Bees are responsible for pollinating approximately one-third of the world’s food supply, a fact which qualifies as something I didn’t know going into this film, and now will never forget. I always like to learn something from films, even if it’s how to misspell “begonia.”
This is a simple tale about two willful people. The first is a callous CEO (Emma Stone), the head of a pharmaceutical company specializing in excuses. The second is a conspiracy theorist (Jesse Plemons) so into his mistaken beliefs he’s practically bathing in Kool-Aid. The opening stresses the difference in lifestyles: Michelle Fuller (Stone) has a manicured life. Everything about her is tempered, cultured, and aided. We catch her wanting to show her “generous” side by stating that employees can now leave at 5:30 [well, unless they’re working on something really important, of course]. Her home, her body, her intake is all carefully manicured. Surprisingly, however, she has no driver, nor live in help, which makes her all the easier to abduct.
Teddy Gatz (Plemons) lives in an unkept, forgotten house. He is grooming Don (Aidan Delbis), his mentally challenged cousin. While Michelle trains with genuine trainers, Teddy is an embarrassment to anyone who has his own workout routine. In fact, without the knockout drugs, Michelle easily escapes being kidnapped by these morons.
So here comes the fun part: Michelle is trapped in the basement of this forgotten rural house and Teddy accuses her of being an alien. An Andromedan, to be exact. This is after they have shaved her head and covered her body in antihistamine cream to “prevent her from contacting her mother ship.”
Well, what do you do with that, huh?
Then the demand: in four days time, Teddy wants a message that Michelle must deliver to her people to negotiate species withdrawal from planet Earth.
Hoo, boy.
You’re chained in a basement. Nobody knows where you are and there isn’t a reasonable chance that anyone will find you. [Although I think this is patently untrue, especially in the case of a CEO. The general public may be able to get to certain CEOs, but imagining they can disappear without a clue and without company follow-up and at the hands of two morons is very far-fetched]. But, hey, it’s a movie, we shall indulge. How do you get out of this?
And what do you say to conspiracy theorist that can possibly make a difference? Most of them are Trump guys these days. Do you have any idea how to convince a Trump guy to look at genuine evidence? It’s freaking impossible. Every sane, unbiased person I know assumed Trump II was going to be a disaster. He doesn’t know what he’s doing; he’s wrong about literally everything; he has no problem with criminal behavior; and he’s a vindictive asshole. Of course the country sucks now. Try getting anybody willing to vote for Trump in 2024 to buy that. Good luck.
Much as I enjoyed the interplay between sane-and-insane, and the tongue-in-cheek humor that accompanies treating a mentally disturbed man with respect because he’s got you
tied up, I didn’t like the approach of Bugonia. Conspiracy theorists by-and-large are Right Wingers these days. The “triggered by fear” mechanism is much more acute in the conservative brain; hence, its far more likely that someone who emphatically believes something wrong, like “the Earth is flat” votes for the person who feeds that mentality. Kidnapping a CEO suggests that Teddy is on the Left, someone looking for social justice, not the perpetrators of pizza gate. The crime here strikes me much more as coming from the mind that took a hammer to Paul Pelosi, not the activist who murdered CEO Brian Thompson. (The criminal in the latter believed something false and acted stupidly; the latter criminal believed something true and acted stupidly.)
Hence, I would have been much happier with this film had the victim been Democratic politician. And that would make much more sense in our current political atmosphere. Dealing with what we have however, this film strikes me as typically Yorgos Lanthimos. There’s just a lot of weird here that makes me smile and cringe at the same time. While it’s clear to me that Yorgos is making fun of conspiracy theorists while pointing out the dangers that create them, there is healthy room for interpretation. A conspiracy theorist could walk from this film feeling completely justified in believing nonsense. That strikes me as a tad irresponsible. To sum up – I liked this film, but I certainly won’t root for it.
There once was a CEO Michelle
Who had her life going so swell
But some morons had a plan
They threw her in a van
And now she’s living conspiracy Hell
Rated R, 118 Minutes
Director: Yorgos Lanthimos
Writer: Will Tracy, Jang Joon-hwan
Genre: Yorgos
Type of being most likely to enjoy this film: Yorgosters
Type of being least likely to enjoy this film: Aliens? Power brokers? Seriously: Conspiracy theorists
