Since his 2015 breakthrough The Lobster, Yorgos Lanthimos has become one of Hollywood’s stranger indie darlings, known for injecting macabre tales with the adrenaline shot of star power, often in the form of Emma Stone.
Bugonia, for the most part, is one of his more straightforward movies, certainly compared to the gothic weirdness of Poor Things and the mad S&M tryptic of Kinds of Kindness. It sees Lanthimos join fellow auteurs Paul Thomas Anderson (One Battle After Another) and Luca Guadagnino (After the Hunt) in tackling the precarious current moment in American politics in a far more direct way than he has attempted before.
Regular collaborator Jesse Plemons plays Teddy, a smart, nerdy small town man pushed to the fringes of society after his family beekeeping business is decimated by colony collapse disorder (Bugonia being the ancient belief that bees were born from the carcasses of cows). He takes to the internet for answers and comes up with a hypothesis: it’s the fault of aliens from Andromeda who have insinuated themselves into human society in an attempt to weaken and enslave it.
Luckily for him, one of the aliens lives in his town: the Big Pharma CEO Michelle (Stone), who embodies elements of Elizabeth Holmes and Jeff Bezos. Alongside his severely autistic cousin, Teddy kidnaps Michelle in a hilariously farcical sequence that sees the two men, clad in Jennifer Aniston masks, almost fail to apprehend one small woman in towering Louboutins.
They manage to secure her in the basement of their dilapidated farmhouse and set about shaving her head (hair being the antenna through which she can phone home) and smearing her in antihistamine cream. And when you shave Emma Stone and cover her in antihistamine cream, she really does look like an alien, so perhaps they have a point.
The majority of the movie unfolds in this basement, with Michelle attempting to convince these conspiracy nuts, often using MBA business-speak, that she’s not an alien, using arguments that, of course, are exactly what an alien would say. It’s a frequently laugh-out-loud satire of the dangers of allowing people to fall through the cracks and into internet rabbit holes as well as a critique of American corporate culture (there’s a fun running joke about Michelle encouraging her staff to leave work at 5.30 – but only if they have no work to do, which is never).
Those two threads balance deliciously. Stone’s job is to be incredibly unlikeable but – probably – undeserving of being kidnapped and tortured. Plemons’ job is to be utterly deranged. Both achieve this with flying colours; by the end you’re rooting for them both to fail.
This being Lanthimos, the plot writhes like a beached octopus, becoming increasingly explosive, violent and demented, the whole thing held together by a thread of deliciously black humour. It is unmistakably a Yorgos Lanthimos movie and I, for one, am here for it.
• Bugonia was on at the London Film Festival (LFF)