In the Flesh: Bugonia

Yorgos Lanthimos uses whimsy more effectively than perhaps any other working director. In Bugonia, his latest feature, he keeps that particular knife hidden for a long, long time, but when it finally comes out, he buries it right to the hilt. The disarming sight of the Andromedans in their bulky, braided costumes, which resemble weighted blankets more than clothing, the fanciful 60s Golden Age sci-fi feel of their mothership with its sandy floors and natural angles, even the strange bulky control wand with which the Andromedan Empress (Emma Stone) pops a bubble to terminate all life on earth, it’s all calculated to draw viewer sympathy, to make the aliens appear distant from human concerns, spiritually elevated, and serene. Even the Empress’s tears as she looks out at the now-desolate Earth are a clever thematic stumbling block, a cue to the viewer that something about what we’ve been shown doesn’t add up. 

The Empress, after all, is also Michelle Fuller, CEO of Auxolith, a woman we first meet as she emotionally terrorizes her staff with a smile on her face, who screams “you can’t stop me, because I’m a winner and you’re a loser and that’s just the way things are” at the intellectually disabled Don (Aiden Delbis) as she strangles his cousin, Teddy (Jesse Plemmons), in front of him. Her sorrowful admission that life in disguise on Earth has made her harder and more selfish, that humanity’s ills have infected her soul, seem reasonable in a science fiction logic sort of way, but nowhere in the film do we receive any indication that Fuller was ever anything but a colonialist psychopath playing god to beings she sneeringly characterizes as genetic garbage. Stone’s performance is tremendously nuanced, her constructed facades chipping away little by little until we’re face to face with her actions, a truth higher and more reliable than her words.

Consider Casey Boyd (Stavros Halkias), a local cop in Teddy’s hometown. Consider his awkward guilt over his implied molestation of Teddy during an adolescent stint as his babysitter. His conflicted attempts to apologize for something he doesn’t seem to fully understand are a strong thematic mirror to Fuller’s crimes. She may cry when all is said and done, but in her eugenicist worldview the whole tangled experiment seems to amount to little more than an elaborate excuse to commit genocide, an exercise in assuaging guilt and bloodlust both. She’s as mired in myths and misinformation as her captor, a man completely broken by his mother’s psychosis and brain-death during one of Auxolith’s pharmaceutical trials, and like Teddy, the lies which form her worldview contain kernels of truth, but it’s all just strength preying on weakness, and the rest is only layers of excuses.