Bugonia
Everything is connected: the bees fertilise the flowers, the flowers provide what the bees need to make the honey, and Teddy tends to the bees and harvests the honey. A packing worker in the warehouse of the Auxolith pharmaceutical company, he is also connected to the chief executive officer, Michelle Fuller, whom he holds responsible for the condition of his mother, Sandy, in a long-term coma due to the unanticipated side effects of an experimental treatment.
Michelle focused and disciplined in her work and her personal life, her exercise and diet specific and enhanced by multiple supplements, Teddy also believes that she is a representative on Earth of the Andromedans, and along with his cousin Don kidnaps her, holding Michelle in his basement where he shaves her hair to prevent her contacting her mothership, demanding that she make an arrangement with her people on the upcoming lunar eclipse to withdraw from the planet.
Inspired by Jang Joon-hwan’s 2003 science fiction black comedy thriller Save the Green Planet! (지구를 지켜라!), Bugonia reunites Yorgos Lanthimos, the director of The Favourite and The Lobster, with his Poor Things star Emma Stone as Michelle, admirably calm and assured as she attempts to negotiate with her kidnapper, Antlers’ Jesse Plemons as Teddy, but swiftly concluding that reason will not be effective against a captor whose convictions are irrational and that she must adopt a different approach to escape.
Adapted by Will Tracy and transferred to rural America, Auxolith the principal employer in the area, the locals beholden to the company and so indirectly to Michelle’s conditional benevolence, Teddy’s grudge is real regardless of whether it is valid or justified, yet while that may have prompted his targeting of Michelle it is not the driving force of the pressure he places on her, his demands entirely about the perceived Andromedan threat, seeing humanity’s continued survival as precarious as the declining bee population.
The lunar eclipse only four days away when Michelle is taken, tellingly the representation of the approaching celestial event is depicted above a flat Earth, Teddy angry, disenfranchised, the inheritor of unfortunate events beyond his control and attempting to seize control of his life, raging against an industry he believes manufactures illness in order to sell cures, a grand conspiracy orchestrated by the alien influence represented by Michelle.
Its name taken from a Mediterranean ritual related to bees though it is also phonetically similar to the protagonist of the South Korean original, Bugonia is an uncomfortable film, a chess game between Michelle and Teddy as they manoeuvre around each other for advantage, neither willing to give ground or concede and the power not entirely in his hands even though she is the captive, held responsible for the hypothetical transgressions of an entire race and arguing a case where her accuser presents no evidence, unlikely to win Lanthimos any new fans but a challenging and fascinating vision.
Bugonia will be on general release from Friday 31st October
