Yorgos Lanthimos’ movies are not my cuppa. From art-house oddities like “Dogtooth” and “Alps” to prestige fare like “The Favourite” and “Poor Things,” all I see is an urge to shock that scans as cutesy and elitist. Lanthimos is too self-conscious to be shocking; one never senses that demons are being unearthed. Rather, a brand is being maintained. And so here we are with “Bugonia,” this year’s prestige Lanthimos fugazi.
A riff on Jang Joon-hwan’s 2003 “Save the Green Planet!” Lanthimos’ new movie concerns the kidnapping of Michelle (Emma Stone), the CEO of one of those corporations that have a variety of nesting monopolies. Early scenes of Michelle in her world, working out and doing her young-forever treatments, are promising.
Michelle strides into her chic tower of glass and informs her admin to tell everyone that they are free to leave at 5:30 if they want to go, though they don’t have to. The joke lands, on corporations that parrot H.R. clichés while pressuring their employees to hate themselves for not working as hard as possible without commiserate pay.
Kidnapping Michelle is Teddy (Jesse Plemons), an outcast who works in the mail room in the bowels of Michelle’s corporation. Teddy lives in his mother’s ramshackle farmhouse with his slow cousin, Don (Aidan Delbis), where Teddy rants about his belief that Michelle is a member of an alien race that’s suppressing humans through corporate culture. They poison us with fake food, underpay us, deny us benefits that Boomers accepted as a given, and are generally grinding us into the ground. Teddy snatches Michelle and brings her to the farmhouse and intends to hear her confession before they are to beam up to her spaceship and negotiate the aliens’ surrender.
This is a match, then, of two of our current boogey-people: the pitiless C.E.O. and the conspiracy-addled crank that spends his life online. Think “Misery” updated for the culture wars, with a particular emphasis on anxieties over climate change. I know climate change is real, but isn’t A.I. and the effortless rise of an authoritarian regime our current top concerns? As in Kathryn Bigelow’s recent “A House of Dynamite,” which asks us to fear nuclear warfare, there’s a sense of “Bugonia” being a day late and a dollar short. Both movies are concerned with yesterday’s apocalypse.
Teddy chains Michelle up in his basement and shaves her head, as he insists that these aliens communicate with their hair. Bald, slathered in ointment (don’t ask), Emma Stone is arrestingly elegant. Shaving one’s head is an efficient actor’s trick of suggesting a paring away of vanity and of superfluous gestures. Just ask Sigourney Weaver, so superb in “Alien 3” or Bruce Willis in “Pulp Fiction” and “12 Monkeys.”
For Stone here, the shorn hair suggests a modern Joan of Arc if she sold out and went corporate, a joke that’s subtler and more resonant than any other in the movie. Shorn of her style and brought down to Teddy’s grubby level, Michelle proves to be as ferocious in a horror-movie situation as she is the boardroom. Stone gives the character dignity, even if the joke of Michelle using HR tactics to attempt to handle Teddy is an old one.
As in “Misery,” it’s the kidnapper who commands most of our imagination. Lean and mean, seemingly a hundred pounds lighter than he was a few years ago, Plemons has a wolfish desperation here that the movie only occasionally earns. There’s a good moment when Teddy refers to his search for meaning, remembering how he passed through the entire digestive tract of extremism, from alt-right to far-left to everything much worse and in between. He says it’s like going into a store and saying “give me everything.” The need to belong and matter, and how that hunger aligns with modern diseased politics — all those qualities coalesce poignantly in this scene.
Otherwise, Lanthimos and Tracy aren’t that interested in politics. They want points for their edgy theme, but “Bugonia” is basically a slow, not-especially-suspenseful genre film outfitted with trendy hashtags — Lanthimos’ specialty. The script keeps furnishing Michelle and Teddy with plot gimmicks so as to avoid the sociopolitical conflict that their pairing represents. There has to be an explanation for Teddy’s disenfranchisement. Isn’t his typical-for-modern-America inability to make a living good enough? Lanthimos and Tracy throw in soap opera to make things more comfortable, more movie-ish.
The conflict that should be animating the film, of course, is that Michelle represents a class of human to which our world grants unlimited privilege at the expense of folks like Teddy. Lanthimos and Tracy do eventually “go there” in terms of class warfare, in a fashion that I found to be astonishingly crass. “Bugonia” is very contemporary in its obsession with wealth and money and contempt for the working class, and to establish why I’m going to need to address the movie’s ending. [SPOILER AHEAD]
Michelle is an alien. That’s fine — so far, so “They Live” — even if forcing us to contend with the implications of Teddy’s insanity would be more dangerous, more in sync with our modern disease of “choose your own reality.” But John Carpenter’s 1987 movie was sympathetic to the working class and critical of how it screws itself over with infighting —that’s what Roddy Piper and Keith David’s extraordinary brawl was about.
Befitting our contemporary fealty to corporate celeb culture, the filmmakers have rewired “They Live” to implicitly sympathize with the aliens, celebrating their annihilation of the human race or, really, the annihilation of the working class, since the aliens have been explicitly equated to our upper caste.
Do I think Lanthimos and Tracy actually want aliens to kill people who eat microwaved dinners and work in warehouses? No. They probably opted for hip nihilism without quite seeing the implications of their pandering to art-house audiences. (Tracy also wrote “The Menu,” which was similarly smug and incoherent on matters of class.)
This year in cinema may be defined as a year obsessed with our end. Seemingly every week there’s a parable of encroaching fascism, via corporations and A.I. and the rise of a militant right-wing and the fall of an impotent left. One does not have to look deep into our cultures, American and global alike, to see why these preoccupations are in the air, so I won’t belabor it. But, watching “Bugonia,” the third hopeless movie that I’ve seen this week, I thought: How about we stop making and watching movies and, you know, work towards avoiding this great fall that everyone seems to feel in their bones?
The answer to that question pertains to complacency: We hope things will blow over. “Anniversary” is blunt, with a talky, cautionary TV-movie vibe, but it’s uncannily in tune with this complacency. It captures the sensation of reading today’s apocalyptic headlines and guiltily wondering “when does this get so bad that it touches me?”
Married for 25 years, Ellen (Diane Lane) and Paul (Kyle Chandler) head a prosperous family of limo liberals, with a smattering of children who are lawyers and the occasional failed writer or aspiring anarchist to liven things up at parties. This is the kind of family that can afford a few black sheep, as Ellen is a revered Georgetown professor, an entitled Boomer who plays the leftie on reactionary talk shows and proclaims herself to be above politics, which means that she votes left, mostly out of loathing for the right, while enjoying establishment spoils. She is happily out of touch, in other words, with the resentments that are felt on both sides of the lane, by people much lower on the social scale. Meanwhile, Paul, a restaurateur, is so kind and progressive that he’s a virtual non-entity, congratulating himself on being sensitive enough to let Ellen run the show.
Lane and Chandler do something very difficult here, playing oblivious smugness without editorializing. Think of the Bradley Whitford character in “Get Out,” only stripped of the cartoon qualities that serve to distance the viewer, encouraging the audience to feel superior to the character for the sake of scoring easy sociopolitical points.
Lane is especially sharp, embodying a life of elegant and sexy erudition that many of us intellectual-artist types would love to have, while underscoring the self-absorption on which it is built. Lane never lets you know that she’s in on the joke as a way of safeguarding her performance against un-likability. And that honesty on Lane’s part allows us to like Ellen anyway; her slow-dawning horror is ours. Lane’s performance is a more sophisticated portrait of privilege than anything offered up by “Bugonia.”
“Anniversary” pivots on Ellen and Paul’s ne’er-do-well son, a doormat named Josh (Dylan O’Brien), hooking up with a young woman, Elizabeth (Phoebe Dyenevor), who is even smugger than Ellen and will go on to write a book that calls for a single-party system in America. The book is a phenomenon that would intimidate even MAGA, finally allowing America to succumb decisively to dictatorship. The movie is set almost entirely in Ellen and Paul’s sprawling waterfront Virginia estate, over several parties over several years as America crumbles, with Josh purging his beta resentments with a slide into corporatized fascism.
The script written by Lori Rosene-Gambino (story by director Jan Komasa and Rosene-Gambino) is schematic, pivoting on a single family that somehow embodies all factions in a new civil war. In this case, I’m inclined to ask “So what?” Komasa’s direction is tight, and the film’s sense of blossoming chaos is chilling and queasy. The movie indicts its protagonists, and us, for allowing atrocities to wash by in the hope that things will sort themselves out.
Perhaps this movie is underrated because it doesn’t turn the erasure of this country into a hipster joke, implicitly congratulating us on our resignation, and because it explicitly links corporations with the government in the project of social domination. That’s not hip anymore, as “Bugonia” illustrates, but John and Roddy would approve.
“Bugonia” and “Anniversary” are in theaters everywhere. The seminal “They Live,” which you have no excuse not to watch on Halloween, can be streamed on Peacock and The Criterion Channel.
