Screening at Venice: Yorgos Lanthimos’ ‘Bugonia’

A remake that feels like a vital renewal, Bugonia updates Jang Joon-hwan’s Save the Green Planet!—the 2003 South Korean cyberpunk romp; emphasis on the “punk”—for the modern age of online conspiracies. The film begins as a Coen-esque farce about two criminal cousins in over their heads, who kidnap a pharmaceutical bigwig in the belief that she’s a powerful extraterrestrial. However, it quickly morphs into a jet-black tale of woebegone societal stragglers, left behind by widening wage gaps, unchecked corporate monopolies and the contorting influence of an unfiltered digital world. Will Tracy’s screenplay adapts the basic premise and parameters of Jang’s original, but director Yorgos Lanthimos puts his unique tonal spin on the material, turning in one of the most sardonic Hollywood comedy-dramas in recent memory.

The remake has been in the works for several years; at one point, in 2020, Jang was even attached to direct. But the further Bugonia departs from its predecessor, the more it justifies its existence. Spinning out of a tale of a young couple kidnapping a man in a position of power, the film sees troubled apiarist Teddy (Jesse Plemons) conscripting his vulnerable, autistic cousin Don (Aidan Delbis) into a rash but detailed ploy to abduct bioengineering CEO Michelle Fuller (Emma Stone), a woman hailed by various business magazines as a modern maverick. As Teddy regales Don with his harebrained beliefs, their ramshackle workout routine in their rundown homestead is contrasted with Fuller’s expensive martial arts training in her luxurious mansion, before the duo kidnaps her in slapstick fashion.

The power dynamics of Bugonia fall squarely in a discomforting gray area. Teddy, a lowly, underpaid package scanner at Fuller’s Fortune 500 company, blames her for slowly killing the world’s bees, and even claims Fuller’s medicines poisoned his mother (who we glimpse in brief, surreal black-and-white flashbacks played by Alicia Silverstone). However, the remake’s inverted gender dynamics ensure that the ritualistic kidnapping is marred by the specter of domestic abuse—as is sometimes the case with real-world conspiracists. They confine Fuller in their basement and shave her head, believing her hair to be alien antennae, and they lather her with an antihistamine cream to further stifle her supposed telekinesis. It’s disturbing and grows increasingly absurd as Teddy and his reluctant cousin insist that Fuller summon her Andromedan emperor for a sit-down. Meanwhile, as news of her disappearance makes the airwaves, Casey (Stavros Halkias), a nosy, self-effacing cop with a surprising connection to the kidnappers, comes snooping, complicating their plans in amusing fashion while fleshing out the macabre details of Teddy’s tragic past.

What sets Bugonia apart from bog-standard tales of goons biting off more than they can chew is the fine line it walks between gawking at Teddy’s detailed thesis and taking his underlying anger seriously. In the original movie, the character’s analogue Lee Byeong-gu (Shin Ha-kyun) is portrayed with a wide-eyed mania, but in the two decades since Save the Green Planet!, Teddy and his ilk have gone from fringe actors to the median voter, courtesy of rabbit holes like Pizzagate and QAnon. Lanthimos understands that the danger of such unhinged political dogmas is that they stem from real frustrations that have become warped beyond recognition (not unlike the geopolitical mumbo jumbo spouted by Plemons’ character in Civil War). The film also gestures towards the twisted hierarchies that misguided anger can assemble itself into, between hints of Teddy’s mother indoctrinating him in moments of anguish, and Teddy subsequently doing the same to his suggestible cousin. All the while, the movie’s “victim,” Fuller, is framed through a tongue-in-cheek lens as the ideal product of a neoliberal order: a ruthless CEO who girl-bosses a little too close to the sun.

If there’s something distinctly absent from the movie’s purview, it’s any hint of real-world political ideology for Teddy to cling to. Hollywood of late has framed even its most susceptible characters as Schrödinger’s conspiracy theorists: equally likely outcomes of any extreme of the American bipartisan spectrum (this is the case in Bugonia too). However, the movie’s emotional contours are so detailed, and so powerfully rendered, that this gap ceases to matter. Instead, Lanthimos centers an increasingly paranoid saga steeped in dispiritingly sad convictions, whose twists and turns—while still mapped according to the original’s plot—end up breathtakingly ambiguous by the end.

Teddy’s scraggly appearance makes him an underdog on the surface, but Plemons plays him with a withheld rage that’s revealed in terrifying (and realistic) fashion. Delbis, meanwhile, proves just how effective casting can be when it casts a wide enough net (in this case, to include an actor on the spectrum), as he creates a deeply sympathetic portrait of a young man trapped by his immediate circumstances. However, the movie’s highlight is undoubtedly Stone, whose gravelly conception of Fuller is that of a cunning negotiator placed in an impossible scenario, wherein she has to pretend to be inhuman to placate her captors while maintaining her humanity as it’s slowly stripped away from her. She’s ludicrously, deliriously fun to watch.

Lanthimos and longtime cinematographer Robbie Ryan not only reflect the film’s uncomfortably swampy environment through exaggerated warm tones, but they capture the momentum of its bizarre rigmarole through their signature short lenses, which contort space in uncanny ways while exaggerating motion. This cartoonish texture clashes wildly with the story’s increasingly violent turns, which—in tandem with Jerskin Fendrix’s booming orchestral score—results in a movie that’s as darkly funny and viscerally entertaining as it is cynical beyond belief.

Not since Lanthimos’s work shaping the Greek Weird Wave has he turned in such an absurdist piece, whose central psychosis functions as a barely concealed metaphor for a world poisoned by podcasts and hazardous chemicals, lashing out at the people in power with the desperation of cornered rats. Its CEO-snatchers may be the ostensible “bad guys,” but in an era where it’s become all too easy to release simple, didactic “eat the rich” stories, Lanthimos’s comedy-thriller zeroes in on the compelling cognitive dissonance that might lead one down a path of reckless lone-wolf violence in the desperate pursuit of justice well out of reach.

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