"Bugonia" may (or may not) be about aliens — but it's definitely about alienation

As the end credits began to scroll at my screening of Bugonia, the audience sat silently in the darkness for several long seconds.

Director Yorgos Lanthimos’ latest film follows Teddy (Jesse Plemons), a grimy, raw-boned conspiracy theorist who, alongside his cousin Don (Aidan Delbis), kidnaps Michelle (Emma Stone) a steely Big Pharma CEO, because he’s convinced himself she’s an alien.

It’s not uncommon for a movie to lull a theater full of people into a moment of collective contemplation, of course. Such silences take various forms, depending on the film that precedes them: stunned, or thoughtful, or weighted with emotion. But Bugonia is a Lanthimos film. Which explains why, at its conclusion, the audience decided to take a moment to sit with it, before a lone voice pierced the gloom:

“The f***,” it shouted, “was that?”

Reader, I grinned. For those of us who count ourselves firmly in the tank for Lanthimos as a filmmaker, that cry of hapless, outraged bumfuzzlement is one reason we love seeing his stuff with a crowd. Because if it’s true that art comforts the disturbed and disturbs the comfortable, the occasional plaintive cry of disturbed confusion can make the moviegoing experience that much richer and more enjoyable. Keep your Milk Duds — gimme a fellow theatergoer’s indignation, in a bucket, with extra butter.

Many of Lanthimos’ previous films evoked similar responses, as he does tend to traffic in all things bleak and despondent. It’s just who he is: What Spielberg is to childlike wonder, Lanthimos is to the abject misery of the human condition. And while he has made films that received widespread audience and critical acclaim, his core sensibility is not engineered for mainstream success, and some of us love him all the more for that. So you go into a Lanthimos film expecting some pushback from folks who just want to sit back and have a good time at the movies.

But this time? That guy who shouted at my screening of Bugonia? He’s got a point.

Doing the Lanthi-most

Because as enjoyable as I found the film (until its final three minutes and 37 seconds, about which more later), it only manages to qualify as mid-tier Lanthimos, chiefly because it doesn’t register as a pure expression of his cinematic sensibility.

The reason that some Lanthimos films — Dogtooth (2009), The Killing of a Sacred Deer (2017), Kinds of Kindness (2024) and especially The Lobster (2015) — feel so much more satisfying and essential than his Oscar-winners — The Favourite (2018) and Poor Things (2023) — is simple: He co-wrote them, with longtime collaborator Efthimis Filippou.

That’s important, because whenever Lanthimos shows up as both director and (co-)writer, he brings a consistent (some would say rigid), characteristic (some would say mannered) style. This approach tends to feature deliberately and hilariously stilted dialogue delivered with a flat affect that borders on monotone, which has the net effect of rendering the characters incapable of accessing the strong emotions that are roiling just below the film’s impassive surface.

There’s also, not for nothing, that bleakness. The abject, unutterable (and therefore very funny), kind of bleakness I associate with the comics of Charles Burns and Chris Ware — a bleakness that is total, and inexorable, and endlessly, hilariously resilient.

Bugonia was written by Will Tracy.

Here, Lanthimos can’t avail himself of his signature style — that affectless affect — because the story he’s telling won’t permit it. He’s forced to adopt a more naturalistic approach, because he needs Emma Stone’s character — the CEO trapped in Plemons’ basement — to be fully, recognizably, empathetically human. He wants to place us in that basement alongside her, making the shrewd, calculating assessments of her situation that we imagine we would, if we were in her straits. Stone is dependably marvelous as a woman deftly reading her captors’ moods and body language, and expertly negotiating her way towards freedom.

For the film to work — and it largely does — it can’t exist within the hermetically sealed bubble that typifies the films Lanthimos both directs and co-writes. It has to feel more immediate, more grounded, more real.

But there’s a coldness, here — a coldness that’s absolutely necessary in films like The Lobster and The Killing of a Sacred Deer, where it works to delineate and define the idiosyncratic world. In Bugonia, however, that same dispassionate directorial remove feels out of place, and can’t help but interpose itself between the audience and the characters, numbing our reaction to them.

Ready for their close-up

That distancing effect is amplified by Lanthimos’ deliberate but frustrating disinclination to let his two leads truly act together, in any given scene.

Bugonia lives in a series of alternating close-ups of Stone’s and Plemons’ faces. We’re tight on a given character while they’re talking, then we cut to the other character saying their bit, then back to the other character as they resume talking.

But acting, as they say, is reacting, and Lanthimos largely denies us reaction shots. It’s something that you first notice unconsciously: Teddy says something provocative that we know Michelle would object to, yet we never cut away to her, we stay on Plemons’ face. When he’s done talking we cut to Michelle, who insults Teddy, but if it gets a rise out of him, we won’t know it until it gets to be his turn again.

It’s a deliberate choice, or course: Lanthimos wants the film to read as a battle of wills between his leads. They are two people forcefully asserting, in turn, their clashing versions of reality, without ever listening to each other, without ceding any ground. They talk at each other, but nothing ever sinks in, nothing ever sways the other person even minutely; they just keep talking.

(Contrast this with Delbis’ character Donny, whose entire presence in the film exists as a series of reaction shots. That’s intentional too — Donny is the heart of the movie, its soft chewy center; he’s a sponge who absorbs absolutely everything Teddy and Michelle say to him, even though they contradict each other; he spends the entirety of the film being acted upon, ruthlessly manipulated.)

The decision to bifurcate the film in this way makes sense on a technical level, I suppose, as it serves the film’s themes of loneliness and alienation. But it’s never anything less than frustrating to watch two of the finest film actors of the age delivering what amounts to a series of choppy mini-monologues instead of engaging in the true exchange of dialogue.

Worst. Needle drop. Ever.

I’ve now talked to several critics and non-critics about the film and a kind of consensus has evolved — several say they like the film in general, but dislike, or hate, the ending.

I’ll be careful here, but: When I hear that take, I always follow up with them. Do you mean the resolution of the film, or the final few minutes of the film?

If they tell me they disliked how the film resolves a central question about the presence or absence of aliens, I disagree with them strongly, because I think the film’s final act is kind of hilarious, and includes some terrific, grotesquely beautiful visual imagery.

But if they tell me they hated those last few minutes — those last three minutes and 37 seconds, to be precise, when Marlene Dietrich’s cover of “Where Have all the Flowers Gone?” is played? Then yeah, they’re right, it’s terrible.

Mind-bogglingly terrible, and a testament to the power of a single musical choice — a single, punishingly literal, ham-fisted, achingly obvious needle drop that occurs at the very, very end of a film — to poison the two hours of innovative, exciting filmmaking that precedes it.

It’s not just the song itself, but the fact that Lanthimos chooses to let it unspool in its entirety, all five verses. That’s a serious chunk of screentime to devote to a single tune, and when you factor in that it’s played over imagery that becomes thuddingly repetitive and overbearing by the two-minute mark, the choice is so mystifyingly bad that this Lanthimos devotee found himself questioning how a filmmaker he admires so much could biff the dismount in such an exhaustive and exhausting manner.

When will they ever learn, indeed.