Yorgos Lanthimos is working at the forefront of present cinematic expression. The work of the Greek auteur will not leave you indifferent. That art provokes response is so central to its value in the present culture. Lanthimos makes The Favourite (2018) or Poor Things (2023), and in the subsequent years, it may seem like everyone is working from his blueprint. That’s because they are: This is a vanguard director shaping the modern cinema, working on its popular periphery with great actors to establish something like a collection of peculiar, highly memorable cinema.
The joy of Lanthimos is that he still isn’t playing it safe. He will make Poor Things and then maybe everyone else will make their Frankenstein stories too, but that’s already not what he’s doing. Lanthimos is moving forward, making an oddball experiment just the following year, like Kinds of Kindness, a triptych of stories starring Emma Stone and Jesse Plemons and immediately after, a reimagining of the Jang Joon-hwan South Korean cult film Save the Green Planet! (2003), also starring Stone and Plemons. Either film is as divisive as it is incisive, working just outside the box, and inviting others to join in, bringing inventive stories and modes of storytelling back to the cinema.
In Save the Green Planet!, a pharmaceutical executive is captured, with the belief he is really an extraterrestrial running experiments on the human race. Over the course of the film, it’s revealed that this is due to some personal trauma, caused by one of the exec’s company’s drugs and the effect of her ongoing sickness on the life of the captor.
The story goes the same way in Bugonia, although the shifting context is important. Emma Stone plays the captured executive and Jesse Plemons plays her captor. The film asks big questions, but not necessarily the expected ones, about our present world and its obsession with conspiracy theories.
The takeaway within our present moment is whether it’s that important to be right about everything. We are divided into sides. By forces way bigger than us. And they want us to believe anything that empowers them. We all have our truths. To live and die by those truths, though, is to circle a certain kind of madness, which keeps us repressed under the thumb of the people who do hold all the answers.
So, Bugonia plays out as a thematic extension of the South Korean film and follows its story beats down to the letter. Within that framework, though, Lanthimos finds invention and inspired ingenuity, with director of photography Robbie Ryan (Poor Things), once again shooting in VistaVision, creating a detailed intimacy within the confines of mostly a house and its basement.
Design and small detail is significantly important here. Spaces tell us about characters, from the poshly decorated home of the executive, to the set decoration — by James Price, who designed the clitoral light switches and everything else in Poor Things) — of the old family home. Upstairs, the design holds remnants of the family who used to be together. It is clearly designed from another period by an older woman, but the space has been shacked up, with foil over the windows, odd selections from newspapers posted to the wall, etc., etc, and down in the basement, it’s become a conspiratorial fallout shelter. The items each tell us about the people, what they value, who they’ve lost, and their motives.
The score by Jerskin Fendrix (Poor Things) is ruminative and icy, with buzzing bee-like strings echoing out the fate of the world. It feels insular, like the plight of its characters, who are lost in the world of their conspiracy, and like emergent death, but also a balanced ecosystem of cacophonous sounds, like a hive being excavated after it’s sprayed with pesticides, but the hive is Earth and the fleeing is of humanity.
Which sets course beautifully for the material texture of Bugonia, which likewise, feels like a dripping bee-hive, awash in warm yellow hues and moody natural lighting. The themes and motifs reflect the title Bugonia — a Greek word from folklore about bees spontaneously birthed from the dead carcass of an ox, as though humanity too, has just been birthed on this sphere by Andromedan experiments, and have hardly left the carcass, before they will be snuffed out.
Bugonia is a very good reimagining of the South Korean film Save the Green Planet! which inserts just enough new value to also be taken on its own merits. Perhaps even if the conspiracies are all true, it would be better if we didn’t believe our own stories about them. Or we might see the truth. That the value of our lives are just an infinitesimal experiment in the great course of the universe, and that if we really want to know, a darker truth is out there. Do you really want to believe?