Bugonia
An old friend sent me one of those Tumblr format memes recently that I’d like to share as part of my review for Bugonia, Yorgos Lanthimos’ latest absurdist black comedy about bees, aliens, conspiracy theories, American ‘healthcare’ and humanity’s morbid fascination with its own extinction. Apologies for its low res aesthetic.
It came from a Facebook group called Entomemeology and he sent it about a week before I attended the media screening for the film. “Ha!” I thought before making a joke about Jason Statham being our deity and then going about my business.
Having now seen Bugonia and spent a few days thinking about it, I find myself returning to that last line – “it’s gonna be touch and go for a while” – because it pretty much sums up what I think Bugonia is about: that feeling that we’ve passed the point of being able to influence our survival as a species and that our fate is up to some power (spiritual, extraterrestrial or commercial) of which we’re totally and blissfully ignorant.
But before I get to that, a synopsis.
Michelle Fuller (Emma Stone) is a Big Pharma CEO girlboss who enjoys an Andrew Huberman-style morning routine, wearing Louboutins, singing along to Chappell Roan on her drive home from work and verbally espousing her company’s new work-life balance policy while passive aggressively encouraging her employees to continue doing unpaid overtime. She presumably worked very hard to get to where she is as a woman in STEM but has become the very thing that most people her age despise: an out of touch billionaire authoritarian who is actively destroying the colony. Go off, Queen.
Meanwhile, Teddy Gatz (Jesse Plemons) is one of her entry-level warehouse employees and he has big plans for Michelle. A quintessential worker bee who has had enough of being dealt a pretty shit lot in life, he and his cousin Don (newcomer Aidan Delbis) will soon be abducting Michelle, shaving off her hair, smearing antihistamine cream all over her body and keeping her chained in Teddy’s basement. Why? Because she’s an alien, obviously.
Teddy believes that Michelle is specifically an Andromedan – an invasive alien species with sleeper agents on Earth disguised as humans who are intent on destroying the planet by killing the bees – and he plans to use her as leverage to contact the Emperor of the Andromedans and demand that they cease and desist. It’s unclear what sparked this idea; maybe from learning the importance of pollination from Bee Movie or by spending a lot of time in the more conspiratorial corners of the internet. Either way, Michelle is in a bit of a situation – and one that her CEO-level conflict resolution skills may not be able to get her out of.
Over Bugonia’s almost two hours we witness a pretty gnarly electrocution scene, black and white dream-like flashbacks, some decent gore and a fascinating tête-à-tête between the accused and the accuser over spaghetti. There are allusions to chemical castrations and maybe some childhood molestation from Teddy’s old babysitter, now a cop (played by comedian Stavros Halkias) who keeps finding reasons to pull him over or drop in unannounced to his family home. It’d be a horror movie if its antics weren’t so comically absurd but then, that’s usually the case with Lanthimos, whose films are often described as modern Greek tragedies and can prove too unpalatable for some audiences, depending on the strength he uses.
The title, though not acknowledged in the film, comes from an ancient Mediterranean belief that bees can spontaneously generate from the carcass of a dead ox. Now, trying to get to the bottom of this batshit sentence sends you down a bit of a rabbit hole and it’s presumably the same one that led Teddy to his hypothesis that Andromedans exist and that Michelle is one of them.
And just like trying to analyse the thinking of ancient conspiracy theorists is less fun than just laughing at them, trying to ascribe too much meaning to Bugonia is less fun than just experiencing it. More than any other genre it is a comedy, and a pretty hysterical one at that.
Strangely, I think this is one of Lanthimos’ more straightforward, accessible outings; the plot makes perfect nonsensical sense and Stone and Plemons give excellent performances as people who live on the same planet but in completely different worlds, a comment on the growing divide between us and one that couldn’t feel more timely. Men and women; the left and right; the rich and the poor – society has never been more binary at a time when it desperately needs unity. You don’t see bees buying into culture wars in comment threads; maybe that’s why they’re better than us and need to be protected.
The film is thematically similar to Eddington – so full of conspiracy theories and distrust of the powers that be – and that makes sense, since it comes from Ari Aster’s production company Square Peg and he hired Will Tracy (former editor of The Onion) to write the script, an adaptation of Jang Joon-hwan’s 2003 film Save the Green Planet! but with the central role gender-swapped. While I enjoyed Eddington quite a bit, I like Bugonia even more; the sheer weight of Lanthimos’ misanthropy here feels so deeply satisfying and it comforts me to know that others see the humour in our hopelessness.
It’s the same yummy, spiteful feeling that festers every time I get served a mainstream media article about declining birth rates and the consensus from regular people in the comments is “good”. If we really do have no power in life, then perhaps we’ll find it in extinction. No honey for you!
Verdict
☆☆☆☆½
Bugonia is in cinemas now. Shave your head before you go or the projectionist will steal your thoughts.
