Yorgos Lanthimos directs Bugonia, starring Jesse Plemons as a conspiracist beekeeper and Aidan Delbis as his cousin. Plemons' character believes a big pharma executive, played by Emma Stone, is a body-snatched alien and orchestrates her kidnapping. The screenplay is by Will Tracy, channeling kill-the-rich satire while diverging from Efthimis Filippou's theater of cruelty and Tony McNamara's florid repartee. The film maintains Lanthimos' perverse detachment and clinical tone but mixes callousness with guarded optimism about human nature. Visual restraint replaces earlier fish-eyed lenses. The film interrogates performativity in anti-capitalist crusades and balances bleak cruelty with restrained hope.
Imagine if Michael Haneke's "Funny Games" were instead about a pair of lone-wolf, conservationist vigilantes trying to save the world instead of two sociopathic twinks wanting to tear it down, and you'll have some idea of the hyper-contained, rigorously controlled torture chamber that is Yorgos Lanthimos' " Bugonia." Jesse Plemons stars as a galaxy-brained conspiracist beekeeper who's either severely mentally
diverting from the droll theater of cruelty present in scripts by Efthimis Filippou ("Kinds of Kindness") or the florid repartee of Tony McNamara ("The Favourite," "Poor Things"). "Bugonia" has all the streak of Tracy's kill-the-rich brand of satire, but with the Greek Oscar-nominated filmmaker interrogating the potential performativity of such capitalist-fighting crusades. That's because Lanthimos brings to this film his signature stamp of perverse detachment, though without the fish-eyed lenses this harrowing time around depravity's merry-go-round.
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