OSCARS 2025: Bugonia (2025)

2003 would see the release of Jang Joon-hwan's oddball dark comedy “Save the Green Planet!” The film would receive a DVD release stateside some time afterwards, grabbing a little bit of press among the horror fandom and cult movie crowd. This was around the same time South Korean crime and horror movies like “Oldboy” and “A Tale of Two Sisters” started to develop a real following around the world. “Save the Green Planet!” never quite got that kind of attention though. Currently, it doesn't even have an American Blu-Ray release. You're going to have to import the UK disc or dig up the out-of-print SD release to own a physical copy. Certainly, I didn't expect a big name director like Yorgos Lanthimos to remake such an obscure title. Meaning I was intrigued by “Bugonia” from the moment it was announced. A notoriously weird filmmaker remaking an already weird movie, unsurprisingly, resulted in a pretty quirky flick. Despite that, Lanthimos has gathered such a following among Academy voters that “Bugonia” managed to score four nominations, including Best Picture and Best Actress for Lanthimos' by-now go-to muse Emma Stone. 

Will Tracy's screenplay hews relatively closely to most of the original's story beats while approaching from a very different tonal perspective. Either way, the set-up is the same: Teddy is an apiarist and a conspiracy theorist thoroughly convinced that Earth is under threat by an insidious invasion from the Andromeda galaxy. He believes that Michelle Fuller, the CEO of pharmaceutical company Auxolith, is one of these aliens walking among us. With the assistance of his neurodivergent cousin, he kidnaps Fuller. They shave her head, believing her hair to be an antenna to communicate with the mother ship, and cover her in skin cream. Fuller attempts to talk her way out of this bizarre situation, Teddy unmovable in his belief that only he can save the human race before the mother ship arrives with a lunar eclipse. Soon, his interrogation of Fuller turns towards torture. As the situation progresses, more of the captor's backstory is revealed and the reality of what exactly is happening here gets murkier. 

When “Save the Green Planet!” was released, conspiracy theories were still regarded with a degree of whimsy by most. The fantastical idea of extraterrestrial life were still centered in most of these beliefs, removing any degree of serious consideration from these ideas. They were kooks, figures of mockery with no cultural power. Things are very different today, when Q-Anon and far right dip shits have effectively taken over the top tiers of America's government. Moreover, in a post-Epstein files era, we have to reckon with the unavoidable conclusion that the cranks were not entirely off-track. This is the mood “Bugonia” inhabits and why it is a lot darker than the frequently wacky original. The film is essentially trying to play out the current anxieties of our times in microcosm. It is a chamber drama showdown between a heartless corporate overlord and a nut case who nevertheless has some good points. 

Fuller is a pharmacy company CEO, directly responsible for the suffering of thousands and never held accountable. She confronts Ted's seemingly unhinged speeches with therapy-speak platitudes, insincere strategies to regain control of the situation. On the surface level, “Bugonia” is a tale of evil versus evil. Much like the collapsing colonies Ted is obsessed with, Fuller is a queen bee, ruling over a colony of what she sees as drones. Her opening scene has her guilt-tripping employees into staying after the hours they can legally be kept on, to get around new worker rights mandates. Ted is an extremist, a kidnapper who electrocutes his bound and captive prisoner. His rantings make Fuller seem like the reasonable one. However, during a key confrontation, she reveals that she's exactly as petty as you'd expect someone in her position to be. She sees herself as superior to underclassmen like Ted and his comatose mother. In other words, while Ted's methods might go too far and his beliefs are delusional, he is actually taking the fight to the Powers That Be and seeking out sorely needed justice. Both are bad but, ya know, at least one is recognizable as a human being and not a blood-hungry capitalist. 

The more we learn of Ted's history, the more sympathetic he inevitably becomes. Through black-and-white dream sequences, the film's most willfully surreal moments, we learn of his relationship with his mother. She was seemingly an addict who underwent an experimental treatment that stuck her in a coma. The corporate reaction to this was insincere. No wonder he's pissed. He references a time before life got all fucked-up. I hope we've all learned that nostalgic feelings for an idealized past is based more in fascist ideology than any reality. At the same time, I don't blame this guy for longing for a more innocent period in his life. When he still had his mom, before his world fell apart, back when things made some degree of sense. Conspiracy theorists look for patterns in the universe to establish order over the seeming chaos of our lives. Naturally they appeal to someone whose life has too often been at the mercy of the cruel and unpredictable.

There's a specific reason he's stuck in this childhood mindset too. An early scene has Ted waxing poetically on how bees pollinating flowers is like sex without “the messy parts.” He chemically castrates himself and his cousin with hormonal injections so they are not distracted by sexual thoughts. Later on, we meet a local cop who was apparently Teddy's childhood babysitter. And, we learn soon enough, molested him as a boy. Lanthimos cast Stavros Halkias, best known as the chummy co-host of a hilariously vulgar podcast, to emphasize how commonplace abuse like this truly is. Teddy's entire paranoid mindset is a reaction to sexual trauma in his childhood, another way to impose order on the random horrors of life. Sexual trauma as the origin point of a splintered mind is a well understood phenomenon. If you've dug into the schizo-posting that's run rampant on social media in the past months, you also know conspiracy theories swirl around abuse such as this as a method for mind control. I don't know about that but all of these things are different types of control. If “Bugonia” is a film concerned with queens having sway over their hives, about the strata of power, these ideas fit right in.

All of that is extremely dark and depressing stuff. Which might seem at odds with “Bugonia” also being a comedy. Yorgos Lanthimos' particular brand of absurd humor is well established by now. “Bugonia” rests unsteadily between the inhuman horror of “A Killing of a Sacred Deer” and the darkness-tinged wackiness of “Kinds of Kindness.” Working from someone else's script means the film is not as heavy on the oddball, staccato dialogue as Lanthimos' earlier work. However, the director's style is still undeniable. Robbie Ryan's cinematography is precise, placing the characters like figures within a diorama. The production design is similarly exact, the sterile offices contrasting with the filth of Ted's basement. The musical score acts as a punchline of sorts, a burst of bombastic sound that put an exclamation point on many absurd moments. The most apparent evidence that we are meant to be amused somewhat by these events on-screen are the bursts of cartoonish ultra-violence. When blood splatters in “Bugonia,” it comes in “Evil Dead”-like waves of crimson. 

Those bursts of over-the-top gore points towards my biggest problem with “Bugonia” and why I've not been able to embrace it fully. Something else the visuals, often looking down at the characters from an elevated distance, bring to mind is a dispassionate god watching ambivalently as these meaningless little ants circle their own destruction. Teddy is a sympathetic figure but he's also a clown. It's hard to deny that we are meant to snicker as he spits his insane theories with utmost conviction. The character of Donny, his cousin, seems to be on the autism spectrum. He speaks in clipped sentences, with an unsteady and lisping tone. Is the implication here that only someone mentally disabled would go along with Ted's bullshit? The actor playing Donny, Aidan Delbis, is genuinely autistic but the way the film regards him, as a foolish other open to mockery, can't help but bother me. When these characters are bloodily torn apart, it is meant to amuse. Are we meant to regard everything that happens in this film as dark comedy? Lanthimos' cold absurdity betrays him here, creating realistically broken anti-heroes and still tugging them along on marionette strings more because it cracks a smile than anything else. 

We head next into spoiler territory but it must be discussed. The assumption “Bugonia” operates on is that Teddy is insane and Fuller is his victim. Any attempts Fuller makes to approach Teddy's crazy bullshit on its level is her trying to bargain with her captor. When Emma Stone delivers a stone cold monologue – that outlines the backstory of the Andromedan beliefs, seemingly mixing Altantis pseudo-history, Oscar Kiss Maerth, dinosaurs, and UFO religion – it represents the film willfully playing with the ambiguity of its situation. Might Michelle Fuller actually be an alien? Is the crazed conspiracy theorist right? This deliberate uncertainty extends right up to the climax of the film before a lengthy epilogue... Confirms it as all true. (While also dropping the bomb that Teddy was a de-facto serial killer.) This reveal in “Save the Green Planet!” was the wacky punchline to a frequently silly film. In “Bugonia's” much darker take on the material, it feels like the bleak end point of the film's cold point-of-view. The final images of the film are of apocalyptic extermination, all of humanity wiped out by alien overlords who have deemed them too innately savage to save. 

It's a sequence impressively pulled off, a darkly detached montage of corpses piling up in multiple mundane scenario. However, what are we meant to take away from this ending? “Bugonia” is a psychic scream about how deep into the shit we are in the 21st century, disinformation and corporate greed battling it out over a planet spinning towards ecological collapse. And the saddest, most frustrating part is the messiness of it all is partially the work of broken humans trying their best. That ending is dismissive, the darkest chuckle at all the horrors that go on here. (Both in the film and in this world, I mean.) There is a note of poetry to them. The sequence is scored to “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?,” that plea to how we are all caught in a repeating cycle of short-lived innocence leading to death before being reclaimed by the Earth. The final shot of a bee buzzing around a flower, when contrasted with earlier images of dinosaur bones in a museum, suggest this as maybe natural. Humans had their time, just like the thunder lizards did. The Earth will spin on and some other lifeforms will inherit it next, starting the bloody cycle all over again. And that's interesting, more interesting than the snide messaging that none of it matters anyway and we can only be smugly amused by humanity's efforts to fight against the dying of the light that the rest of the film points towards.

The title, by the way, comes from an ancient folk ritual to spontaneously generate bees from the corpse of a cow. Perhaps suggesting all of these events are sacrifices worthwhile as long as they bring the bees back. All of which is to say that “Bugonia” is a very, very interesting film with a lot of fascinating ideas on its mind that ultimately puts me off by being too coldly critical of its own characters. By sanding off the more manic comedy of “Save the Green Planet!,” it's probably a more consistent film. However, I can't help but wonder if Lanthimos' tendency towards coldly considering the foibles of humanity with nothing but a dark grin was the right approach here. Technically, it's a magnificent film. Stone and Jesse Plemons are excellent. It's a movie that buzzes about in my head persistently, that I can't quite dismiss, that I also can't quite love. [7/10]