In Bugonia, a greasy-haired Jesse Plemons plays conspiracist antihero Teddy, who concludes that his own boss is in fact part of an alien race intent on destroying Earth. So he and his cousin Don kidnap her.
It's just the latest absurd offering from director Yorgos Lanthimos, part of what he calls his "little paradigms or experiments" to observe societal constructs and dig into what's behind them.
Teddy may appear unhinged, but he has valid reasons to feel angry and afraid — capitalist exploitation, ecological disasters and the sense that society doesn't care about people like him.
So it's no wonder he sets his sights on Emma Stone's ruthless, Louboutin-clad CEO. "Nobody gives a f*** about us," he tells Don, played by Aidan Delbis, who is making his feature film debut at 19. The actor describes himself as autistic.
Lanthimos acknowledged that the characters represent archetypes, but all is not as it may seem. The film slowly uncovers layers of complexity.
"It challenges all these biases that we have about people, which is aided by technology and compartmentalization," he told Morning Edition host Leila Fadel, referring to those biases as a "dormant" state of mind.
The screenplay, by Will Tracy, is loosely based on the 2003 South Korean film Save the Green Planet!
This is not the strangest tale spun by Lanthimos, after previous features explored the extremes of parental control (Dogtooth), jealousy and power struggles (The Favourite), scientific experimentation (Poor Things) or revenge (The Killing of a Sacred Deer).
But Bugonia, out in theaters nationwide October 31, feels especially relevant in an era filled with misinformation. The strangely unsettling tale backed by stilted, darkly humorous dialogue also makes for some especially riveting cinema.
The secret lives of bees
First, a bit of etymology: the word bugonia that lends the film its name comes from the ancient Greek words for "ox" and "progeny," a reference to a ritual based on the myth that bees emerge from an ox carcass.
Bees appear in the opening and closing shots of the film, and Teddy's pastime as beekeeper is part of what fuels his belief that Earth is hurtling toward doomsday.
He determines that the hives face colony collapse disorder, which he blames on pollution caused by Auxolit — the company run by Stone's character Michelle Fuller — and on other corporations he believes are run by aliens.
As the two cousins drive away with a sedated Fuller in her car, Teddy has Don shave off the company executive's hair — to prevent her, he says, from contacting her mothership.
Stone shaved her head for real for the role, her fourth feature film collaboration on a feature film with Lanthimos, which he credits to their "synchronicity." They also worked together on the short film Bleat set on the Greek Cycladic island of Tinos.
When Fuller wakes up in Teddy's dirty basement, shaven and slathered in an antihistamine cream meant to dull her supposed extraterrestrial powers, Fuller begins a tense negotiation for her release.
Making cramped scenes feel grand
These cramped scenes still manage to feel grand because Lanthimos shot much of the film on VistaVision, a format that is usually especially desirable for large vistas.
Directors like Brady Corbet (The Brutalist) and Paul Thomas Anderson (One Battle After Another) have also turned to this vintage format debuted by Paramount Pictures in 1954.
Cinematographer Robbie Ryan tracked down a rare Wilcam 11 camera to shoot on Vistavision, which is fed horizontally rather than vertically, resulting in a crisper image than standard 35mm film.
"The juxtaposition of filming closeups of faces in a very limited space with that kind of format kind of made them iconic," Lanthimos said. "So all this confrontation between these people is kind of elevated to a different level just by the depth and the tonality that the medium provides."
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The broadcast version of this story was produced by Phil Harrell and edited by Olivia Hampton. The digital version was edited by Majd Al-Waheidi.
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