The End of Things
By Savina Petkova
Bugonia
Dir. Yorgos Lanthimos, U.S., Focus Features
The word “bugonia” is a composite between the Ancient Greek word for “ox” (boûs) and the morpheme denoting “progeny, offspring,” and in the rare cases it’s been used, it describes a ritual of restocking beehives. A “bugonia” involves a particularly gruesome animal sacrifice that gives spontaneous rise to honeybees out of the rotting carcass of a young bull—a burst of new life at the cost of another. Idiosyncratic and quite mystical, this so-called method was barely mentioned in Ancient Greek texts but popularized in Roman times thanks to Virgil, whose poem Georgics provided (in Latin) usually more practical agricultural tips. To name their newest film after an apocryphal word with ambiguous meaning suggests that Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos and screenwriter Will Tracy are inviting metaphorical projections from the get-go.
Bugonia is a mostly faithful English-language remake of the South Korean film Save the Green Planet! by Jang Joon-hwan, which had a significant festival circulation in 2003, receiving awards and recognition in places like Rotterdam, Buenos Aires, and Moscow. Save the Green Planet! channels the frantic energy fueling Park Chan-wook’s Vengeance Trilogy and especially Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance, which came out one year earlier, in which an embittered employee seeks revenge against his superior. Jang’s film follows a young man who kidnaps a pharmaceutical executive convinced that the latter is an alien. There’s a detective chase intertwined with the main storyline and a dispute over labor rights, since the CEO was not only the employer of the mistreated main character but also the indirect cause of his mother’s comatose condition. Tracy’s script for Bugonia hews close to the original, with Jesse Plemons (reuniting with Lanthimos after Kinds of Kindness) playing the unpropitious Teddy Gatz, a beekeeper who works as a packer for Auxolith, the pharmaceutical company whose opioids poisoned his mother. The big shot CEO in the remake, however, is not male, personifying the Westernized ideal of a girlboss.
Michelle Fuller (Emma Stone) is the one who’s “ushering in a new era in the pharmaceutical industry,” per Auxolith’s Linkedin page, and also the one Teddy thinks is alien. Bugonia opens by starkly contrasting two glossy yet wildly different tableaux, the deep greens and blinding whites of Fuller’s corporate world and the swollen burgundy reds and woody browns of a rickety countryside home Teddy shares with his younger cousin Don (newcomer Aidan Delbis). By crisscrossing the two settings in a rare example of parallel editing in a Lanthimos film, Bugonia allows the class tensions to swell enough so that audiences can anticipate the assault to come. Fueled by a cynical kind of idealism, Teddy alludes to the kidnapping plan early on, as he and Don tend to an apiary next to the house. “Magnificent creatures,” eulogizes Teddy, who states how the bees tend to their queen, praising their organizing principle as “like sex but cleaner.” His short opening monologue relates directly to the film’s title, with bees as symbols of a wondrous, still-possible world order restoration. He angrily mentions the endemic colony collapse disorder (CCD)—the “others” are to blame; “they” have ruined everything. It’s a familiar decisiveness one associates with a particular type of disillusioned, socially passive men: conspiracy-pilled incels.
As evident from the film’s prologue, Teddy is a taut storyteller, confidently initiating Don in a grandiose plan: to save humanity from the tyrannical grasp of extraterrestrials, called Andromedons. In this noble mission, they will take the Andromedon CEO hostage and torture her into giving him an audience with the alien Emperor, all before the next lunar eclipse in three days. These two men, wearing paper Jennifer Aniston masks, kidnap Fuller right outside her house, and the first thing they do, before chaining her in the basement, is shave her head to prevent her from warning the mother ship.“ But how do you know she’s an alien?” asks Don, and Teddy points out the supposedly distinctive signs—narrow feet, slight overbite, high hair density. The idea of inspecting Fuller more closely for “the signs,” might seem silly to a viewer at this point, but less so later.
By the third act, Bugonia has established “is-she-or-isn’t-she?” as its main narrative drive, and so Lanthimos invites the audience to weigh the reasonings of two contemptible characters: a power-hungry CEO and an arrogant conspiracy truther. As attractive as this guessing game is, it’s easy to underestimate the mercurial qualities of Emma Stone’s performance in her fourth collaboration with the Greek director and the skill required to keep her character in a state of flux and limbo at the same time. Her physical acting might be less obvious than what Poor Things demanded, but if we were to draw a parallel between Michelle Fuller and her Oscar-winning rendition of Bella Baxter, the former is a highly evolved version of the latter judging by how her character assimilates learned behavior.
As the film progresses, her movements and speech become more mechanical, piling up the alien allegations; Stone shows up bald, beaten, injured, but never suffering, while Teddy towers over her, the streaks of his thick, greasy hair dangling in front of his frustrated face. In response to his barking orders and assertive arguments, Stone, ever the savvy corporate performer, alternates between pouting, lispy delivery and a more gashing staccato when threatening the men with jail and death. Perhaps the film’s pessimism lies here in the powerlessness both sides share. She can’t save herself from torture, they can’t convince her to tell the truth—their repeated attempts to reach an understanding punctuated by funny one-liners like “This is not Death of a Salesman!” or “You’re a credit to your species, Teddy, truly.”
Most of Bugonia takes place in the moldy basement of the Gatzes’ ramshackle family house, with the camera occasionally offering glimpses of the dining room, strewn with food leftovers and rubbish. Instead of simply playing up the claustrophobic feeling of those interior shots, cinematographer Robbie Ryan allows a looser framework, shooting in VistaVision. Gone are the fisheye and lens distortions of Poor Things—he sculpts the characters’ growing exasperation though lower-angle close-ups and medium shots, while occasional wide tracking shots make Bugonia look deceptively ordinary. On a conceptual level, this intentionally unobtrusive visual style fits well with Teddy’s constant attempts to appear as personable and as “normal” as one can be in front of his coworkers and the sheriff alike, while concealing the horrors and torture he instigates behind closed doors.
Both Lanthimos apologists and detractors agree on his “signature” being a dark, condemning kind of comedy that is always one step away from nihilism. It’s difficult to argue against such accusations when the films (including Bugonia) are so often cruel to their human characters. Since the dark humor of his films cannot be called “humanistic” by any stretch, then perhaps the label of anti-humanism—and its rejections of anthropocentric assumptions about human nature and the world—can cast a light on the shadow of cynicism cloaking a film about preventing the destruction of humanity. Perhaps the world we live in has caught up with prognostications of dystopia so completely that artworks can no longer assure the same distance between reality and art.
It’s not surprising that the work of Yorgos Lanthimos, perhaps today’s best example of a globally successful European (non-native English) director, still invites interpretations in a local key, meaning the title’s mythological origin. In a way, Bugonia shares more of that DNA with Lanthimos’s The Killing of a Sacred Deer and its titular reference to Trojan war mythology than Poor Things or Kinds of Kindness: both films invite allegorical interpretations but never excuse their characters’ illogical deeds. But if the “bugonia” evoked by the film’s title is much more a ritualistic practice of the imaginary than the real—considering it was popularized by Virgil long after the Greeks could validate or refute its use—then the grim sacrifice implied at the end of Bugonia is also a decoy. Instead of dismissing the conclusion as an instance of self-serving cruelty and a cynical outlook on humanity in general, this supposed nihilism could be seen as a camouflage for the hope to be proven wrong.