Bugonia: Yorgos Lanthimos masters the bleakest side of conspiracy satire

Save the Green Planet! (2003), by the Korean director Jang Joon-hwan, won a cult following for its novel approach to genre mash-up, fusing comedy, science fiction, thriller and horror elements into an over-the-top spectacle of violence. Yorgos Lanthimos’s latest is an adaptation and significant revision, via a script by Will Tracy, which repositions the film as an absurdist class-warfare parable set in the contemporary United States, with all its dystopian aspects amplified.

Representing the underclass, we have the conspiracy-crazed Teddy (Jesse Plemons), who has enlisted his neurodivergent cousin Don (Aidan Delbis) on a mission to kidnap Michelle Fuller (Emma Stone), CEO of Auxolith, a powerful pharmaceutical company with all the signifiers of Silicon Valley (though the film is set in Fayette County, Georgia, a suburb of Atlanta). Fuller, Teddy believes, is an alien in human guise from the Andromeda galaxy, bent on destroying Earth. In Stone’s portrayal, she emerges as something even worse, and yet depressingly familiar: a corporate bot – part Elon Musk, part Elizabeth Holmes – frighteningly adept at masking her inherent anti-humanity behind a mask of performative empathy, for whom every exchange is ultimately transactional. She is the arch sociopath; and yet, as much as one might incline towards the underdog, we can scarcely feel more sympathy for Teddy, who is himself manipulating his cousin’s shortcomings, persuading him to join him in ‘chemical castration’, so as to keep their minds on the task at hand (a nod to incel culture?).

A harrowing kidnapping scene involves a prolonged fight (the opening sequence shows Fuller undergoing intensive martial arts training as part of her morning routine), but they manage to stab their victim with a tranquillising hypodermic. She awakens in the basement of Teddy’s house, where the mastermind confronts her about her alleged alien nature and demands to be taken to her leader.

And so commences her struggle to manipulate her captors into freeing her. She utilises a range of tactics from the CEO’s pop psychology arsenal, from identifying with the role her captors desire her to play, to offering to help them, to admitting all her life’s wrongdoing as a corporate monomaniac and vowing to change, while clearly not believing a single word of it. Stone sells this doublespeak in the most convincing way, which inflects her virtual Rolodex of neo-lib non-starters with a dry humour. “Can we have a dialogue, please?” she asks Teddy. “Stop saying ‘dialogue,’” he retorts. “This isn’t Death of a Salesman.” Inevitably, the scenario descends into death and violence, with Fuller finally arriving at a successful selling point. Teddy’s choice of victim, which at first seems random, gradually begins to make more sense as it is revealed that Auxolith manufactured the opioid withdrawal medication that left Teddy’s mother in a vegetative state; Teddy, it turns out, is also a low-level warehouse employee of the company. (The latter is one of several instances of plot-point overkill that will likely leave some fans nostalgic for the reticence that underpinned the bizarro scenarios of earlier Lanthimos efforts like Kinetta, 2005, and The Lobster, 2015.)

More could have been done with a subplot involving a paedophile cop, played by Stavros Halkias, who was formerly Teddy’s babysitter. And some of the clumsier tacked-on metaphors – beehives as harbingers of life (the film’s title refers to an ancient Greek belief that bees regenerate from the carcass of a dead ox), for instance – could have benefited from pruning. The biggest element of overkill, however, is the gratuitous use of Jerskin Fendrix’s melodramatic score, which becomes a crutch used to punctuate each! and! every! dramatic! moment! One can only imagine how much more affecting certain scenes would have been had Lanthimos possessed the restraint to go without. In some ways, Bugonia adheres dangerously close to the clichés of thriller schlock without quite managing to subvert them. And while it’s played well, the film’s surprise ending feels predictable. 

What, surprisingly, sustains the film, burrowing it deep into the viewer’s brain for further contemplation, is its philosophical pessimism. This aligns it with other recent films, such as Bong Joon Ho’s Parasite (2019) and Radu Jude’s masterpiece Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World (2024), which utilise explorations of class as a departure point for examining our seeming impulse to self-destruct. “Sometimes a species just winds down,” Fuller argues at one point, fully complacent in her role as an accelerant in that process. What could have easily descended into an exercise in mere cynicism becomes, in Bugonia, a questing into the dark ideology of the present, revealing the ways in which it is so often driven by alienation. 

Satire is arguably the most difficult mode to pull off in narrative, and Lanthimos has clearly mastered its blackest, most classic principles. There is not a single character fully worth rooting for here – each is awful in their own way and meant to represent certain toxic typologies of the zeitgeist. What prevents them from devolving into mere types is the depth brought by the performances, in particular those of Stone and Plemons, who carry much of the film. Plemons isn’t content to abandon Teddy to the doldrums of loserdom: his naivety comes balanced with an infusion of idiosyncratic logic that makes his beliefs come across as sincere, if not compelling; his exchanges with Fuller in the basement make for some of the most arresting and unsettling moments in the film. Meanwhile, Stone paints Fuller with so many shades of intrigue and contradiction that one’s full attention is inevitably drawn to her whenever she appears in shot, rendering a wrenching portrait of an all-too-human ambivalence that is glacial and empty at its core. Lanthimos’s bleakest statement comes at the very end: in this world of irredeemable characters, it is perhaps unsurprising that everyone gets exactly what they deserve.

► Bugonia is in UK cinemas from 31 October.