Bugonia captures American paranoia The film reflects an irrational new world

Here’s a cliché: “History repeats itself, first as tragedy, then as farce.” Bugonia, the new film from Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos, proves that the opposite might just as well be the case: what began as farce can repeat as tragedy.

The film is a remake of South Korean director Jang Joon-hwan’s 2003 release, Save the Green Planet!, which delivered a giddy masterclass in slasher comedy. The original featured a bulimic beekeeper on a mission to abduct a pharmaceutical CEO who he believes is an alien from the planet Andromeda, and thus save the world from apocalypse before a band of idiotic cops — led by a detective with a hyperactive sense of smell — can get to him. It’s the kind of wack-cinema in which the wild-eyed protagonist prepares to torture his victim by coating a white-hot, foot-long steel dildo with gobs of lube — that is, utterly off the hook. This sort of macabre just desserts for the 1% was no doubt satisfying to a South Korean audience 20 years ago, embittered by class disparity, and thirsting for some lavish, if elusive, revenge.

In Jooh-hwan’s zany bricolage of dungeons, electrodes and death by killer bees, the cardboard-cutout characters are no more than vehicles for violence against long-standing power imbalances, and to their credit, Lanthimos and Bugonia screenwriter Will Tracy were smart enough not to delve too deeply into the psyches of their revamped dramatis personae. These aren’t characters so much as caricatures, each standing for sociological mega-tropes of America’s decline and fall — the corporate CEO, the basement-dwelling extremist, and he who no longer has the capacity to process what the hell is going on. Each seeks to negotiate their way through a senseless world beset by maniacal irrationality.

It’s clear from the remake that comedy has become passé. A farce, even one drenched in buckets of blood, cannot serve as an adequate response to the plague of anxieties in today’s United States — from pharmaceutical poisons and school shootings to the National Guard knocking down doors to arrest housekeepers and hairdressers. The tragic message of the remake is inescapable: the conspiracy theorists have seized the day.

Lanthimos updates Joon-hwan’s characters by switching the gender of Green Planet’s evil CEO. Instead of a pharma bro, we get a pharma babe. Michelle Fuller, played by Emma Stone, graces the cover of Forbes. She knows Michelle Obama and spends a great deal of time perfecting the nuances of her social media feed. She is also dedicated to cardio, which means she can beat the living crap out of any incel with bad intent, even in those black Louboutins.

That doesn’t stop her from being abducted by Teddy, the scuzzy conspiracy theorist played by Jesse Plemons (aka “Meth Damon” from Breaking Bad) and his cousin and sidekick, the extraordinarily disheveled Aidan Delbis, whose real-life neurodivergence delivers striking pathos. And if there’s any doubt that Michelle is from a galaxy far, far away, our anti-hero Teddy points out her narrow feet, her cuticles, the cute overbite, and the fact that he has discerned “Andromeda code on her Instagram” — a phrase that in and of itself should garner Tracy a nomination for Best Adapted Screenplay.

Shorn of her luxurious locks so that she cannot “be tracked” by her allies who are orbiting the earth in their spaceship, as Teddy patiently explains to Donny, Fuller languishes in chains, a gender-switched Samson awaiting the inevitable return of her powers. As Michelle schemes her escape, the losers ride their rusted bikes through the blight of exurbia. As Teddy tells Donny: “No one on earth gives a single fuck about us.” Perhaps they should.

The plot of Bugonia is virtually identical to Save the Green Planet!, which may be because the warped and damaged men of the digital dystopia are really not so different from the warped and damaged males of any age, shape or time, all of whom might relish the sadism of sticking a girlboss like Fuller with a syringe full of sedatives and locking her up in the dark. The only difference between the original and the remake is the absence of that white-hot dildo, for the boys of Bugonia have chemically castrated themselves so as not to be tempted by womanly wiles.

And yet, despite a two-decade-old plot that leans into every horror cliché in the book, Bugonia is very much a film for our time. The popular motif of alien invasion has taken on a new profile since the release of Save the Green Planet!, as the comic contrail-counters have matured into power players. “Doing the research” has transformed into US public policy, with the tin-foil-clad brigade now holding Cabinet-level positions in the Trump administration, advocating against Tylenol and seriously considering whether or not there is any gold at Fort Knox.

Then there is the dialogue that lacks the essential give and take of, well, dialogue. Even a power-pill plutocrat like Michelle, supremely confident in her ability to sway opinion with endless streams of public relations sophistry, can make no headway against Teddy in the bizarre dinner-table discussion that serves as the intellectual core of film (while Donny squirms in his seat, complaining that he has to pee). Here, it becomes clear that Michelle’s corporate doublespeak and Teddy’s “resistance” gibberish are two sides of the same irrational coin. There is no middle ground, no solution.

It therefore comes as no surprise that when a handcuffed and bloody Emma Stone eventually inquires, “Can we have a dialogue?”, the answer is a straightforward no. Michelle may inform Teddy that his theories have no basis for his truth, that he has lost himself in an internet echo chamber, but it’s all in vain. He simply takes an axe to her knee.

The implications of all this are so unsettling that the film has left the critics desperately trying to evade articulating — or perhaps even contemplating — the obvious point. In their reviews, they earnestly discuss whether the film is about corporate duplicity and greed, or perhaps an allegory of Covid, or a musty rehearsal of Antifa versus tech. That is, anything but America’s descent into irrationality and violence.

Lanthimos has said that before he begins shooting a new film, he makes a habit of re-watching The Red and the White, a Hungarian pièce-de-résistance from 1967, directed by Miklós Jancsó. Banned for many years in the Soviet Union, it delivers a stunning condemnation of the senseless evils of war, as soldier after soldier is lined up and executed, only for the next brigade to arrive, and the shooter himself to be shot. History repeats itself: Hungary in the grips of Soviet Communism, South Korea in the shadow of Kim Jong-Un’s atomic arsenal, and now, the United States in the grips of unreason that has now threatens to undo the very foundations of this country. This is a director who understands the chaos and absurdism of our age.

Of course, it’s clear from the start of Bugonia that skeevy vapers and gamers like Teddy and Donny don’t stand a chance. But as it turns out, neither do the slick CEOs. No homo sapien can escape the mess of being human. When the cosmic joke of the film is eventually revealed, it’s a reminder that not only have Teddy and Donny and Michelle lost the thread, so has everyone else. We can’t blame it on pharmaceuticals, the economy, or the internet. As Teddy has understood, our propensities towards self-destruction are programmed into human psyches. “Your core,” he tells Michelle, “has already been infected.”

It was funny 20 years ago. Today, not so much.

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