bugonia
ever get the peculiar sense that someone is always watching?
Bugonia (2025)
Directed by Yorgos Lanthimos
It’s not lost on me that as a cis-(half) white heteronormative male of a certain age, some of my past behaviors can be chalked up to a conservative - dare I say: alt-right, incel-esque - mentality. I’ve been cruel. Cruel things have happened to me both as a child and adult, but I’ve come to accept that my acts of cruelty cannot be blamed on my past. Regrettably, the fragments of a parental worldview, where I was often ridiculed and beaten with a leather strap at a very impressionable, young age, are profoundly difficult to shake. It takes constant work, and as disappointing as it may seem: my default setting can often be unkind. It’s a feeling that I express most to myself, but I know it oozes out of me, splattering onto those in my orbit. But one of the things that I’m actually proud of, during the tumult that embodied 2020, where I saw my cruelty’s comeuppance falsely rendered against me, I did not plunge into total darkness. Too often I see those that spew vitriol and hatred only dig their heels deeper within the sand, submerging themselves on a granular level to a worldview of hostility and division. I made mistakes navigating through the abyss, and placed faith in people that did not see the best in me: and not to get spiritual or granola here, but I was finally able to see light. For Teddy (Jesse Plemons), I’m not sure if he ever escapes that darkness.
Yorgos Lanthimos’ new film Bugonia draws its parallels before the opening title card, where we observe Teddy with his cousin Don (Aidan Delbis) eking out a living on a small run-down property in a remote un-named rural community that more or less represents the American South (portions of the picture were filmed in Georgia). The moments see Teddy, an apiarist, espousing the virtues of the Queen bee, only to observe the colony begin to reject their long-standing biological nature, he speculates that it could be pesticides or an ensuing global calamity, but suspects something even more sinister at play. These sequences are interspliced with Michelle (Emma Stone), a high-powered CEO (can a CEO be described as otherwise?) going about her posh lifestyle. As the head of Auxolith, a biotech company, she can stroll into the office in her Louboutins or within the confines of her opulent mansion, she can embark on a rigid exercise and self-defense routine that dwarfs that of the frumpy Teddy and Donny. The two don’t quite measure up to the soaring capitalistic heights that Michelle’s life affords. But when the narratives intersect, and what Lanthimos plays with for the duration of Bugonia can be observed as an act of paranoia; one rooted in observing the trivial, but oftentimes amusing reality that Teddy and Michelle are not quite as different from one another as they may seem.
Lanthimos, to his credit, does not fixate on either figure as particularly noble in their cause. I recall a line reading by Plemons in the Paul Thomas Anderson film, The Master: “he’s making it up as he goes along.” There, Plemons played the son of a grifter. Here, he’s the red-pilled charlatan that believes in a secret alien society living among us, and suspects that Michelle, for her mega-opulence, is likely one of these aliens. He convinces Donny to go along, promising him a reality that would be impossible to realize. Michelle, meanwhile, is composed but cruel, critical of her workers and determined to squeeze them for every minute that they’re worth. Her office, her home, even her commute from work is poverty-free, operating as two fixtures in a verdant, Eden-esque void, while Teddy and Donny are often riding their mountain bikes throughout the community, with Dollar General’s and Piggly Wiggly’s functioning as the oasis in a dilapidated and abandoned setting. Before the two would, clumsily, kidnap Michelle and bring her to their basement, Donny will express hesitation about going through with the crime. Much like Steinbeck’s Great Depression novel, Of Mice and Men, Donny possesses a certain Lennie quality that by proxy insists that Teddy might very well be our modern George. I’m not too sure if Lanthimos and his writer Will Tracy (responsible for the rather toothless The Menu) quite get there, but it is notable that they did credit writer/filmmaker Jang Joon-hwan as a writer (his 2003 film, Save the Green Planet! would seemingly suggest that the film played an integral part in jumpstarting Bugonia).
The crux of it all is that… Teddy was right. Anyone with a vague familiarity of Lanthimos’ work would know this was a likely possibility, but to his credit the uncertainty that he provokes, coupled with Plemons’ absolutely unhinged performance, provides ample doubt throughout the film’s runtime. Having just watched the premiere of Vince Gilligan’s similar-minded Pluribus, the overarching anxiety that the world has been overrun by an alien entity has often felt as likely a reality as any since 2016. My life, seeing myself living outside of the second city for the first time, has not been a particularly seamless transition. The hills of Seattle feel like I’m now giving myself literal obstacles to overcome as opposed to the metaphorical ones that I would complain about back in Chicago. But what I suppose I admire most about Bugonia is how even if Teddy was right, even if his conspiracy theory proved to be accurate, it meant just the same either way; we die the way we lived. And these days, despite the despair, the anger, and the default setting that seems hell bent on making me miserable, I have to actively rally against that. Lest I be blown up into oblivion. Who the fuck cares if you’re right then?