Two conspiracy-addled guys abduct a powerful CEO because … well, they think she’s an alien. And the crazy’s just getting started. This movie is definitely not for kids for a host of reasons, including its ridiculous levels of gore and heavy profanity. But it’s bothersome in other ways, too.
Teddy’s tired of aliens telling him what to do. Who do those Andromedans think they are, anyway? Landing on our planet, manipulating our societies, killing off our bees? Yep, Teddy’s had it up to here with intergalactic interference. And he’s gonna do something about it.
Most folks don’t even know about this insidious alien threat. Andromedans look just like us, after all. Well, almost. But Teddy can tell. Oh, yes. There’s something about the earlobes, the hair, the cuticles that give ‘em away. And Michelle Fuller? CEO of the big-pharma company Auxolith? She’s definitely an Andromedan. It’s written all over that smug, pretend-human face of hers.
Teddy has her abduction all planned out. He knows where she lives. When she drives home from work, he and his best friend, Don, will grab and sedate her. They’ll shave her head so she won’t be able to call for help. (They communicate through their hair, y’know.) They’ll chain her up in their basement. They’ll make her confess.
And then, if all goes well, Michelle (or whatever her Andromedan name is) will bring Teddy up to the mothership to meet the Andromedan emperor. And Teddy’ll talk some sense into the alien.
Sure, Teddy knows it won’t be easy. Michelle, being an Andromedan and all, will be wily and clever. She’ll deny and deny and deny. I’m not an alien, she’ll say. I’m not an alien. Not. Not. NOT. She’ll cry. She’ll threaten. She’ll play every card she has. And while Teddy knows better than to believe alien scum, Don’s not exactly the brightest bulb in the box. And if Teddy’s forced to bring out more, um, persuasive methods to force a confession, Don just might flinch.
But Teddy’s come too far to let anything derail his plans. He knows far too much about those sneaky Andromedans to stop now. He’ll save the world. Absolutely he will. The earth will be a place worth living in again, and everyone will thank him for his hard work.
And once they do, maybe he’ll feel better.
Bugonia makes it hard to praise much of anyone here. Does the fact that Teddy thinks he’s saving the world excuse what he does to “save” it? Do we believe Michelle when she says her pharmaceutical company is all about saving lives—even if it ruins others?
Don, the third core player in this little drama, is perhaps the only halfway decent person we meet here. He seems to operate with the guileless approach of a child. He loves Teddy unconditionally and follows him without question. But he is aware when Teddy goes too far, and he perhaps saves Michelle’s life a couple of times by stepping in. Indeed, he’ll protect each of them from physical harm if he must. And that makes him the closest thing to a hero as you’ll find here.
We hear a long, complex story of Andromedan contact with Earth—one that suggests that humans were products of both creation (by the hand of an alien, not God) and evolution.
Crude crosses adorn the walls of Teddy and Don’s shared house. Another cross hangs in the room of a care facility. We see dozens of Muslims in a mosque, apparently at prayer time.
Both Teddy and Don have chemically castrated themselves in order to rid themselves of all distractions and prevent Michelle from using her apparently womanly wiles on them. Don laments the necessity of it: “I just wanted to be with someone someday,” he says sadly. But he submits to the needle, which Teddy injects into Don’s visible rear end.
A man and woman lie naked on a bed together, one on top of the other. Their bodies essentially cover each other’s most critical bits. Teddy compares a bee’s pollination process to sex, “only nobody gets hurt.” We see Michelle from the shoulders up when she takes a shower. She wears a bathrobe for much of the movie and lathers lotion on her legs. We see men and women in revealing swimwear. Characters talk about masturbation.
If Bugonia was sentient, it’d be flat-out bipolar. And nowhere does that bifurcation show up more obviously than in its onscreen violence.
Early on, the violence is played as straight-up slapstick. (Though, if you pause to think about what’s really happening, it becomes a lot less funny and a lot more concerning.) The camera films Michelle’s abduction at a distant remove, like a neighbor across the street. Michelle’s more than a match for her would-be abductors, knocking one senseless and leaving the other gasping from exertion. One tackles her into some nearby bushes, and all you see for a bit are their legs thrashing about as the rest of them struggle unseen. A syringe filled with a sedative eventually does the trick: We see Michelle run, then stagger, then fall flat on the grass as the syringe sticks comically out of her leg.
Those deceptively light scenes do nothing to prepare us for the carnage to come. Someone shoots himself in the head, spraying blood everywhere. Another man is killed via shovel—his head turned into a chunk of bloody meat after repeated blows. In a scene that seems to try to join both the comic and the grotesque, someone accidentally blows up: The decapitated head flies like a gore-spattered basketball, while the closet the victim was inside of is painted in blood and body chunks. In one scene, Teddy straps Michelle to a makeshift electric chair, gagging her and sending electrical charges through her body. When he finally stops, Michelle’s nearly comatose, and blood dribbles past the gag and down her chin.
Two characters fight and choke each other, both bent on murder. Antifreeze becomes a lethal poison. Someone finds a hidden room filled with human parts in jars and a tinfoil-wrapped body apparently awaiting dismemberment: A photo album depicts scenes of torture. In flashback, we see Teddy’s very sick mother—prone to her own insane-sounding rants—lying in a bathtub, her body pierced by what appear to be 3-foot-long acupuncture needles. Someone is incapacitated by bees.
Even when we’re not exposed to actual violence, the threat of it hovers everywhere.
Teddy may believe that Michelle is an alien, but he also blames her, and her company, for more personal tragedies. “You killed my family. You killed my community. You killed my co-workers. You killed the bees,” he tells her. He believes that she should thank him for how “super professional I’m being by not gutting you.” He threatens her with a chair, then decides to pound the floor with it instead. (The tantrum culminates with Teddy throwing the chair over Michelle’s head.)
Teddy has a few conversations with a police officer, Casey. We learn through these conversations that Casey molested Teddy when he used to babysit, and he awkwardly tries to apologize.
[Spoiler Warning] In the end, everyone dies—every human being on the planet. We see the bodies everywhere: on a museum floor; on a beach; prepping for a wedding; eating at a diner; in a hospital room, with an automated suction tube mindlessly clearing a wound of blood from an already-dead patient. The scenes aren’t meant to be violent or gory but perhaps a little funny and rather sad. And given the planet is home to somewhere north of 8 billion people at the time of its making, Bugonia may have one of the highest body counts in cinematic history.
More than 50 f-words and about two-dozen s-words. We also hear uses of the c-word, “h—” and “a–.” God’s name is misused once.
Characters eat a spaghetti dinner together, and we see glasses of wine on the table. Michelle pops a handful of pills (they may simply be vitamins). She talks about the efficacy, refinement and occasional failure of her company’s pharmaceuticals, including an opioid withdrawal drug.
During a dinner, Don repeatedly asks Teddy if he can use the restroom. (Teddy says no.)
Bugonia comes with a strong environmental message, alleging that the human race willfully ignores potential environmental catastrophe even when that catastrophe looms at the world’s doorstep. A declining bee population is a huge concern for Teddy: When Michelle says that the bee population is on the rise again, Teddy suggests that that’s just what gatekeepers want the world to think.
Teddy admits that he’s been involved in plenty of fringe and conspiratorial groups: alt-left, alt-right, Marxists, you name it. He abandoned them all because he felt that they were far more about the adherents trying to categorize and brand themselves than they were about any actual cause.
In flashbacks, Teddy’s mother floats like a balloon—a manifestation, the movie suggests, of Teddy’s unhinged or metaphorical memories.
Michelle is, let’s face it, kind of a jerk.
“The madman’s explanation of a thing is always complete, and often in a purely rational sense satisfactory,” wrote G.K. Chesterton in his book Orthodoxy. “If a man says (for instance) that men have a conspiracy against him, you cannot dispute it except by saying that all the men deny that they are conspirators; which is exactly what conspirators would do.”
Bugonia’s seeming central tension lies in this paradox of rationality. Michelle says that she’s not an alien … which is exactly what an alien would say, reasons Teddy. Michelle suggests that Teddy has fallen prey to the most extreme, most unhinged voices online—themselves unfettered by traditional, fact-rooted gatekeepers. The gatekeepers are the ones feeding lies, Teddy would argue.
Bugonia lands in an age in which suspicion of those traditional gatekeepers is perhaps greater than ever before. Our technology allows us to manipulate faces, voices and entire events. The uncertainty can leave us feeling unmoored, seeking truth in alternate voices or trusting our own gut. Meanwhile, online anger grows ever louder. Mental illness is at an all-time high.
Bugonia suggests that impending environmental catastrophe is society’s greatest threat. But I wonder whether the movie’s on-the-nose premise—its questions of who or what we can trust—feels even more relevant today, and more frightening. And for those who walk into the film suffering from their own forms of mental illness, Bugonia whispers, Hey, you may be right after all.
Bugonia is a clever film with excellent performances. But it’s also as problematic as problematic can be. Director Yorgos Lanthimos’ latest Oscar hopeful comes with enough content issues to make many discerning moviegoers swiftly walk the other way: its violent forays into grotesquerie, its harsh language, its willingness to turn abduction into a joke.
But beyond all that, this film might’ve been the hardest, most dispiriting film I’ve had to watch this year. It feels a movie too much of this age—one that amplifies rather than eases its own worst impulses. And I worry about its influence on, admittedly, the small sliver of moviegoers who might see Teddy very differently than most of us would.
Bugonia is based on the 2003 South Korean film Save the Green Planet!, a film I watched with a friend suffering through his own season of mental illness. And even though we were watching the same screen, we saw very different movies.
The Korean movie’s version of Teddy, Byeong-gu, was far more a hero in my friend’s eyes than in mine—someone who saw the world much as my friend did. The film wasn’t just a clever, fanciful work of fiction, but something that felt powerful and personal to him. It reinforced his paranoia (or so I would’ve considered paranoia) and validated his delusions (or so I would’ve considered delusions).
I would’ve brushed off Save the Green Planet with a mix of reactions no matter what: It, like Bugonia, was funny, bleak, disturbing. But I walked away feeling more than amused or sad or bothered. I felt helpless; helpless to help. Helpless to know how to counter the voices my friend heard, now reinforced by the voices onscreen.
My own reaction to Bugonia can’t help but be colored by my experience with Save the Green Planet. And I walked away from both feeling awful.
We at Plugged In talk often about the power of story. Humans are creatures shaped by story, and the stories we take into our hearts—be they on the page or on our screen—can help shape us into the people we are. It’s why Jesus taught through parables; He knows, better than anyone, how receptive we can be to them.
For most moviegoers, Bugonia will be a creative, well-crafted and wildly problematic story. We’ve already documented its oodles of issues. But Bugonia comes with a very personal reminder that we can take away very different messages from the movies we share with each other. And that’s something to be mindful of, too.
Paul Asay has been part of the Plugged In staff since 2007, watching and reviewing roughly 15 quintillion movies and television shows. He’s written for a number of other publications, too, including Time, The Washington Post and Christianity Today. The author of several books, Paul loves to find spirituality in unexpected places, including popular entertainment, and he loves all things superhero. His vices include James Bond films, Mountain Dew and terrible B-grade movies. He’s married, has two children and a neurotic dog, runs marathons on occasion and hopes to someday own his own tuxedo. Feel free to follow him on Twitter @AsayPaul.
