Bugonia

Obviously a completely different experience if you've already seen Jang Joon-hwan's Save the Green Planet!, director Yorgos Lanthimos' Bugonia is then, under those circumstances, transformed into a feature-length query. Are these filmmakers prepared to go quite as far as Jang's film did? As before, Bugonia details the kidnapping and torture of a pharmaceutical executive by a mentally ill conspiracy theorist who harbours a grudge that is rooted in the experimental treatments that have placed his mother in an unending coma. Aside from the minutiae of this global subjugation, as espoused by Jesse Plemons' apiarist turned abductor Teddy Gatz, the biggest point of departure in this telling is the amount of time and space apportioned to the chained-up CEO, played here by the Academy Award winning Emma Stone. In this Lanthimos telling, written by Will Tracy, Stone's Michelle Fuller is a much more magnetic and conniving presence than her South Korean predecessor - Baek Yoon-sik's much more conspicuously reptilian Kang. Perhaps this decision to give over so much more of this film's focus to Fuller unbalances the overall piece? 

Certainly, the extra layer of context provided by the Bugonia's closing minutes are jealously guarded; a pointed refusal to allow the audience's perspective or expectation to truly align with Teddy's paranoid outlook. Stone, a gifted physical comedian, plays Fuller as irritating and disingenuous but never quite odious or even, really, gloating. Her attempts to reason with her kidnappers may be communicated in the patronising double-speak of American office culture but even this achingly neutral invective signals an attempt to reassume the upper hand she expects rather than outright offend. Stone's performance is such that Fuller could be an extraterrestrial, or a robot, or even just a sociopathic businesswoman attempting to navigate the violent moods of the unwashed chuckleheads who have locked her in their basement. Stone's innate ability to confer depth on her CEO, and the fact that she plays a certain kind of melancholy in the decision that closes Bugonia, actually ends up framing this remake in much more alien and nihilistic terms. As cinematographer Robbie Ryan's camera glides over beatific images of extinction, rather than the tiny fragments of happiness that closed Save the Green Planet!, it's Fuller's sadness and thwarted sense of ambition that we the audience (including any potential Oscar voters catching up with their screeners) are being asked to consider.