Bugonia

 Although director Yorgos Lanthimos opens up the action in Bugonia, this 2025 film is, in effect, a carefully imagined and powerfully written three-hand play, mostly confined to a single rather macabre set and featuring excellent performances by Emma Stone, Jesse Plemons, and an actor hitherto unknown to me, Aidan Delbis.  (Delbis, who is "neurodivergent" plays a character named Don, conceived as autistic -- he speaks with strange cadences, remains silent throughout much of the movie, but his presence is pivotal to the narrative.)  One can imagine this film, with some slight changes, staged as a play with one set and a couple of incidental walk-on parts in addition to the trio of principals.  The movie is modestly scaled and shot primarily in anguished close-ups; there are a few surreal black and white flashbacks that look a little like David Lynch at his most outre but, by and large, the picture is naturalistically designed and organized as a brutal confrontation between a kidnapper (Teddy played by a haggard-looking Jesse Plemons) and the woman he has kidnapped (Emma Stone as Michelle Fuller, an aggressive CEO at a big pharmaceutical company.)  The film is full of dark and vicious intimations.  Some people regard the movie as an "absurdist black comedy" -- but it's not really "absurd" and more horrifying than funny.  It's a great movie and emotionally exhausting.  Lanthimos is one of the world's best filmmakers and, when working at his peak, he can achieve effects that most directors would never attempt and could not even imagine.

Teddy is a badly damaged and psychotic conspiracy theorist.  He raises bees and the phenomenon of bee "colony collapse" has convinced him that a big pharmaceutical company is engineering the destruction of his beloved bees and, further, conspiring to destroy the planet Earth.  As we learn in elliptical flashbacks and by hints and intimations, Teddy's mother is in a coma, apparently as a result of an oxycontin overdose.  Furthermore, his father has vanished and Teddy seems to have been sexually abused by fat local cop who used to babysit him twenty years earlier.  Teddy is conducting strange experiments in his cottage in the country, a ramshackle place on a dead end in a ragged-looking woods.  On a hill, he has hives full of bees.  Teddy works for Auxolith, a surrogate for Amazon at one of its "Fulfillment Centers."  He lives with his almost speechless cousin, Don, a big bear-like kid with an asymmetrical face.  Teddy has become convinced that the CEO of Auxolith, Michelle Fuller, is an emissary from Andromeda, sent to our planet to conduct experiments on human beings. (Auxolith is like some sinister hybrid of Amazon and Big Pharma.)  With Don, Teddy kidnaps Michelle; Michelle is very fit, spending her pre-dawn hours exercising and engaging in mixed martial arts sparring with partners.  She nearly beats up Teddy and bests Don, but they finally capture her, drag her to their crumbling cottage in the country and chain her up in the basement.  Teddy, then, tries to get Michelle to admit that she is an alien invader from Andromeda.  Of course, Michelle is unafraid and can't imagine being really harmed by these geeky doofus kidnappers.  She debates the issue with them and tries to talk Teddy out of his scheme.  Teddy is convinced that Michelle has called for the Mother Ship to extract her from Earth in four days, during a lunar eclipse.  Most of the film consists of Teddy and Michelle dueling with words about the role of big corporations in our economy and fighting about whether the CEO is, in fact, a space alien.  Teddy has shaved her head on the basis of his fantasy that Andromedans use their hair as antennae to communicate telepathically.  He has also smeared her with some kind of antihistamine lotion for reasons I couldn't figure out.  Both Teddy and Don are "chemically castrated" having injected themselves with progesterone to allay any sexual instincts -- they don't want the attractive alien to use her female wiles on them.  Things go from bad to worse when Teddy tortures Michelle with electrical shocks.  When she withstands several hundred volts without dying, Teddy becomes convinced that Michelle is not merely a messenger from Andromeda but, in fact, the Empress of the aliens in that galaxy.  Spoilers will now follow:  Teddy and Don's plot goes awry:  the cop who abused Teddy years earlier when he was his babysitter shows up looking for the missing CEO.  Some murder and mayhem ensue.  Michelle discovers that Teddy has been experimenting with other poor victims whom he thought were from Andromeda -- he has a little basement room full of horrors: pickled heads and hands and a photo album showing him vivisecting people to discover if they are space aliens -- this aspect of the movie plays like Psycho.  Teddy is convinced that Michelle has an antidote for his mother's coma, disguised as anti-freeze.  He rushes to his mother's bedside and injects her with anti-freeze with predictably dire results.  Teddy and Michelle, then, have a final confrontation in which Michelle admits that she is, in fact, the Empress of Andromeda.  There's more murder and mayhem.  On Andromeda, Michelle concludes that the human race is too violent and unpredictable to be allowed to survive.  Michelle kills everyone and the film ends with the song "Where have all the flowers gone" played to a montage of shots of dead people strewn all over the world, on beaches, highways, on a ship sailing with dead captain and crew through the Aegean, a copulating couple dead in bed, burning vehicles and school classrooms full of corpses.  But the bees are flourishing once more.  "Bugonia" is a Greek word that describes bees spontaneously generating from with the guts of dead animals and, in fact, human corpses.  Life on Earth has been saved although all human beings are now extinct.  

Bugonia is very self-assured, confident, and bold.  Scenes involving Teddy's comatose mother, shot as flashbacks in high contrast black and white, are particularly effective.  The sick woman is pierced in a hundred places by three-foot long needles; in another scene, she floats like a black thundercloud over her crumpled bed or hangs over the Auxolith building tethered like a balloon.  The speechifying, which is most of the film, is thrillingly literate and theatrically intense. The film's score is gloomy and florid, sounding a bit like the adaptation of Henry Purcell's funeral music used at the outset of Clockwork Orange. The movie is successful in all respects.  (According to Wikipedia, the movie is a very close adaptation of a 2003 Korean film, Save the Green Planet directed by Jang Joon-Hwan. Lanthimos chief innovation is to substitute a woman for the male CEO in the Korean film.)