Hairless in the Basement: “Bugonia”

Greek filmmaker Yorgos Lanthimos is not one to play it safe. Neither, apparently, is Emma Stone. The Internet tells me that Lanthimos is a part of the so-called “Greek Weird Wave.” Unlike such earlier Greek filmmakers as the great Michael Cacoyannis—who dramatized classical tragedies like Electra (1962) and The Trojan Women (1971) while also bringing a full range of dramatic colors to 1964’s modern-day Zorba the Greek—Lanthimos is not interested in ennobling his characters. He seems to have real affection for the grotesque. I haven’t seen all of his English-language films. But The Lobster, in which single adults are given 45 days to find a mate or risk being turned into the animal of their choice, is both bizarre and extremely entertaining. And I loved Lanthimos’s first collaboration with Emma Stone, in 2018’s The Favourite, which made me regard the 18^th century British monarchy in a whole new light. None of this, though, prepared me for Poor Things (2023), a kind of berserk Frankenstein story in which Stone’s young adult character starts out with a small child’s brain, then develops a teenager’s libido, before finally reaching a kind of mental and emotional maturity. (The Oscar Stone won for this role was definitely well-deserved.)

 In this year’s Bugonia (the title refers to an ancient Greek folk ritual involving bees and cow dung), Lanthimos and Stone are together once again. And once again he seems to enjoy systematically destroying her wide-eyed beauty in the name of grim humor. In the film, Stone plays a soignée big pharma exec who works out of a hypermodern building set in the rural American countryside. She’s a powerhouse at work, but this doesn’t stop her from being kidnapped by two scruffy locals and imprisoned in their basement. The older one, Teddy, is played by the recently ubiquitous Jesse Plemons, who—with his always disheveled red hair—is looking more and more like Opie gone to seed. He’s the idea guy: the one who is absolutely convinced that Stone’s Michelle is really a dangerous space alien sent to threaten Planet Earth. The younger, Don, is Teddy’s always-loyal cousin. (He’s played by young Alban Delbis, who is genuinely afflicted with autism. A star of his SoCal high school’s drama class, Delbis gives an impressively moving performance.)

 The notion that a successful entrepreneur in a business suit and heels would  be accused by a doofus or two of actually coming from outer space sounds like it could make for fun at the movies. That’s what I thought my evening would be like, but the film’s poster should really have disabused me of that notion. Though a few of my fellow filmgoers managed to guffaw a time or two, Bugonia is hard to classify as a comedy, even a very dark one. Yes, there are some unexpected plot twists that encourage us to smirk, but I defy anyone to chuckle at the film’s gut-punching ending.

 Most critical reviews of Bugonia have been positive, I’m told, My hometown newspaper, The Los Angeles Times, titles its strong review “It’s Emma Stone’s planet now as the alien comedy ‘Bugonia’ proves.” The focus by the Times critic is on how cleverly Stone plays with our emotions, and how much she endures for her art, up to and including having the hair on her head brutally shaved off on camera. To promote the film’s opening, a Culver City theatre staged a promo performance exclusively for bald people, or those who were willing to lose their locks on-site. But despite the resulting hoopla, I’m sensing that audiences—with or without hair—are staying away.