Hive Mind: BUGONIA

A continuing delight of contemporary cinema is the Emma Stone collaboration with art house auteur Yorgos Lanthimos. Who’d have thought that her blend of screwball feistiness and laconic confidence would fit so perfectly in his dark deadpan extremity. And such variety! There was the snappy, fish-eyed period piece The Favourite, the explicit warped feminist Frankenstein riff Poor Things, and the bleakly wacky triptych Kinds of Kindness. In each, she pushes and pulls her physicality and psychological acuity with an intoxicating freedom, loose-limbed fearlessness launching through scenes both clever and exposing. They’ve re-teamed for the fourth time with Bugonia, and it’s the least of these. It’s no less well-photographed, rigorously sound designed, or precisely calibrated with discomfiting interpersonal dynamics. But the plot’s contortions, inspired by the 2003 South Korean film Save the Green Planet, feel strangely stale and like an unusually disappointing dead end despite a live-wire contemporaneous flavor. Stone plays a calculated pharmaceutical CEO who is kidnapped by a desperately conspiratorial beekeeper (Jesse Plemons) convinced that she’s an alien in disguise. The bulk of the film concerns their mind games. He’s trying to get her to record a message for her mothership, demanding to be taken to her leader. He knows he's right because he's "done his own research." She’s trying to get in his head and talk him into letting her go. She never loses her sense of high status, even when her hair is shaved and she's shackled in a basement. It’s a tense standoff going nowhere fast. Screenwriter Will Tracy, of the similarly hollow The Menu, gets little deeper than the surface of the concept working despite all the right elements for something better buzzing around. 

It makes for a movie that’s largely a tense back and forth that’s also surprisingly static, going over the same points at progressively louder volumes. She’s so cruel and cutting, even in early scenes in which she’s a transparent, sanctimonious manipulator of a boss, and he’s so distressingly unhinged that we don’t get a good sense of where we stand. The movie is deliberately keeping us off balance, but it plays off our uncertainties with only easy points. We don’t much like the wealthy’s disregard for the common folk, but we also don’t want to see an innocent woman brutalized. We don’t much want a delusional man’s crackpot theories to be proven correct, but we also don’t want to see a grieving, mentally ill man taken advantage of, especially since he’s gotten his cousin (Aidan Delbis) wrapped up in this predicament, too. It’s a seemly intractable bit of unpleasantness surrounded by further characters who are either intensely vulnerable, like a comatose mother (Alicia Silverstone), or deeply disturbing, like a molester who’s now the town cop (Stavros Halkias). What could be bracingly misanthropic instead reads as empty provocation. It all adds up to a pretty grim straight line to a cosmic dark joke of a finale, and that’s hard to take. Where other Lanthimos movies are symphonies of bad feeling, this one’s pretty drearily one-note, despite his actors willing to go off on flights of fanatic nuance. He’s better than this. It takes a lot of talent to make a movie so well-made feel this much of a shrug in the end. 

Triple Threat: KINDS OF KINDNESS

“Some of them want to use you / Some of them want to get used by you / Some of them want to abuse you / Some of them want to be abused”
— Eurythmics, “Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)”

“This were kindness?”
— The Merchant of Venice (1.3.154)

For anyone worried that Greek writer-director Yorgos Lanthimos was drifting to the mainstream with his awards feted, and surprise box office hits, The Favourite and Poor Things, here’s Kinds of Kindness to most fully expose that bleeding heart of darkness within his works. Not that those other films aren’t wild with vulgarity and explicitness, too, but they were packaged in aesthetically pleasing historical intrigue or flights of fancy, respectively. Kindness is colder, slower, less immediately narratively legible, and without even the slightest hint of appealing character motives. That’s what makes it so compelling, too. One watches it trying to figure it out, and it's structured to keep slipping away. It’s fitting that it begins by blasting the iconic driving synths of Eurythmics’ “Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This),” as the movie is about people used and abused, in darkly comedic and deadpan absurd stories in which everyone is looking for something, and in which reality seems to take on the logic of an inscrutable dream. Lanthimos pins down his characters in clinically precise widescreen frames, and then spins out the surreal plot turns, scripted with his Killing of a Sacred Deer co-writer Efthimis Filippou. He does so with an unblinking, mannered realism, dialing back the style and coaxing underplayed reactions just when the stories are aching for excess.

As the characters wriggle their ways through the emotional and physical pain of their plots, the movie becomes a caustic acid bath of cynicism, watching toxic people give into base impulses, and work their wicked ways. The film is made up of three short films, each nearly an hour long and starring the same ensemble. Each tale would undoubtedly test the patience at feature length, each take a sick joke inside a sick joke that starts strange, grows even stranger, and then ends on its bleakest, gnarliest punchline. The first finds a businessman (Jesse Plemons) totally controlled by his boss (Willem Dafoe) and the old man’s mistresses (Emma Stone and Margaret Qualley), down to the food he eats and whether or not his wife (Hong Chau) will get pregnant. When he finds himself doubting his commitment to his latest grotesque task, his life instantly changes for the worse. The second story finds Plemons as a police officer whose wife (Stone) has been missing at sea. It’s odd enough that in his grief he invites their friends (Qualley and Mamoudou Athie) over to watch their sex tape; odder still is how he reacts when his wife is eventually discovered. Lastly, we find Stone and Plemons looking for a Chosen One at the behest of a cult leader (Dafoe) and his wife (Chau). It becomes a sort of desperate ritual as it goes on.

In each story, the cast is so good at inhabiting these extreme situations of sex and violence with shrugging acceptance that the bubbling surreality is played out quite naturally—subtext and text dancing with extreme literalness, down to the black-and-white flashes of dreams and visions that mingle with their mindsets. These characters are constantly doing acts of a selfish sort of kindness, casually blowing up lives, behaving as dangers to themselves and others. If this were kindness, who needs cruelty? Here’s a movie with a pretty low opinion of human behavior that’s as darkly upsetting as it is grimly funny, in a preposterous string of circumstances held in the grip of skilled filmmakers making each moment count. Lanthimos using the same faces in new roles uses each switch of the narrative to recombine them into dynamics of freedom and control, power and submission, responsibility and individualism. These characters keeps slamming into illusions they’ve created to make sense of lives spiraling out of control—often of their own doing. The bruising absurdism of each accumulates into the sickest joke of all: sometimes the only kindness is to give into the absurdity of your circumstances and hope for the best.

As an aside—how wild is it to think back to 2010, when Stone’s Easy A was a satisfying comedy that confirmed her a star and Lanthimos’ nasty, explicit Dogtooth got a surprise Academy Award nomination for foreign-language film. Imagine telling us moviegoers back then that those two would bring out the best in each other.

Vindication of the Rights of Woman: POOR THINGS

With Poor Things, director Yorgos Lanthimos returns to his pet themes: freedom and control, society and individualism, intellect and appetite. Within them, the Greek provocateur loves to push buttons and test the boundaries of discomfort. He sets up rigid systems and see his characters squirm under their demands. His international breakthrough Dogtooth is a tragedy set in a worst-case scenario disinformation-based homeschooling setup, while his dreary The Lobster is a depressing world of romantic pressure in which unlucky singles are turned into animals, and his gripping Killing of a Sacred Deer finds eerie body horror revenge inflicted on an alienated nuclear family unit by an unsettling interloper. Even his biggest hit to date, period piece of royal courtly intrigue The Favourite, drips with a devilishly funny satire of politicking and interest peddling within his usual concerns. In Poor Things he pushes his ideas to fanciful Frankensteined abstraction in a steampunk fantasy Europe of an imagined Industrial Revolution past—a little Mary Shelley, a little German Expressionism, a little Tim Burton, a little Jean-Pierre Jeunet. But it’s all of a piece for a work about a revived body stumbling into the world and slowly learning what life is all about.

Shot with his favored fisheye lenses and pushy, panning, zooming, looming cameras—and scored with a calliope-meets-theremin brio—the movie finds a mad scientist (Willem Dafoe) bringing a beautiful corpse (Emma Stone) to life with a mind made freshly tabula rasa. Named Bella Baxter, she flails and stumbles and babbles, trying to master language and motor skills, like a grown woman with a toddler’s mind. It’s quite a spectacle, funny and sad and off-putting and compelling all at once. It might give you a sense of Lanthimos’ approach here that the mad doctor’s new assistant (Ramy Youssef) takes one look at her and gasps: “what a beautiful retard.” The movie gawks and scowls at its characters’ madnesses and eccentricities. As Bella grows into her body, society fills her mind with ideas. She strains against the confines of her experimental status and demands to be let out into the world. There she encounters a variety of men—buffoonish seducers (Mark Ruffalo) and suave cynics (Jarrod Carmichael) and nasty brutes (Christopher Abbott)—who want to have her and control her and affect her and mold her. And yet Bella is so stubbornly, persistently herself that she’s uncontainable by societal standards. She hasn’t been indoctrinated with the shame  she’s expected to feel and stereotypes to which they assume she'd conform. There’s some pointed commentary in the fact that she’s most desirable to the men when she’s at her least capable. The more she learns, the more she confounds their expectations, the more they go mad for her, in all senses of the word. She navigates a series of gross-out gags and slapstick and drama and sexual encounters with a growing awareness and a blissfully inquisitive need to take it all in and understand.

The potentially simple concept is exquisitely elaborated and vividly imagined in all its complications and contrasts. The screenplay by Tony McNamara, who brings some of The Favourite’s charmingly mean ear for dialogue, takes clear delight in running Bella through a crash course in philosophical constructs, a one-woman Enlightenment living the concepts Rousseau and Locke and Hobbes and Voltaire had to merely ponder. And it’s all so fleshy, too, with Lanthimos’ usual preoccupation with bodily fluids and functions, making her a Candide in situations that’d blush with frank vulgarity but in fact give nary a flinch. She likes to copulate as much as she cogitates. But for all the overt mixture of the highfalutin philosophizing and lowdown dirtiness, the movie’s at its most fun as it dances across that chasm. It’s a riot of production design—weird vehicles and elaborate sets—and costumes—all frills and flowing cutaways and cinched edges. And within that, the performers turn loose in masterfully silly eruptions of straight-faced shock and delicate pratfalls and casual nudity. It’s Stone’s show—a stunningly technical and deeply felt play with high drama and fearless comedy. But everyone in the cast joins in the fun. Every line reading turns into candy, and every serious swerve of intellect is chased with a grinning irreverence. Ultimately, this is Lanthimos’ most hopeful picture, embodied with a stubborn, grinning belief that the stuff of life is pleasurable and, though people may be as cruel as they are curious, the right fresh mind is capable of positive change. As Taylor Swift wrote, "we were built to fall apart / then fall back together."

Family Plot: THE KILLING OF A SACRED DEER

Yorgos Lanthimos is out to mess you up. Even if you haven’t squirmed through the Grecian filmmaker’s international breakthrough Dogtooth – an intensely disturbing story of siblings unknowingly held captive by their own parents – or gritted your teeth through The Lobster – a cruel fantasy comedy that many seemed to like, but lost me as it ground a good fanciful premise into pessimistic repetition – you’d know right off that the writer-director of The Killing of a Sacred Deer wants to provoke intense reactions. The film sits on a black screen, soft and dramatic classical music playing underneath. Then: a smash cut to an extreme close-up of open heart surgery. I gasped. Then I squirmed as the shot holds. Then I looked away, repulsed but grinning. Oh, Lanthimos, at it again, up to his audience provoking jolts, his unflinching camera staring. After this startling opening statement, the build up to the next disturbing disruption is a long, soft timpani roll of suspense, the score doing its best to rumble under the imposing blocking and unflinching austere framing which turns every normal Cincinnati street and gleaming hospital corridor into a close cousin of Kubrick’s Overlook hotel. The film is a sustained creepy thriller with tension slowly simmering and clasping underneath every scene. Empty space and cavernous silence in the cold sets and pulsing grainy cinematography leaves room for disquieting suspicions as unfathomable escalating moral and karmic confusion ripples across an already-brittle family’s life.

Lanthimos directs his cast into performances of carefully modulated awkwardness and softly tripping monotones, their eerie implacability adding to a sense of wrongness that slowly builds. The film demonstrates its own twisted logic step by step as a surgeon (Colin Farrell), his wife (Nicole Kidman), and two kids (Sunny Suljic and Tomorrowland’s Raffey Cassidy) are slowly, subtly, and increasingly absurdly drawn into the plot of an unusual and insinuating interloper (Barry Keoghan, his quietly menacing face miles from the sweet innocence of his Dunkirk role). The young stranger is the son of a man who died on the operating table. The surgeon has tried to show him sympathy, striking up a vaguely paternal mentorship, maybe out of guilt. Big mistake. The boy wants to make the surgeon hurt. Suddenly, this creepy guy is the nexus of mysterious illness that spreads through the family. The kids are struck with paralysis that’s seemingly incurable, and completely inexplicable to a small army of medical experts. It only gets worse from there, including both inducement to murder and an awkward attempt by the boy to get his mom (Alicia Silverstone, never sadder) to watch Groundhog Day with his victim. With no shortage of disturbing emotions and plot developments roiling under every scene that follows, characters squirm intensely under pressure. Lanthimos keeps the proceedings darkly absurd, austerely terrifying, a deeply eccentric mix of the lurid and placid, the preposterous (a halting nervous laughs masking deep horror) and tense ethical quandaries stirring up grippingly sustained suspense. It’s all the more upsetting for being so inscrutable, for offering up no answers other than a desire to see brittle people break, even as they’re forced to confront their mortality, morality, and contradictions therein.

Singles Mixer: THE LOBSTER

For an intensely sad and cynical movie, The Lobster’s one good idea is awfully whimsical. It imagines a dystopian parallel world much like our own, but which takes a dementedly strong pro-marriage stance. All single people must find a mate; if they do not, they’ll be turned into the animal of their choosing. When we meet sad-sack Colin Farrell – he’s put on some weight to make his hangdog mood look extra saggy – he’s just been dumped by his unseen wife, left to trudge to a singles’ resort with his brother, who had similar misfortune and is now a dog. It’s an irresistible concept, and one sure to provoke good conversation and perhaps some honest self-reflection. I think I’d be a house cat; they’ve all the pampered benefits of dogs with none of the expectations of excitation. (And I like napping in patches of sunshine.) Sadly, the movie’s not as playful as its animating concept might lead one to believe.

When Farrell is asked what animal he’d want to be if, after his allotted time to be unattached, he can’t find a suitable match, he has his answer ready: a lobster. The hotel’s chipper manager (Olivia Colman) finds that refreshing. Most people pick more popular animals. The fields around the hotel feature the occasional rabbit, horse, camel, flamingo, and so on. I found myself wondering who they might’ve been in an earlier life. That’s later, though. First we must trudge through a stay in this sad hotel, where Farrell meets friends like a dopey lisper (John C. Reilly) who would like to be a parrot, and a fussy limper (Ben Whishaw) who’d rather not think about that question thank you very much. There are also potential mates, like a shockingly youthful nose-bleeder (Jessica Barden), an anxious biscuit-chomping lady (Ashley Jensen), and a woman we learn has no feelings whatsoever (Angeliki Papoulia).

The film’s central premise is worked out with misanthropic deadpan. Writer-director Yorgos Lanthimos, whose breakthrough feature was 2009’s memorable Dogtooth, an equally imprisoned and methodical exploration of a locked-in system of perverse human behavior, creates the hotel as the stifling inverse of a mischievous Wes Anderson mood. It has a suffocating rigidity to Thimios Bakatakis’s static cinematography, trapping its characters with either too much or not enough head space, squirming with resigned discomfort like butterflies pinned behind glass while barely alive, wriggling but clearly doomed. The patrons spend their days forced to watch silently as staff acts out skits about the dangers of being alone, and then they get death-marched into painfully stilted dances and awkward chitchat around sad little meals. Once daily they’re driven out to the wilderness on a hunt, told to use tranquilizer darts to shoot and collect loners who’ve escaped the hotel pre-transformation and now live illegally in the woods. Each person caught buys the hunter an extra day before the coupling deadline.

This is distancing movie, slow and repetitive as it watches the sad desperate routines of its characters. A closed loop of behavior operating under cruel impenetrable logic, the rigorous framing drains the characters of agency. They’re trapped in a cruel world, explored by a cold story. It’s tedious and increasingly pointless, wallowing in misery, dispassionately nasty and mean. A dog is kicked to death. A woman is blinded. A man is forced to stick his hand in a hot toaster. For a movie purporting to have cutting or otherwise incisive ideas about relationships – the torture of loneliness, and the desperation it can breed for finding One True Love – it’s too hollow, forced, passionless. The actors speak uniformly in a flat affect, mumbling as they talk past each other, glumly focused on their fate. There’s no energy to their goals. They simply shrug and trudge, hunched over and preemptively drained. Maybe they would be better off as animals. Is that such a tragedy?

Lanthimos uses dreary colors to enhance the oppressive mood. Stings of classical music mix with self-amused straight-faced absurdism. One couple is dutifully celebrated in the hotel’s conference room, sent off to see if the marriage will stick with the encouragement that if they have problems they’ll be given children. “That usually helps,” the manager quips. We continue on, counting down the days until Farrell will be made into a lobster. The movie never progresses beyond the basics of its setup, with few complications, escalations, or contradictions to keep things moving along. Instead it just grinds on and on, a deadening effect rendering what starts as wry and shocking merely numbing. Eventually one character flees the hotel and meets a variety of characters hiding out in the woods – a group led by Léa Seydoux that includes Rachel Weisz, who has also been narrating the whole thing in a largely emotionless monotone. Alas, freedom of sorts is shot in the same stultifying icy precision as the hotel, and slumps on for ages in a tiresome slog.

This is the sort of infuriating movie that slowly and steadily drains all interest and inquisitiveness from a killer concept. At first I was leaning in, eager to see an imaginative vision. By the time it lost me, I found myself itching to leave, as one excruciating scene after the next failed to build or move or provoke. It strands charismatic performers in a flat, uninteresting style, punctuating long stretches of dead air with splashes of cruelty and depression. It creates an interesting allegory and proceeds to take care it almost never intersects with recognizable human emotions. It offers only empty futility, distended bleak glibness hoping its heaviness and pessimism get mistaken for profundity. What a waste. At one point a character asks if she could watch Stand By Me, and I wanted to go with her. Later, in the film’s final moments, a man prepares to stab himself in the eyes with a steak knife. By that time I could almost relate.