This satirical science fiction comedy-drama is about the kidnapping of a female CEO, assumed to want to secretly destroy the planet Earth, where humans are living.
BUGONIA. Starring: Emma Stone, Jesse Plemons, Aidan Delbis, Stavros Halkias, and Alicia Silverstone. Directed by Yorgos Lanthimos. Rated MA15+. Restricted. (Strong violence, injury detail, coarse language and a suicide scene). 117 min.
Review by Peter W Sheehan, Jesuit Media Australia
The film is an English language remake of the South Korean film, “Save the Green Planet” (2003) by Jang Joon-hwan. It is a co-production of Ireland, South Korea, the United States of America, and Greece. Teddy (Jesse Plemons) is a paranoid bee-keeper who plans his life covertly and disturbingly, and Michelle Fuller (Emma Stone) is the CEO of a major pharmaceutical company which is highly profitable. The Director, Yorgos Lanthimos is Greek, and the word “Bugonia” refers to an ancient ritual, poetic belief that bees are sacred insects that spontaneously generate by imbibing dead (animal) carcasses.
The film mixes Absurdist comedy with horror, violence, science fiction, and satire. Lanthimos is no stranger to black absurdist drama – he directed the excellent “The Killing of a Sacred Deer” (2017) and both Emma Stone and Jesse Plemons have worked with him in the past. Lanthimos brings the same directorial flair to this movie that he did to “The Killing of the Sacred Deer”, and he has a special talent for combining horror and dramatic realism. In “The Killing of the Sacred Deer” he insinuated a disturbed teenager into a household with terrible consequences, and this film graphically depicts an Ancient myth, where similar forms of terrible behaviour are highlighted. In this film, black humour is linked with shocking events, and the movie skirts a thin dividing line between science fiction, reality, and the supernatural.
Emma Stone acts the CEO of a pharmaceutical company that distributed a drug that turned Teddy’s mother into a vegetable, and Stone entirely captures the duplicity of corporate organisations. The company which employs her is one that makes profit out of doing bad things to people.Teddy kidnaps Michelle; he knows what her company did to his mother; and he regards her as an “alien being”. He chains her, and brutally interrogates her in the basement of his house.
This is a film that has been directed intentionally to antagonise. Its humour is pitch black; its violence is gory; it offers a confronting depiction of a society that has lost its way; and the film is especially revealing about corporate greed. The movie graphically depicts a Society that is doomed not to survive. Psychotic paranoia, delusory thinking, confabulated fantasy, and other forms of mental disturbance are used cleverly by Lanthimos to depict paths through human chaos. The final scenes of the film are devastating, and make sense of it all.
Reviewed by Peter W Sheehan, an Associate of Jesuit Media