Associated Press
[Source: AP]
The twisted filmography of Yorgos Lanthimos has by now trained us to expect darkly comic visions of contemporary life, both savage and mundane.
His movies have perhaps inspired the most “What?!” reactions of the last decade, partly because they’ve tried so hard to do so.
His movies — farces, fables, experiments — reside in surreal worlds of their own. But his latest, “Bugonia,” is thrillingly, if tragically, tied to our reality. It might even be his best film.
Though I’ve been apprehensive about the flamboyant severity of Lanthimos’ movies, I found “Bugonia,” a chamber-piece gut punch, hard to shake.
For starters, it’s difficult to resist any movie with a line in it like: “There’s Andromedan code all over your Instagram.”
That’s one of the things that Teddy (Jesse Plemons), an incel eco-terrorist, says to Michelle (Emma Stone) after kidnapping her with his neurodivergent cousin Donny (newcomer Aidan Delbis) and tying her up in their basement. Teddy and Donny live together in fairly remote, rundown old house.
There, Teddy tends to both his bees and to unhinged conspiracy theories.
But as Plemons so deftly plays him, Teddy doesn’t seem like a lunatic. He might reach wildly insane conclusions, such as that Michelle, a pharmaceutical company chief executive, is an alien.
But he’s thoughtful in nature and sweetly cares for his cousin.
It’s a feat of Plemons’ innate good nature that we kind of like Teddy, even as he shaves Michelle’s head, to prevent “it,” as he calls her, from contacting the mothership.
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