Yorgos Lanthimos, “Bugonia” (2025)
A remake of the South Korean sci-fi / black comedy film “Save the Green Planet!”, this work is just as dark in its comedy, with a strong nihilist message about the purpose of humanity on Earth amid other themes and issues of alienation, paranoia and the role of disinformation in fragmenting society and maintaining class warfare to the point that entire communities and social strata can be held under control by small elites while reality itself becomes indistinguishable from false information, delusions, misconceptions and stereotyping. Michelle Fuller (Emma Stone), the head of pharmaceutical giant Auxolith, is kidnapped by conspiracy theorist loner Teddy Gatz (Jesse Plemons) and his cousin Don (Aidan Delbis) in the belief that Fuller is an alien from the Andromeda Galaxy who, with her fellow aliens, has enslaved humanity and is ruining the environment by killing honeybees. Imprisoning Fuller in the basement of their farmhouse, Teddy and Don tell her that she has just four days before a lunar eclipse to negotiate a meeting between them and her people, so that Teddy can tell them to leave Earth alone. For the next four days then, Teddy subjects Michelle to interrogation, even punishment and torture, at which Don becomes uneasy and upset. Michelle attempts to bargain with her captors, threatens them and even goes along with their story about her being an alien. Through their conversations, and flashback passages in the film, we learn that Teddy’s mother (Alicia Silverstone) is in a coma in hospital as a result of severe side effects from taking one of Auxolith’s drugs in a trial.
The appearance of Casey (Stavros Halkias), a local police officer who once babysat Teddy when they had been much younger, and who now wants to question Teddy over Fuller’s disappearance, forces Teddy and Don to hide Fuller, and Teddy tries to distract Casey by showing the officer his backyard bees. Michelle tries to persuade Don to free her by promising to take him away from Earth, but Don becomes confused. What he does next ratchets the film to another level, where we discover some dreadful truths about Teddy’s past actions, and are almost led to believe that Fuller, beneath her cold-eyed reptilian personality, is a real victim of two psychotic individuals.
In a film with few characters, Plemons, Stone and (to a lesser degree) Delbis carry the film very convincingly as individuals from completely different worlds: Plemons and Delbis as very marginalised, isolated cousins who have not been able to move beyond their respective histories and traumas, but are stuck in a twilight world of Internet and social media rumours and conspiracy theories; and Fuller as a member of a cocooned elite who use their power to accumulate more wealth and influence at the expense of lower social classes and especially of people like Teddy and his mother. When Teddy and Don meet Fuller, there can be only one winner from the contest that arises as two worldviews with their particular delusions, stereotypes and value systems conflict. As the film progresses, Teddy reveals himself as a possibly psychotic, even sociopathic and manipulative individual – he subjects himself and Don to chemical castration, and tortures Fuller with electric shocks – while Fuller, despite the clear danger she is in, never seems quite fully human: she not only absorbs punishment that would severely injure normal people but appears more in control of her unique situation even as a captive, than Teddy and Don do as her captors, and one can almost believe that this character may be what Teddy claims she is.
The film makes very confronting observations about how people, even people who are clear victims of inhuman ideologies and abusive belief systems, can misuse power when they gain it, with devastating effects on themselves and others. In the film’s later moments, Fuller admits that her people have acted in irresponsible (if perhaps accidental) ways – but at the climax, she lies to her people about (spoiler alert) the failure of the human experiment on Earth, that humans will always be savage and violent and can never be trusted to handle power responsibly, and the aliens all agree that the experiment must be terminated.
A satire of many aspects of contemporary American society in decline – its increasingly fractured nature as social classes move farther apart thanks to propaganda and disinformation, the dominance of corporations as vehicles for elites to accumulate more power, influence and wealth as they mould society to their tastes and delusions – “Bugonia” ultimately presents humanity as irredeemable and corrupt. The film’s closing montage of images reflects a desire to cleanse the planet of its biped parasites and restore it to an ideal pristine state. The title “Bugonia” (in Greek, meaning “oxen-born”) refers to a Greek myth of honeybees being born from a dead ox, a metaphor for the resurrection of life from corruption and decay.