Back in the early 1970s, the stubbornly independent rock ‘n’ roller Neil Young had a couple of big hit albums with “After the Gold Rush” and the soft, commercial “Harvest.” The albums, he once said, “put me in the middle of the road. Traveling there soon became a bore, so I headed for the ditch.”
This is not to say that Yorgos Lanthimos is a filmmaking version of Young, but there’s something about the Greek director’s work since his critically and commercially successful “The Favourite” and “Poor Things” that suggests that he, too, feels more at home in messier, less friendly terrain. Those two hits weren’t conventional by any means, but something about their period trappings made the casually twisted surrealism of Lanthimos’ work feel lush and fun, earning him more than $200 million worldwide and 21 Oscar nominations between them. And since then, he has responded to success with the triptych “Kinds of Kindness,” which felt closer to his earlier, even weirder films like “Dogtooth” and “The Killing of the Sacred Deer”; and now with “Bugonia,” a Lanthimonian riff on sci-fi, conspiracy theories and lots more.
“Bugonia,” which had its world premiere on Thursday at the Venice Film Festival, is twisted and unforgiving – and if it boils down to a hysterical mano a mano face-off between a pair of gifted Yorgos vets, Emma Stone and Jesse Plemons, it would rather mess with the audience than play off the goodwill of his greatest hits.
It does share one thing with “The Favourite” and “Poor Things,” because they’re the only three Lanthimos films that don’t credit the director as a screenwriter. Will Tracy adapted it from South Korean film “Save the Green Planet!” and Lanthimos came on board after producer Ari Aster had developed it for the original Korean director, Jang Joon-hwan.
In both films, a rural man besotted with conspiracy theories kidnaps a high-powered executive, convinced that the CEO is from the planet Andromeda and that the fate of the world depends on a face-to-face meeting with the alien leader that can only take place during an upcoming lunar eclipse.
And that’s just the beginning of the kind of wild theorizing that could make QAnon look sensible. Plemons’ Teddy is clearly out of his mind as he spins impossibly elaborate theories that only he has been able to figure out, but he’s also a surprisingly good debater. The actor, who had something of a tour de force playing three different roles in “Kinds of Kindness,” turns Teddy into a complex and endearing wack job with unexpected depths and enough charm to even make him endearing, at least until he starts torturing Stone’s pharmaceutical CEO Michelle, whose company is partly responsible for the near death of Teddy’s mother.
As for Stone, she clearly relishes playing in Lanthimos’ ditch. She’s now made four movies with the director in seven years, part of a résumé that suggests her Oscar for “La La Land” freed her up to be as nutty as possible: a quadruple helping of Yorgos, plus a “Zombieland” sequel, another conspiracy theory-palooza in “Eddington” and the TV series “The Curse,” which messed with viewers’ minds just as much as Lanthimos.
She plays an unbelievably driven and fierce CEO whose idea of being a caring boss is to tell her employees that they can go home at 5:35 instead of 6:00 … but, you know, only if all of their work is done. When she wakes up tied to a bed in Teddy’s basement, it’s time for a doomy, crazy showdown between a calculating woman who cannot believe she’s been kidnapped by a pair of addled beekeepers who’ve undergone chemical castration so as not to be tempted by her feminine wiles – or not exactly feminine, according to Teddy. “It’s not a person named Michelle Fuller,” he insists. “It’s the Fuller humanoid.”
How does he know? Easy. “Narrow feet, slight overbite, semi-protruding earlobes, high hair density.” The first thing he does, once she’s unconscious, is to have his partner Don shave off that hair, which he says is enabling her to communicate with and be tracked by the mothership. “I’m not a dips–t,” he insists. “I’m a guy who knows what’s happening.”
The, um, Fuller humanoid gives as good as she takes, though, eviscerating many of his arguments and scoffing at others. When he mispronounces the word shibboleth, she corrects him, which sends Teddy into a fury. “What?” she says. “Is grammar a false Andromedan construct?”
Then again, do any of them, and any of us, know what’s really happening in a Yorgos Lanthimos movie? “Bugonia” suggests not, or, at least, it suggests that the director wants to keep us on our toes.
The film loves contrasting the sleekness of Michelle’s work environment with the rustic messiness of Teddy’s cabin; it’s alternately sleek and grungy, which lets composer Jerskin Fendrix (an Oscar nominee for “Poor Things”) swing from his signature quirky minimalism to full-scale orchestral bombast to accompany the assorted freak-outs on the part of everyone involved.
And make no mistake, the freak-outs get increasingly freaky and increasingly out there, with a polite kidnapping escalating to torture (bad, but nowhere near as disturbing as in the Korean original), shotgun blasts and blood-soaked party dresses, as befits a full-scale sci-fi horror extravaganza. Meanwhile, any time a logical explanation (or even an illogical one) seems imminent, Lanthimos pulls the rug out from under his audience’s expectations.
It’s “Misery” meets “Mars Attacks” meets all kinds of other stuff, with the excesses being quite entertaining, if not as satisfying as, say, “Poor Things” or “The Lobster” or “Dogtooth” or “The Favourite.” Coming only a year after the sampler pack that was “Kinds of Kindness,” this feels in a way like Lanthimos on automatic and in overdrive, churning out fun transgressions one after another because he and his leading lady have so much fun doing them.
Then again, too much Lanthimos is still kind of a blast. It calls to mind a scene early in the film in which Teddy is lecturing Don about the aliens’ master plan, and how they’re tracking every moment with mysterious technology that will “weevil into your brainbox.”
And hey, that’s as good a way as any to sum up this movie. “Bugonia”: It’ll weevil into your brainbox!
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