Yorgos Lanthimos has established himself as a master of the cinematic wild ride, and the nature of those rides and their degrees of wildness are ever-changing. He courted a wider public favor and Oscar kisses for the mean, queenly The Favourite and the feminist Frankenstein-opus Poor Things. He changes directions yet again with the unnerving head-twisting and genre-twisting Bugonia, a spicy remake of Korean director Jang Joon-hwan’s Save the Green Planet!. Kidnap kitsch, environmental dread, black humor, psychological ping pong, and shades of sci-fi somehow learn to live together in this strange and unique concoction.
Lanthimos has shifted the focus and bearings in his “adaptation,” including a nod to his Greek roots: “Bugonia” is an ancient Greek term for “the mythical practice of bees spontaneously arising from the carcass of a sacrificed ox,” a metaphor for rebirth from seemingly hopeless decay, as in humanity’s destructive nature. Blame it on the killing of a sacred ox.
In a way, we can find Lanthimos-ian parallels between his new film and his dark horse wonder The Killing of a Sacred Deer, from 2017, just before he gained a broader public profile. In both films, there is some serious — and somewhat surreal — mental gamesmanship and sadistic foul play between characters, motivated by one outsider’s grievances against a perceived power wielding foe/victim. The gripping cat-and-mouse horseplay between Jesse Plemons’s articulate ruffian character Teddy and the kidnapped pharmaceutical CEO Michelle Fuller, played by Emma Stone (a Lanthimos regular), is the very drivetrain which keeps this film chugging towards its apocalyptic ending. In Sacred Deer, the cool, conniving Barry Keoghan slowly manipulates and undoes the offending surgeon and family man played by Colin Farrell. In both films, some serious and sinister head games are afoot.
