Bugonia

Released 2025. Director: Yorgos Lanthimos

DO YOU KNOW ANYONE WHO BELIEVES aliens live among us, the Moon landing was faked, the Earth is flat, or some such nonsense? Or maybe you're one of them? Bugonia takes the idea of fringe beliefs very seriously while being marketed as a comedy. It's also weird in places and an acquired taste if by now you're not accustomed to the discombobulating style of director Yorgos Lanthimos, who birthed a selection of strange delights including The Lobster, The Killing of a Scared Deer, The Favourite, Poor Things and Kinds of Kindness.

The movie, a remake of Save the Green Planet! from South Korea, starts off as a satire with two bumbling semi-informed under-achieving cousins as the avatars for conspiracy theorists. Teddy and Don live in their own bubble of misinformation dissociated from facts and logic. Teddy leads while Don, who is autistic, follows with absolute loyalty.

The two men not only believe in the presence of extra-terrestrials but they are dead certain they have identified one and plan to kidnap her. The target is Michelle Fuller, the CEO of a pharmaceutical company where Teddy's mother used to work. The goal is to force the alien to arrange a meeting with the emperor of the Andromedan race before the next lunar eclipse in four days.

So far, so wacky. The comedy foundations are laid and the clumsy and laughingly inept kidnapping is almost slapstick in its construction. The two guys are woeful while Michelle is quick thinking and almost gets away with it. This is the only comic treatment in the movie that sort of works. From here on, the tone gets progressively darker to a point I wouldn't call it a comedy of any kind.

Teddy is the mastermind who subjects his victim to physical torture. First he shaves Michelle's head because apparently the alien's hair is what she uses to communicate with her mothership. Maybe it's a shocking sight to see Emma Stone bald and covered in antihistamine cream but it's not really playful or silly and all pretences at comedy are gone when Teddy attaches electric cables to Michelle and turns up the dial. You hear the rising buzz but it's the woman's muffled scream off-screen as she's being fried that chills the blood. Lanthimos lets this scene go on and on. Are we meant to find this prolong torture amusing?

Emma Stone and Jesse Plemons are dedicated to their characters, one a resourceful survivor in command of her power of persuasion even under tremendous stress, the other a certified nutter who cannot be dissuaded by any means. These two are designed to face off as each other's mortal nemesis. In another movie their clashes might result either in a farce or understated humour, yet their acting is calibrated for a thriller and negates the intention for a black comedy.

Bugonia would've been a better movie had it used the psychology of the feuding pair as a primary focus, as it's briefly utilised in a tense dinner scene but dispensed of promptly. Instead, the movie slides into an easy twist that isn't all that surprising. I wish it'd been either a pure kidnap thriller or a facile comedy, not this mixed bag of ziggy-zaggy, indecisive directions passing as satire.

It gets worse when Don commits suicide by blowing his brains out. The shock is tragic, not funny. Are we also meant to laugh when Teddy unwittingly kills his mother at the hospital because he's really just dumb as a brick?

The joke has always been on Teddy, the weirdo detached from reality whose foolishness eventually cost the life of his loved ones – until the table is turned and suddenly the joke's on us. Here's that big twist: Teddy was right all along! Michelle is really an alien! And guess what – the Earth is flat! Ha, who's the loser now?

That's not the end yet. What happens later I shall leave it to you to decide for yourself if it's meant to be literal or metaphorical. Either way, humanity is toasted because we should've listened to the crackpots with outlandish and unsubstantiated theories.

Yorgos Lanthimos has always been adept at skewering human behaviour, celebrating oddity and embracing the strange and freakish. With Bugonia he has turned apologist for conspiracy theorists justifying their illogical, unscientific and subversive views. All well and good in trying to make a satire on a couple of misguided stragglers, but to glorify these homicidal maniacs in such an offhand, shoulder-shrugging nonchalance is quite something else. And to ultimately reward harmful action and sheer stupidity is worse than puerile entertainment.

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