Cousins Teddy (Jesse Plemons) and Don (Aidan Delbis) live together on Teddy’s bee farm and are training to be ready when the Andromedan aliens come down to Earth to destroy the human race; a threat that is nearer than the media or the government would lead you to believe.  Their research leads them to Michelle Fuller (Emma Stone), the CEO of pharmaceutical company Auxolith, who they believe is a high-ranking official of the Andromedan race.  Kidnapping her and bringing her back to the compound, Teddy demands that she arrange for him an audience with the leader of her species to make his appeal for Earth and humanity. 

Yorgos Lanthimos directs Bugonia, a 119-minute sci-fi satire penned by Will Tracy, adapting Jan Joon-hwan’s Save the Green Planet! (2003).  Focus Features acquired the title out of the Cannes Film Market, and the distributor debuted the film in competition at the Venice International Film Festival, where it was recognised with the Green Drop Award for its promotion of environmental sustainability.   

Marking the fourth consecutive title with Stone and second with Plemons, he is able to direct his de facto troupe with a bit of shorthand, and because they have built up a level of comfort and trust with the eccentric provocateur, they are fearless in front of  Robbie Ryan’s lens; himself a four-time Lanthimos veteran, too.  What helps shake up any sense of stagnancy in this extended collaborative experiment is the addition of Delbis, not only in his first role under Lanthimos’ direction, but in his first feature role period; a tall ask of any actor, made even taller since Don is our window into the world of the film.   

Tracy and Lanthimos expertly thread the needle of what is real and what is a fabrication, here, so that we never quite know how truthful either Teddy or Michelle are being at any given time.  What makes it so compelling is that no matter what that pair is doing or saying, we understand that their character is fully committed to it and believes it to be true or requires it to be true, depending on the scenario.  And then there is Don who has been welcomed into the fold and influenced by Teddy after the death of his mother to join his cousin on the hunt for the Andromedan.  His confusion and his insistence on questioning Teddy makes him the most reliable one out of the trio as he picks up on all the little nuances and turns of phrases that both Teddy and Michelle had used before and asks them to defend their change of position across the unfolding of the narrative.  He is a good person, perhaps the only truly good person in this film, and that moral beacon in an otherwise cruel world portrayed on screen draws audiences towards him all the more. 

Bugonia, despite its constant narrative sleight of hand, which makes this film so exciting to watch during the middle act, is one of Lanthimos’ most straightforward endings that seems to be in stark rebuke of modern cinema’s insistence on being ambiguous.  By the time the credits roll, there is no question remaining that Michelle is an Andromedan and that Teddy was right about everything, but this revelation – while welcome on a narrative level – completely undermines some of the major themes of the film.  Part of this is due to the script being pulled in two thematic directions: first, that humanity is failing in its role as stewards of the Earth and second, that capitalism has only fueled the fire that is consuming the planet.  Had the film not opened on a montage of bees pollinating flowers, the overt conservationist themes may not be as apparent, but because those themes are so immediately and clearly presented, it becomes hard to divorce the rest of the film’s thesis from this imagery.  In the penultimate sequence, when Michelle bursts the ozone layer, sentencing humanity to an almost immediate demise, it takes away the onus of our responsibility because there is nothing humanity could do to stop Michelle’s interference.   

What this ending does do, however, is more overtly conclude the film’s thoughts on the dangers that come at the intersection of unchecked money and power.  As the gap between the haves and the have-nots continues to grow and articles speculating on the Mars-minded Elon Musk rocketing closer and closer to being the world’s first trillionaire, Bugonia looks with contempt on those who have the means to enact change but instead refuse to progress anything except their own greed.  Ever the satiricalist, Lanthimos also takes plenty of opportunities to poke fun at corporate, performative do-goodery, but the film, unlike in real life, never lets us believe that this focus on issues is ever coming from a well-intentioned place.  Because Lanthimos does not write this script, it does let Michelle off a little easy, as it is lacking a mean streak that made some of Lanthimos’ earlier works so devilishly satisfying.