Yorgos Lanthimos has established himself as a master of the cinematic wild ride, and the nature of those rides and their degrees of wildness are ever-changing. He courted a wider public favor and Oscar kisses for the mean, queenly The Favourite and the feminist Frankenstein-opus Poor Things. He changes directions yet again with the unnerving head-twisting and genre-twisting Bugonia, a spicy remake of Korean director Jang Joon-hwan’s Save the Green Planet!. Kidnap kitsch, environmental dread, black humor, psychological ping pong, and shades of sci-fi somehow learn to live together in this strange and unique concoction.
Lanthimos has shifted the focus and bearings in his “adaptation,” including a nod to his Greek roots: “Bugonia” is an ancient Greek term for “the mythical practice of bees spontaneously arising from the carcass of a sacrificed ox,” a metaphor for rebirth from seemingly hopeless decay, as in humanity’s destructive nature. Blame it on the killing of a sacred ox.
In a way, we can find Lanthimos-ian parallels between his new film and his dark horse wonder The Killing of a Sacred Deer, from 2017, just before he gained a broader public profile. In both films, there is some serious — and somewhat surreal — mental gamesmanship and sadistic foul play between characters, motivated by one outsider’s grievances against a perceived power wielding foe/victim. The gripping cat-and-mouse horseplay between Jesse Plemons’s articulate ruffian character Teddy and the kidnapped pharmaceutical CEO Michelle Fuller, played by Emma Stone (a Lanthimos regular), is the very drivetrain which keeps this film chugging towards its apocalyptic ending. In Sacred Deer, the cool, conniving Barry Keoghan slowly manipulates and undoes the offending surgeon and family man played by Colin Farrell. In both films, some serious and sinister head games are afoot.
In marked contrast to the globetrotting locations of Poor Things, much of the action in Bugonia is limited to one creepy and artfully claustrophobic site — the raggedy farmhouse where the captive is restrained in the basement. Evil and possibly semi-psychotic mastermind Teddy and his innocent, sadly gullible cousin Don (Stavros Halkias) are up to their misdeeds in the basement, and then at a dinner which turns violent.
But this is no standard brand kidnapping caper, and questions abound. Is Teddy actually a crazed conspiracy theorist nutjob, or do his ideas have some credence? Is Michelle a morally dubious CEO or, as Teddy believes, an “Andromedan” sent down from space? And where have all the bees and flowers gone?
Amidst the film’s ample doses of tension and cryptic curiosities, one of the most strangely lyrical moments arrives at the end. A dreamy montage of stilled bodies — now in multiple locations — lull us into a tragic, comically meditative state, while Marlene Dietrich asks that pressing musical question, Where have all the flowers gone?
All of the pieces come together in this cinematic puzzle, including cinematographer Robbie Ryan’s tasteful eye, also behind the vivid visuals of Poor Things. Edgy yet poised performances by Stone (Lanthimos’s virtual muse) and Plemons are tour de force turns, worthy of Academy love. Another holdover from Poor Things and last year’s Kinds of Kindness, Jerskin Fendrix has cooked up a brilliant and cliché-free musical score, a thing of beauty and gentle surprises. Speaking of surprises, the finale is a twister, with a purposeful rather than just a titillating shock tactic. It causes us to rethink the dynamics of what we’ve seen in the previous two hours.
In the end, Lanthimos’s contribution to the cinematic art form is feeding on the power of the “rethink,” on multiple levels. Bugonia further confirms his status as an inspired outsider who has made inroads to the industry inside but sticks to his artistic guns. Not incidentally, the film even boasts its own cool font, a “hook” of the film.
(Catch Lanthimos and Plemons in conversation with SBIFF’s Roger Durling on Saturday night at 7 p.m., November 15, at the Riviera Theatre for SBIFF’s “Cinema Society” screening, info here).
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