Finally, the Truth!

Peggy Hepburn’s 3-Word Review: Warped! Wild! Whoa!

I’m still scratching my head over this one, among others. Head-scratching seems to be the goal du jour for this Oscar season, kids, but it makes sense, we live in head-scratching times. The vortex of political chaos is a tornado sweeping up all cultural conversations & creations, & the anxiety of a world on edge is giving forth to some very compelling cinema: I give you, Bugonia.

I’m a recent convert to the church of Yorgos Lanthimos, the director of this weird jewel of a movie. While Kinds of Kindness slipped under the radar — it was okay — it was clearly simply a fade-in / fade-out between Poor Things & Bugonia, with Emma Stone the director’s muse, a partnership that is clearly yielding some beguiling results. In their most recent, the actress depicts a powerful executive of a chemical company, & she is more than convincing. The details of her existence (personal trainer, tasteful modern home with manicured lawn & lots of glass & empty space, her perfectly understated, exquisitely tailored clothing) build a delightful contrast to the weird, haggard existence of Teddy (Jesse Plemons, also a Lanthimos regular), who lives in the cluttered & outdated home of his deceased mother with his slow-witted cousin, Don (Aiden Delbis), his acolyte & only friend. The greasy-haired Teddy is a familiar figure in our cultural discussion of late: a would-be internet manifesto author, a terribly lonely white man with a head full of conspiracy theories, all of them weaving together to form a Grand Conspiracy, one which he believes he holds the key to.

Rather than purchasing a firearm & heading to his local mall or church or elementary school, he conscripts his cousin into kidnapping Emma Stone, shaving her head, & chaining her up in the basement. He is convinced that she is an alien, an Andromedon to be exact, & he is convinced that she is killing the bees (he keeps bees in the backyard of his hilly country property) & otherwise sewing chaos on Earth. She is incredibly even-headed during all this, a performance tailored for our age: a sane, put-together woman calmly talking down a demented man prone to fits of anger, her calm belying her valid underlying conviction that the man she is speaking with is, in fact, completely insane. The expertly-crafted dialogue is like a tight precipitation of all of the obnoxious political sniping that we seem unable to escape these days, one side, with the absolute straightest of faces, entirely convinced that the other side is insane and/or flat out lying.

The tension never breaks in this picture, & the ending arrives as a kind of amazing societal Schadenfreude, a kind of impossible final answer that might put an end to all this never-ending bickering. The clever, clean presentation up until then, however, reminded me almost of a Coen brothers movie: demented in a strangely satisfying way, the violence surprising & gorey amid an otherwise almost hyperrealist depiction of rural poverty (Hello! Class warfare! There’s rarely a political conversation without it!), the slow burn & sudden explosive energy capped with one of the strangest & most incredible third acts in contemporary cinema. This is how you make a political movie!

—Peggy Hepburn