Bugonia

According to the custom, which is rooted in superstition and dates back to at least 1621, anyone who keeps bees is to inform them of major life events, including and especially a death in the family. Failure to do so, the thinking goes, may result in them leaving their hive, ceasing to produce honey, or even dying. John Chapple, the royal apiarist, explained the process: “You knock on each hive and say, ‘The mistress is dead, but don’t you go. Your [new] master will be a good master to you.’”

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Watching Bugonia, you can’t help thinking that Teddy (Jesse Plemons) forgot to tell his bees about something big. An amateur beekeeper, he considers the insects our planet’s most admirable creation and particularly reveres what he calls the “larger organizing principle” that defines their existence. Lacking any such structure himself, he fills the void the same way a lot of people do: cooking his brain with conspiracy theories. The theory that Teddy believes most fervently, and the one he plans to violently act upon, is that a pharmaceutical CEO played by Emma Stone is in fact an alien intent on destroying the planet.

Yorgos Lanthimos’ thrilling new film takes its title, which is never spoken aloud or even alluded to, from an ancient ritual based on the equally out-there idea that bees are born from the bodies of dead cows. Call it the original conspiracy theory. And though Teddy’s decision to kidnap Michelle and demand she bring him to her mothership so he can end their sinister scheme is patently absurd, you can hardly blame him for thinking we’re in the end times. Conspiracy theories, after all, have a way of providing order and meaning to a world that appears to lack both. At a time when it seems likely that there are any number of disaffected young men plotting who knows what all across the country, Teddy’s misbegotten scheme feels particularly scary — though, in true Lanthimos fashion, it’s also so outlandish that you can’t imagine it inspiring any copycats.

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The majority of Bugonia entails little more than captor and captive speaking to each other. Every minute of it is compelling. Michelle is smart enough to be polite when she tells Teddy that she is not, in fact, an Andromedan and that she’s too high-profile a figure for this to end well for him. He remains convinced of the righteousness of his mission nevertheless, and it’s in their conversations, most of which take place with her chained to a cot in his basement, that the film most overtly explores the danger of online echo chambers and feedback loops. Some millennials deal with the state of the world by becoming Disney adults; others get radicalized by their social-medial algorithms. (The latter does more harm, but only just.)

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The problem with rabbit holes is that they’re easier to get into than they are to get out of. As the brains of the operation who manipulates his naive cousin (the excellent newcomer Aidan Delbis) into going along with his daffy yet dangerous scheme, Teddy is quite smart — but, like most people who “do their own research” online, not as smart as he thinks he is. That’s a perilous combination, and Plemons, in his second consecutive collaboration with Lanthimos following the underrated triptych Kinds of Kindness, makes Teddy compellingly pitiful.

Some millennials deal with the state of the world by becoming Disney adults; others get radicalized by their social-medial algorithms.

We should all be so lucky to find someone who loves us as much as Lanthimos loves Stone. Not that he isn’t justified: she’s been superlative in all of their collaborations, beginning with The Favourite and continuing with Poor Things (for which she won her second Oscar) and Kinds of Kindness. (They also made a short film called Bleat that hardly anyone got a chance to see.) With her head shaved by her kidnapper and her skin covered in lotion for reasons only Teddy can explain, Michelle does cut a somewhat extraterrestrial figure — beautiful but otherworldly. The more she pleads her humanity, the more alien she looks.

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As that happens, you might start wondering whether Teddy is onto something. Surely not, right? Unless…? He’s certainly put a lot of thought into the idea, and expresses himself so eloquently as to almost be persuasive. Just as Michelle has an answer for everything, he has a rebuttal. Lanthimos and screenwriter Will Tracy, in remaking the 2003 South Korean film Save the Green Planet!, never condescend to Teddy or treat him as an object of ridicule. They might if he were harmless, but we and Michelle quickly learn he isn’t.

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Bugonia is funny in a way no other director’s movies are, unsettling in a way no other director’s movies are, and intriguing in a way no other director’s movies are. The fact that the outré Greek filmmaker responsible for Dogtooth managed to become a major Hollywood filmmaker without altering his sensibility continues to astound; with the endless glut of franchise fare showing no signs of slowing as generative AI becomes increasingly common, it’s also something to be thankful for. Despite all the damage we — not aliens — have done to the planet, it turns out there’s something else to be thankful for as well: the bees are coming back. Let's hope we can keep them this time.