BUGONIA is nothing sweet
The British food company Lyle’s – makers of baking pantry staples like golden syrup and black treacle – has a very old, very cool illustration on its labels. It’s a decomposing lion in which bees have made a hive. It’s from a Bible story where Samson eats honey from the inside of a lion he killed. “Out of the eater came something to eat, out of the strong came something sweet” and all that.
Anyway, bees. You’ll see them in Yorgos Lanthimos' new film Bugonia and they matter, in ways that relate to that mythical story but which I don’t plan to share too extensively (this is a very short review). I’ll say only that a powerful and clearly wicked CEO (Emma Stone) finds herself kidnapped by a deranged, conspiracy-addled man (Jesse Plemons) and his younger cousin (Aiden Delbis). The kidnappers’ intentions are simple: get their captive to confess to being an alien. Their motivations and methods, revealed slowly over the course of the film, are simultaneously more and more sympathetic and horrific, while their victim’s position and responses turns slippery and surprising.
Earlier Lanthimos films like Dogtooth, Alps, and The Lobster examined methods of control: of families, of grief, of sexual relationships, and an intangible line of compassion ran through them in spite of their bizarre narrative circumstances. Those themes return for Bugonia, and the film reserves its scant empathy for the kidnapping cousins, not for Stone's coldly impressive, precision villainy.
Plemons’ and Delbis’ performances as the desperate men are the heart of the film. They’re people you’ve met, broken by the brutality of a country that disposes of its own citizens. And Lanthimos allows you to grieve for them, but just a little, and not for very long. Every action in the film generates a consequence, and a Yorgos Lanthimos consequence is almost always the stylishly misanthropic comedy-doomerism sort. I’ve been an off-and-on fan, and his is a gorgeously gruesome way to vent, even if this film's “poor things” don’t get what they’ve been dreaming of.
[Stop here if you don't want to read any allusions to the film's imagery or outcome.]
Lanthimos is also fond of eating his cake and having it too. He laments humanity’s inexorable push toward destruction while reveling in what we all deserve and its beautifully composed aftermath. It’s a mechanized march to destruction, a luxuriously splenetic sci-fi viewing experience – That's what you get! – and in the end the only winners are the bees.
