some of it inconclusive, and (bar a cheeky little twist at the end) Lanthimos doesn’t really land anywhere specific: a choice which is bound to annoy those after a more definitive indictment of the dangers of internet culture, or the moral implications of the wealth gap.
What the film does so well, though, is bring enormous compassion to a story that initially seems to despair for the world. Maybe there isn’t ultimately some “masterplan”, as Fuller tells Teddy, and maybe Lanthimos doesn’t have one either. It’s a return to form for the film-maker following last year’s limp Kinds of Kindness (also starring Plemons and Stone), a macabre and raucously mischievous comedy that forces us to ask whether we’re really all as rational as we assume.
In cinemas now
