The story follows a conspiracy-obsessed white American man, Teddy (Jesse Plemons), who persuades his loyal cousin Don (Aidan Delbis) to help kidnap Michelle Fuller (Emma Stone), the CEO of a biomedical company.
What remains keeps largely to the compelling battle of wits between abductor and abductee, the latter gender-swapped from the original film. Tracy, Lanthimos and co-producer/star Stone craft a focused study in class dynamics that demands its viewer constantly refocus their own values and ethics.
View Green Video on the source websiteMichelle, meanwhile, is every bit the “girlboss” archetype: self-serving, powerful, glib. Yet, the violence she endures is horrible, while the film-makers clearly enjoy watching her smoothly manipulate the confused Teddy.
As the story progresses, Michelle drops more details about the Andromedan race, supposedly invented on the spot to placate Teddy. Meanwhile, we discover more grotesque details about Teddy’s backstory. The details accumulate, and complicate the film’s already slippery point of view. At the film’s end, both Teddy and Don are dead and Michelle – revealed to have been an alien all along – returns to her people and pushes a button that instantly kills all Earthlings. Lanthimos closes with a series of upsetting but rather breathtaking tableau shots of human corpses, all having been shut down painlessly in the middle of their day-to-days. The animals remain and thrive.
Its spaces, even Michelle’s clean corporate office, thrum with the same sense of unease and looming violence as the excellent Jerskin Fendrix score that ties the action together. Many similar instincts are present in Bugonia’s biggest competition, Oscar’s runaway favourite this year: Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another. That film’s frontrunner status lies not just in its obvious quality, and the “overdue win” narrative that attends the legendary Anderson, but in its specific contemporary political motifs and viewpoint, from its opening raid on an immigration facility onward.
Audiences and awards voters have been drawn to the film’s floating sense of representing and critiquing the here-and-now; the notion, perhaps, that supporting it somehow sticks it to someone.
It’s stirring… and in its own way, intrinsically Hollywood, from a film-maker who grew up just a few miles over from Tinseltown’s great white sign. It’s a film that endorses revolutionary violence, while keeping this safely in the confines of spectacular entertainment. Bugonia, on the other hand, never once draws back from its slide into madness. It remains nervy to the end.
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