Back in the early 1970s, the stubbornly independent rock ‘n’ roller Neil Young had a pair of large hital albums with “After the Gold Rush” and the soft, commercial “harvest.” The albums, he once said, “Sit me in the middle of the road. Travel there soon became a drill, so I went towards the ditch.”
This is not to say that Yorgos Lanthimos is a filmmaking version of Young, but there is something about the Greek director’s work since his critically and commercially successful “favorite” and “bad things” that suggest that he also feels more at home in Messier, less friendly terrain. These two meetings were not conventional in any way, but something with their period prisoners made the relaxed twisted surrealism in Lanthimo’s work to feel lush and fun and serve him more than $ 200 million worldwide and 21 Oscar nominations between them. And since then he has responded to success with tripty “kind of kindness”, which felt closer to his past, even Weirder movies such as “Dogtooth” and “The Killing of the Sacred Deer”; And now with “Bugonia”, a country riff on sci-fi, conspiracy theories and much more.
“Bugonia”, which had its world premiere on Thursday at the Venice Film Festival, is twisted and unforgiving and if it boils down to a hysterical mano, a mano-face-off between a pair of talented Yorgo Vet, Emma Stone and Jesse Plemons, it would rather be the good to play the good.
It shares one thing with the “favorite” and “bad things”, because they are the only three Lanthimos films that do not credit the director as a screenwriter. Will Tracy adapted it from South Korean film “Save the Green Planet!” And Lanthimos came on board after producer Ari Aster developed it for the original Korean director, Jang Joon-Hwan.
In both films, a rural man who obsessed with conspiracy theories a high-driven CEO, convinced that the CEO comes from the planet Andromeda and that the fate of the world is due to a face-to-face meeting with the foreign leader that can only take place during an upcoming Lunar Eclipse.
And it is just the beginning of the kind of wild theoretization that can make Qanon look sensible. Plemons’ Teddy is clearly out of his mind when he spins impossibly developed theories that only he has been able to figure out, but he is also a surprisingly good debater. The actor, who had something of a Tour de Force who played three different roles in “type of kindness”, turns Teddy into a complex and delightful Wack job with unexpected depths and enough charm to even make him delight, at least until he begins to torture Stone’s Medicines of Drug Michelle.
When it comes to Stone, she clearly likes to play in Lanthimo’s ditch. She has now created four films with the director in seven years, part of a resume that suggests that she Oscar for “La La Land” freed her to be as nutthe: a quadruple help by Yorgos, plus a “zombieland” follower, another conspiracy theory palooza in “and the TV series” The Curse Conspiracy theory-palooza in “Eddington” and the TV series “The Curse,” as Messed with Wating Waters “memories”.
She plays an incredibly driven and hard CEO whose idea to be a caring manager is to tell their employees that they can go home at 5:35 instead of 6:00 … but you know, only if all their work is done. When she wakes up to a bed in Teddy’s basement, it is time for a doomy, a crazy showdown between a calculating woman who cannot believe that she has been kidnapped by a pair of Addled beekeepers who have undergone chemical castration so as not to be tempted by her feminine Wiles – or not exactly feminine, according to Teddy. “It’s not a person named Michelle Fuller,” he insists. “It’s the full humanoid.”
How does he know? Easy. “Narrow feet, lightly overpunned, semi -prolonged ears, high hardness.” The first thing he does, when she is unconscious, is to get her partner Don to shave that hair, which he says allows her to communicate with and be traced by motherhood. “I’m not a dip – t,” he insists. “I’m a guy who knows what’s going on.”
The one, UM, Fuller Humanoid gives as good as she takes, but to develop many of his arguments and spit against others. When he pronounces the word incorrectly shibbolethShe corrects him, who sends Teddy to a rage. “What?” she says. “Is grammar a false Andromedan -Construction?”
Again, do any of them, and any of us, know what really happens in a Yorgos Lanthimos movie? “Bugonia” does not suggest, or at least it suggests that the director wants to keep us on our toes.
The film loves to contrast the elegant in Michelle’s work environment with the rustic mobility in Teddy’s cabin; It is alternate elegant and grungy, which allows composer Jerskin Fendrix (an Oscar-nominated for “bad things”) turning from his signature snapping minimalism to full-scale orchestral bomb to follow the different freak-outs from all involved.
And make no mistakes, freak-outs are becoming more and more freaky and increasingly out there, with a polite kidnapping that escalates to torture (bad, but nowhere close as disturbing as in the Korean original), shotgun and blood-soaked party dresses, which fit a full-scale horror extract. At the same time, a logical explanation (or even an illogical) seems to be imminent, Lanthimos pulls the carpet out under his audience’s expectations.
It is “Misery” meets “Mars Attacks” meets all types of other things, with the surplus that is quite entertaining, if not as satisfactory as, says “bad things” or “The Lobster” or “Dogtooth” or “Favorite.” Coming just a year after the sample package which was “kind of kindness”, this feels in a way like Lanthimos on automatically and in exaggeration, to throw out funny violations one after each other because he and his leading lady have so much fun to do them.
Again, too much Lanthimos is still a kind of blasting. It urges a scene early in the movie where Teddy lectures Don about the foreigner’s master plan, and how they track every moment with mysterious technology that will “weak into your brain box.”
And hey, it’s as good as everyone to summarize this movie. “Bugonia”: It will weak into your brain box!
