[ad_1]
Yorgos Lanthimos’s warped filmography has by now trained us to expect darkly comic scenes of contemporary life both wild and mundane. His films have perhaps raised the most “what?” Has inspired. reactions over the past decade, partly because they’ve worked so hard to do so.
His films – farces, fables, experiments – inhabit their own surreal world. But his latest, “Bugonia,” is thrillingly, if tragically, connected to our reality. This may also be his best film. Although I was skeptical about the flamboyant seriousness of Lanthimos’s films, I found “Bugonia” a chamber-piece gut punch that was hard to shake. For starters, it’s hard to resist any movie that contains the line: “Your Instagram has the Andromedon code.”
This is one of the things that Teddy, an incel eco-terrorist, says to Michelle after kidnapping her along with his neurodivergent cousin Donny and tying her up in his basement. Teddy and Donny live together in a remote, dilapidated old house. There, Teddy tends to both his bees and rampant conspiracy theories.
But because Plemons plays him so cleverly, Teddy doesn’t seem crazy. He can jump to wildly crazy conclusions, like that pharmaceutical company CEO Michelle is an alien. But he is considerate by nature and takes very good care of his cousin. It’s a wonder of Plemons’s innate good nature that we like Teddy, even when he shaves Michelle’s head to prevent “it”, as he calls her, from contacting motherhood.
The opening moments of Will Tracy’s script cast these deranged conspiracies in an apocalyptic light. The fate of the bees is very much on Teddy’s mind; Colony collapse disorder, often caused by pesticides, is one of their talking points. It’s a phenomenon that, in “Bugonia” — a film based on, or perhaps just lamenting, the fate of humanity — isn’t just for bees.
While the Stone’s abilities alone might legitimate paranormal suspicions, there are other reasons why Teddy has targeted Michelle. He is an acclaimed corporate leader; His office includes a framed Time magazine with him on the cover and a photograph with Michelle Obama. Her company, Oxolith, operates out of a sleek office building where Michelle presides over her workforce like a queen bee. She has the corporate language of “transparency” and “diversity,” but whether she actually adheres to any of these ideals is questionable. Before Teddy and Donnie stop her, she announces a “new era” at Oxolith where employees walk in at 5:30 pm, but not if they don’t meet their quota, she adds. And not if they’re, you know, busy.
In this way, Mitchell is a camera-ready cover for whatever Oxolith is doing, who teases a toxic history as the film progresses, including the opioid manufacturing that plagued Teddy’s mother.
Much of “Bugonia” is a conceptual conversation between him and Teddy in the basement. It’s a conversation across contemporary divisions that is as ridiculous as its impossibility. One is prone to paranoia and extremism, the other knows only heartless corporate talk. It is useless to understand each other. Watching Stone as Mitchell attempt to reason with Teddy is part of the film’s deep fun, just as it is watching Plemons’ Teddy adamantly cling to his certainty that Mitchell is part of an alien incursion on Earth that he intends to eliminate by the next lunar eclipse.
The source of such a wild tale, of course, could only come from South Korea. “Bugonia” appears in the 2003 Korean film “Save the Green Planet!” Is based on. All of Lanthimos’ notable films were previously written with Efthymis Filippou or Tony McNamara. But, otherwise, “Bugonia” has the feel of a quick follow-up to last year’s “Kinds of Kindness,” a black-comedy triptych also led by Stone and Plemons.
Yet what could easily be misconstrued as a middling film – there are only a handful of characters and a few scene locations – feels like a peak-slash-nadir for Lanthimos. After making a dozen films that darkly satirize the tragic, primitive stupidity of mankind, it’s now time to feature in “Bugonia.”
The film drags in the middle when it is locked into a prisoner drama which becomes a bit tiresome and predictable. But the payoff is huge. Teddy calls his torture chamber “the headquarters of the human resistance.” By the time “Bugonia” reaches its unforgettable finale, it becomes painfully clear how tenuous any such movement can be, and the film’s air of apocalyptic resignation, achievement of destiny, sounds like a punishing death knell.
The Focus Features release “Bugonia” is rated R by the Motion Picture Association for bloody violent content including suicide, gruesome images and language. Running time: 118 minutes. Three and a half stars out of four.
This article was generated from an automated news agency feed without any modifications to the text.
[ad_2]
