Bugonia Trades Social Commentary For Shock Value
Two years after directing the Academy Award-winning film Poor Things, Yorgos Lanthimos has another potential awards season contender with Bugonia.
The film, released on Oct. 24, follows the story of Teddy Gatz, a conspiracy theorist and Don, his autistic cousin, who kidnap the CEO of a pharmaceutical company.
They believe the company’s CEO, Michelle Fuller, is an alien from outer space sent to control the human race using medicine. After kidnapping Fuller—played by Emma Stone—they interrogate her.
Those scenes build up loads of tension, commenting on the real-life effects of radicalization and conspiracies. But the movie undermines that buildup with a crazy plot twist in the third act when it’s revealed that Fuller is an alien.
On a technical level, Bugonia is brilliant and the performances of the three main characters are phenomenal. The script, however, starts strong but dips in quality at the end.
The dark comedy uses a lot of charged language and ideas. For example, the writers blame Teddy’s reprehensible actions on his abusive upbringing.
His father abandoned him when he was young, his mother was a narcissist who was addicted to opioids, his babysitter sexually assaulted him, he loses contact with all of the friends he grew up with and the only remaining living family member he has at the beginning of this film is Don, but all of that is used only as a backdrop.
The movie never takes an opportunity to say anything about Teddy’s trauma and instead uses it for shock value.
During a manipulative conversation with Michelle, Don decides Teddy will be OK without him and shoots himself in the head.
The scene has a lot of emotional weight, but falls flat with lazy writing—a young mentally handicapped person randomly kills himself so other characters can have something devastating to react to.
It feels like Don’s entire inclusion in the movie boils down to that scene and that seems gross.
The same thing happens with Teddy’s old babysitter, who only serves as comic relief.
Every time you expect Teddy to have a big emotional moment because the person who sexually abused him keeps trying to reinsert themselves into his life, he doesn’t seem to care. Instead the scenes are just for cheap laughs.
These moments only chase audience reaction giving the film a shallow feel. The only character that ends up having a complete arc by the end is the antagonist, Fuller.
Thematically, the film reminds me of another film that came out this year, Eddington.
Both movies deal with a man falling down conspiratorial rabbit holes, but the way these films treat the onslaught of misinformation and desensitizing shock content is very different.
Bugonia engages with its subject material on a surface level and never makes any real commentary on it. Eddington fully dives into it.
The viewer goes down their own rabbit hole and is confronted with difficult questions and statements about those questions that are hard to swallow.
Both films aim to tackle different problems, but only Eddington manages to follow through, carrying real social commentary.
For as good of a movie as Bugonia is, the way it handles many of its sensitive topics leaves you wanting more. At the end, viewers realize the film isn’t going to give you that and that’s a sad reality to resign yourself to when watching a movie.
