Who hasn’t wondered if their CEO or anyone leading a major corporation is from another planet and trying to destroy us?
Out of touch, unrelatable, speaking in foreign corporate lingo, and running companies that are doing more harm to humans than good – maybe it isn’t too much of a stretch that they are not really “one of us”.
The idea has certainly consumed Teddy (Jesse Plemons).
The struggling factory worker, beekeeper and conspiracy theorist is convinced that Michelle Fuller (Emma Stone), a rich, high-powered CEO of a pharmaceutical company, is an alien from the Andromedan species living among humans.
But she isn’t here just to climb the corporate ladder and set up a cushy retirement plan – apparently, she intends to destroy Earth and the human race.
Teddy recruits his impressionable cousin Don (Aidan Delbis) to help him kidnap Michelle and hold her hostage in their basement to convince her to call off the plan and leave Earth.
They go as far as shaving her head so she cannot communicate with her mothership through her hair, which sends the signals.
While chained up, Michelle tries various psychological tactics to convince her captors that she is, indeed, human and to let her go but the longer the situation continues, the more dangerous it gets.
What else would one expect from director Yorgos Lanthimos?
While the script belongs to Will Tracy, who has taken inspiration from the 2003 South Korean film Save the Green Planet!, this material is right up Lanthimos’ alley.
He is one of the most interesting directors currently making films, with his imagination running rampant with The Lobster and Poor Things.
While his films do not always hit the bullseye (The Killing of a Sacred Deer, Kinds of Kindness), they are never boring, uninteresting or without intriguing concepts or stories.
Despite Bugonia’s wacky plot, it is among his most grounded work.
Yes, it is definitely quirky and has his signature laugh out loud bonkers moments, but the modern setting and realism leaning approach makes this one slightly more subdued (for the most part) and tonally more aligned with The Favourite than Poor Things.
Bugonia marks Lanthimos’ fourth collaboration with Stone and third with Plemens – and it continues their winning streak, with the two leads each a force in their own right, and they are matched by incredible newcomer Delbis.
Bugonia’s satiric jabs at corporate America are unsubtle but delicious (Michelle is tickled to announce a new company 5pm knock-off time policy, but only if staff have completed their work) and the bee analogy is heavy handed (the title gives it away up front).
But this is a wild ride that, if you have a strong stomach (it gets fairly nasty), you will find rewarding and even craving another collaboration from the three creatives.
8 out of 10
