Every year, in the time between when the Academy Award nominations are announced and the actual Oscars ceremony is held, OUT FRONT Magazine movie reviewer and associate editor Julie River tries to watch all the movies nominated for Best Picture that year. Can she make it through all 10 films again? Find out on OFM’s Road to the Oscars!
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In 2023, Greek filmmaker Yorgos Lanthimos gave us the bizarre feminist sci-fi film Poor Things which was nominated for 11 Academy Awards and won four, including a second Best Actress award for Emma Stone. Now he returns with another film that’s up for multiple Academy Awards, the bizarre dark comedy sci-fi film Bugonia, an English-language remake of the 2003 South Korean film Save the Green Planet. With a razor-sharp wit and an outlandish premise, Bugonia shines as a dark, uncomfortable, and brilliant story with one hell of a twist ending.
In Bugonia, we meet Teddy (Jesse Plemons), a beekeeper and conspiracy theorist who is convinced that aliens from the Andromeda galaxy have invaded the Earth and are destroying honey bees and forcing the human race into subservience. Teddy and his cousin Don (Aidan Delbis) concoct a plan to kidnap Michelle Fuller (Emma Stone), the CEO of a pharmaceutical company called Auxolith because Teddy believes her to be an Andromedan alien and also because Teddy’s mother, Sandy (Alicia Silverstone), participated in an Auxolith clinical trial that rendered her comatose.
Jesse Plemons gives the most powerful performance of the film as Teddy, a frustrated young white man who is angry at the world and has become paranoid, seeing enemies everywhere. Teddy explains that he’s gone through all of the political affiliations from alt-right to Marxist and seems to have settled on bonkers conspiracy theories, which perfectly satirizes the angry young men who have become obsessive about things that are obviously not true like chemtrails and 5G poisoning.
Aidan Delbis seems like a somewhat wasted character as Teddy’s subservient cousin who is just barely along for the ride and seems to understand that his cousin is off his rocker but is too scared to defy him. His story arc doesn’t seem to be too satisfying, and ultimately the only purpose he seems to serve is to give someone for Teddy to explain his plan to. While that device was necessary, it would have been nice to make Don a meatier character on top of that.
As for the great, two-time Oscar winner Emma Stone, her character is surprising, never feeling like a true victim and, instead, coming off as a calm, calculating genius who finds a way to take control of a bizarre situation. That was a welcome alternative from the typical damsel-in-distress role that you would expect a woman in her situation to play. Her counterpart in the South Korean film was a male character, and it’s admirable that Lanthimos didn’t make her a more docile character when changing her gender.
I feel like I have to give a spoiler warning here to get into the big twist ending, so don’t read on if you don’t want the ending spoiled for you.
The big twist of the film comes when, at the end, we find out that Teddy was, in fact, correct about Michelle Fuller being an Andromedan alien, although he was way off about the Andromedan’s motives in coming to earth. The Andromedans had accidentally killed off the dinosaurs on a previous visit to the planet. To atone for their mistake, they attempted to create a new species on Earth in their own image, the humans, but were distressed when the humans became self-destructive and started destroying themselves and their planet. Fuller’s mission in coming to Earth was to try to save the humans from themselves but, after Teddy’s attempt to take her by force, she declares the planet to be a failed experiment and kills off all the humans, as the final shot shows humans lying dead, having been suddenly killed off in the middle of their everyday activities.
The ending was surprising, but also seemed to be an inevitable conclusion, and allowed the film another chance to satirize the problems of the modern world. It also moved the film from a tense thriller into a sci-fi black comedy, which is a welcome shift in tone at the end of the story. It also gives a different undertone to Emma Stone’s performance to realize that she was hiding her true identity the entire time, and explains why she does such a good job of taking control of the situation.
As I mentioned in the Hamnet review, the Vegas Odds* show that One Battle After Another is likely to win Best Picture and there’s no film that really has a chance to catch up with it. Bugonia finds itself in a distant fifth place in the odds for the Best Picture win. Meanwhile, Emma Stone is in third place in the odds to win a third Best Actress award, with Jessie Buckley being pretty much a lock to win Best Actress for Hamnet. Surprisingly, the film is not up for Best Actor for Jesse Plemons or Best Director for Yorgos Lanthimos, and it seems unlikely to win its other two nominations for Best Adapted Screenplay or Best Score. So while it’s likely to walk away with no wins for its four nominations, the film nevertheless deserves the recognition of those nominations because it’s one hell of a ride.
Rating: 92/100
Bugonia is now streaming on Peacock.
*I use the Vegas odds in my Road to the Oscars reviews to give us an idea of what the odds are of who will win what. I want to make it clear that betting on the Oscars is illegal in Colorado and OFM does not condone illegal gambling.
Photo Credit: Yorgos Lanthimos
