The Scare Salon

I didn’t discover until after I saw it that it’s actually sort of a loose remake of a 2003 South Korean film called Save the Green Planet!, which was directed by Jang Joon-hwan; and in fact, Jang himself was supposed to direct it until some health issues caused him to bow out. He remained on as a producer and was reportedly very happy when Yorgos Lanthimos was brought on to replace him. A lot of elements have been changed from the original film, though, so it’s less a straight retelling and more an “inspired by” type of situation. I admit I haven’t seen Save the Green Planet!, mind, so I’m not a great judge of how similar they are; I’m just going by a general consensus from other sources.

I’ll also note here that although I’m not going to spoil everything about the movie, I will be going into some detail about the plot setup, so buyer beware. I strongly suggest you go into Bugonia without knowing anything about it, but you’re (presumably) a grown-ass adult and can do what you want. This is your only warning.

The marvelous Emma Stone marks her fourth collaboration with Lanthimos in Bugonia, and she’s phenomenal as always. She plays a character named Michelle Fuller, a very Type-A CEO of a powerful pharmaceutical company called Auxolith which seems to be a significant driver of this (unnamed) town’s economy. It’s later revealed that a drug manufactured by the corporation has had some unfortunate side effects, and it seems that Michelle has been brought on to usher in a new era and repair the company’s reputation a bit.

Meanwhile, we have a working-class man named Teddy (played by Jesse Plemons, of Civil War and I’m Thinking of Ending Things fame), who lives in a shabby farmhouse with his autistic cousin Don (Aidan Delbis). He raises bees and appears to work in one of Auxolith’s shipping warehouses. We eventually find out that Teddy’s mother (played by Alicia Silverstone) was rendered comatose by the previously mentioned Auxolith drug, and as a result, it seems that Teddy’s mental health has begun to spiral, as he becomes convinced that Auxolith is responsible for poisoning the local environment, including some other unspecified family members and the bees in his hives.

Now, if this was the only belief he held, then I’d say he was being reasonably logical and probably bang on the money. However, at the beginning of the movie, it’s clear that Teddy has gone so far down some crazy internet rabbit holes that he’s likely to meet a hookah-smoking caterpillar. You see, it’s not enough that he thinks Michelle Fuller is just your standard-issue evil CEO, oh no. Teddy believes with his full chest that she is in fact a malevolent alien in the guise of a human, one of a race called Andromedans who have secretly infiltrated the Earth from our neighboring galaxy and are in the process of slowly destroying humanity so they can rule the planet.

Like your average conspiracy theorist, he has watched lots of YouTube videos and read some questionable websites and now considers himself an expert on the topic, and further seems completely entrenched in his hypothesis. So much so that he has convinced his cousin Don that they are humanity’s last hope, and they must take action to prevent the alien takeover.

Said action, at least from what we can see at first, consists of some laughably lame “training” in the form of labored push-ups and uncoordinated “fighting” skills. Teddy has also become convinced that any kind of sexual activity, including masturbation, drains one’s life force and causes one to lose focus from the mission, so he injects a drug to chemically castrate himself and persuades Don to do the same. Don, I will note, is easily the most sympathetic character in the story, as he’s obviously good-hearted, but because of his disability, naïveté, isolation, and love for his cousin, is also ripe for manipulation.

Not long into the movie, Teddy and Don get started on their cockamamie scheme. This involves the guerilla-style kidnapping of Michelle Fuller in the driveway of her mansion, during which they drug her and use her SUV to drive her back to their specially prepared basement lair. They strap her to a cot, and Teddy shaves her bald, since everyone knows that Andromedans communicate through their hair. He also covers her in antihistamine cream to tamp down some of her intergalactic powers.

When Michelle wakes up, she’s understandably pretty alarmed by the situation, but is able to keep her wits about her enough to try to talk sense into her captors. Teddy isn’t having any of her denials or explanations, though, and basically says that he kidnapped her so that she could negotiate a meeting with the Andromedan emperor when the mothership enters Earth’s atmosphere on the lunar eclipse in four days’ time. Teddy believes that he and Don will be able to board the mothership and plead humanity’s case, thereby dissuading the emperor from continuing the Andromedans’ harmful activity toward the hapless Earthlings.

Michelle insists that she isn’t an alien and appeals to Teddy’s reason, but when she sees she isn’t going to get anywhere using that tactic, she attempts bribery (by telling Teddy that she will personally oversee a cure for his comatose mother) and later divide-and-conquer (by trying to use Don’s obvious reluctance to turn him against his cousin). At some point, Teddy tortures Michelle with some type of electrical device of his own design, and because she is able to endure far more than he expected, he theorizes that she is actually a much-higher-ranking Andromedan than he had given her credit for, and he starts treating her with more respect and affording her a few more privileges.

In fact, the bulk of the second act is a sort of psychological cat-and-mouse game between Michelle and her kidnappers, which is tense, darkly hilarious, and occasionally pretty bloody. I don’t really want to spoil anything that happens beyond this point because it’s better to just go along for the ride, but suffice it to say that everything isn’t quite as it seems on the surface, and I will give this movie credit for (ostensibly) having one of the bleakest (yet also most oddly satisfying) endings I’ve seen in a while.

Bugonia is really just a lot of fun, despite its somewhat dark premise, seeming to mine most of its off-kilter humor and suspense from examining (and perhaps lampooning) the disturbing headspaces of conspiracy-minded people, but also going a bit more unexpected with it and thus giving it more depth. While I don’t think it’s nearly as bonkers or purely cinematic as Poor Things, or as nuanced and disquieting as The Killing of a Sacred Deer, it’s still a fantastic film, with lots of thoughtful details and plenty of room for audience discussion and theorizing. Although I haven’t seen all Yorgos Lanthimos’s films (yet), I think this would be a good one to start with if you’re new to his work, as it retains his trademark idiosyncratic style but is still fairly approachable for a more mainstream audience.

Until next time, keep it creepy, my friends.