‘Bugonia’ is definitely about alienation, even about aliens themselves: NPR

As the end credits began to roll during my screening of Bugoniathe audience remained silent in the darkness for several long seconds.

Director Yorgos Lanthimos’ latest film follows Teddy (Jesse Plemons), a grimy and raw conspiracy theorist who, alongside his cousin Don (Aidan Delbis), kidnaps Michelle (Emma Stone), a steely Big Pharma CEO, because he himself is convinced she is an alien.

It is of course not uncommon for a film to lull a room full of people into a moment of collective contemplation. Such silences take various forms depending on the film that precedes them: stunned, pensive or charged with emotion. But Bugonia is a film by Lanthimos. Which explains why, at the conclusion, the audience decided to take a moment to sit with him, before a lone voice pierced the darkness:

“The damn,” he shouted, “that was that?”

Reader, I smiled. For those of us who count ourselves firmly in the Lanthimos pool as a filmmaker, this cry of unhappy, indignant confusion is one of the reasons we love seeing his films with a crowd. Because while it’s true that art comforts the disturbed and disrupts the comfortable, the occasional plaintive cry of disturbed confusion can make the cinematic experience all the more rich and enjoyable. Save your Milk Duds – give me another theatergoer’s outrage, in a bucket, with extra butter.

Many of Lanthimos’ previous films have garnered similar reactions, as he tends to traffic in anything dark and downbeat. That’s just who he is: what Spielberg is to childlike wonder, Lanthimos is to the abject misery of the human condition. And while he’s made films that have received wide audiences and rave reviews, his fundamental sensibility isn’t designed for mainstream success, and some of us love him all the more for it. So you go into a Lanthimos film expecting negative reactions from people who just want to sit down and have a good time at the cinema.

But this time? This guy who screamed during my screening of Bugonia? He’s right.

Do the most Lanthi

For as enjoyable as I found the film (until its final three minutes and 37 seconds, which we’ll talk about later), it only manages to qualify as a mid-tier Lanthimos, mainly because it doesn’t register as a pure expression of his cinematic sensibility.

The reason why certain Lanthimos films — dog tooth (2009), The killing of a sacred deer (2017), Kinds of Kindness (2024) and above all The lobster (2015) – feels so much more satisfying and essential than its Oscar winners – The favorite (2018) and Poor things (2023) — is simple: he co-wrote them, with his long-time collaborator Efthimis Filippou.

This is important, because whenever Lanthimos appears as both director and (co-)writer, he brings a consistent (some would say rigid), characteristic (some would say mannered) style. This approach tends to present deliberately hilarious dialogue, delivered with a flat affect that borders on the monotonous, which has the net effect of rendering the characters unable to access the strong emotions bubbling just beneath the film’s deadpan surface.

There is also, and not for nothing, this gloom. The abject, the unspeakable (and therefore very funny), a kind of sadness that I associate with the comics of Charles Burns and Chris Ware – a sadness that is utter, inexorable, and infinitely, hilariously, resilient.

Bugonia was written by Will Tracy.

Here, Lanthimos cannot boast his signature style – that affectless affect – because the story he tells does not allow it. He’s forced to take a more naturalistic approach, because he needs the character of Emma Stone – the CEO locked in Plemons’ basement – ​​to be fully, recognizable and empathetic. He wants to place us in that basement alongside him, making the astute, calculated assessments of his situation that we imagine we would make if we were in his predicament. Stone is consistently wonderful as a woman who skillfully reads the mood and body language of her captors and expertly negotiates her way to freedom.

For the film to work – and it largely does – it can’t exist in the hermetically sealed bubble that characterizes the films Lanthimos directs and co-writes. It has to feel more immediate, more grounded, more real.

But there’s a coldness here, a coldness absolutely necessary in films like The lobster And The killing of a sacred deerwhere he works to demarcate and define the idiosyncratic world. In BugoniaHowever, this same dispassionate suppression of the director feels out of place and can’t help but come between the audience and the characters, numbing our reaction to them.

Ready for their close-up

This effect of distance is amplified by Lanthimos’ deliberate but frustrating reluctance to let his two main actors truly act together, in any given scene.

Bugonia lives in a series of alternating close-ups of Stone’s and Plemons’ faces. We pay attention to a given character as they speak, then we switch to the other character who is saying their point of view, then back to the other character as they resume their conversation.

But to act, as they say, is to react, and Lanthimos largely denies us plans for reaction. It’s something we first notice subconsciously: Teddy says something provocative that we know Michelle would object to, but we never cut him off, we stay on Plemons’ face. When he finishes speaking, we cut to Michelle, who insults Teddy, but if that makes him angry, we won’t know until it’s her turn again.

Aidan Delbis as Don and Jesse Plemons as Teddy.

Atsushi Nishijima/Focus Features

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Atsushi Nishijima/Focus Features

Emma Stone as Michelle.

Atsushi Nishijima/Focus Features

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Atsushi Nishijima/Focus Features

This is a deliberate choice, or course: Lanthimos wants the film to read as a battle of wills between its protagonists. These are two people who take turns forcefully asserting their opposing versions of reality, without ever listening to each other, without giving up any ground. They speak has each other, but nothing ever penetrates, nothing ever influences the other person, even minutely; they just keep talking.

(Unlike Delbis’ character, Donny, whose entire presence in the film exists as a series of reaction shots. This is also intentional: Donny is the heart of the film, its soft, squishy center; he is a sponge who absorbs absolutely everything Teddy and Michelle say to him, even if they contradict each other; he spends the entire film being used, ruthlessly manipulated.)

The decision to split the film this way makes sense on a technical level, I suppose, because it serves the film’s themes of loneliness and alienation. But it’s never anything less than frustrating to watch two of the best screen actors of the era deliver what amounts to a series of choppy mini-monologues instead of engaging in a real exchange of dialogue.

Worse. Needle drop. Never.

I have now spoken to several critics and non-critics about the film and a sort of consensus has developed: several say they like the film in general, but don’t like, or hate, the ending.

I’ll be careful here, but: When I hear this take, I always follow up with them. Do you mean the resolution of the film, or last minutes from the movie?

If they tell me they don’t like the way the film resolves a central question about the presence or absence of aliens, I completely disagree with them, because I think the final act of the film is quite hilarious and includes some terrific and grotesquely beautiful visual imagery.

But if they tell me they hated those last few minutes — those last three minutes and 37 seconds, to be precise, when Marlene Dietrich’s cover of “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?” is played? So yes, they are right, it’s terrible.

Mind-boggling terrible, and a testament to the power of a single musical choice – a single, punishingly literal, ham-fisted, painfully obvious needle drop that occurs at the very, very end of a film – to poison the two hours of innovative and exciting filmmaking that precedes it.

It’s not just the song itself, but the fact that Lanthimos chooses to let it unfold in its entirety, all five verses. That’s a lot of screen time to devote to a single piece, and when you take into account that it plays over images that become extremely repetitive and overbearing after two minutes, the choice is so mysteriously bad that this Lanthimos enthusiast found himself wondering how a filmmaker he admires so much could cross out the takedown in such an exhaustive and exhausting manner.

When will they ever learn?

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