Strange harvest: "Bugonia"

This feels a weird question to ask - doubly so, given the weird state of the world - but is it possible Yorgos Lanthimos is running out of weirdness to film? Awards-circuit attention for 2023's Poor Things has kept the money coming in, but Lanthimos may have made a rod for his own back in insisting on tackling only that material that vibrates at a very narrow, very strange frequency. (His rival for the title of most generously overfunded modern filmmaker, Luca Guadagnino, has afforded himself an easier ride, hopping from genre to genre, milieu to milieu like a confidence trickster skipping town after every grift.) After clearing his bottom drawer with 2024's patchy portmanteau Kinds of Kindness, Bugonia sees Lanthimos and writer Will Tracy pivot to pre-existing weirdness, attempting to freshen up and straighten out 2003's Save the Green Planet!, one of the millennial Korean New Wave's more frantic and pungent offerings. I say straighten out, but Lanthimos and Tracy muss up their source in different (I'm tempted to say superficial) ways, handing their leads a grungy makeover. As one of a pair of dimbulb kidnappers targeting an agribusiness CEO for the part she's played in colony collapse, Jesse Plemons is stuck with gnarly blond locks and ratty facial hair, and handed the kind of loopy conspiratorial chat one typically finds in the Internet's darker corners. Emma Stone, as the CEO her captors believe to be an alien, is introduced as yoga poses and vitamin pills poured into a Givenchy power suit, but she too is soon roughed up and yanked around: removed of her hair, smeared in antihistamine cream and shackled to a crummy camp bed. What's promising about this set-up is that Lanthimos is entering into weird thriller territory: a set-up with its own peculiar tensions. Even so, you will be given cause to wonder whether Stone in particular greeted Lanthimos's recent admission he plans to take some time off with a marked sigh of relief. How often can anyone, even an A-lister seeking to throw off a reputation as an all-American sweetheart, want to play a battered punchbag?

I say thriller, but Lanthimos remains a terminally contrary sod. After a run of name-making comedies that weren't conventionally funny and - with Poor Things - a feminist text, arrived at by men, which didn't seem especially feminist, Bugonia presents as a thriller in only the most numbly anaesthetised sense, one that from first to last holds its characters at some remove, as though they were bugs under glass, ripe for the squishing. Underengaged by Tracy's plotting, I found myself casting my mind back and wondering when the last time a character in a Yorgos Lanthimos movie was allowed to show recognisable flickers of humanity; I think it may have been Colin Farrell's sadsack in 2015's The Lobster, not coincidentally the point at which this filmmaker was promoted from an underground to a mainstream concern. If the films that followed have started to seem more than a little flat and one-note, that's largely because Lanthimos has resolved to do one thing - and one thing alone - with his camera: extend it towards his characters, like a pointed finger at the end of a raised and accusatory arm, while shrieking "look at these weirdoes! Aren't they weird?" The approach has carried him this far - in part because our fellow earthlings have got demonstrably stranger over the past decade - but Bugonia, shot on location in High Wycombe and Greece, seems more than anything an oddly reduced spectre of the maximalist weirdness one found (and maybe enjoyed) in, say, 2018's The Favourite; the mayhem of Save the Green Planet!, an indie that qualified as ramshackle yet cinematic, has here been scaled down into a small, bathetic theatre of cruelty.

Here, then, are the three days until an eventful lunar eclipse, during which time both captive and captors are largely held in place; a third-act twist confirms our suspicion we're no more supposed to care for these notionally flesh-and-blood creatures than we are for the chair the Plemons character smashes during one of his rages. You can't map this madness onto the real world as you could the action in Parasite, because the closed-off Bugonia is so clearly the work of a filmmaker boxing in his own characters to have warped fun at their expense; more than it is a reflection of anything going on out there, it's a cackling science experiment, pricking Alicia Silverstone (as Plemons' mother) with hyperdermic needles ahead of a predetermined conclusion. More damagingly, Lanthimos appears to have run out of ways to surprise, confront or confound us with his weirdness. Another insufferable Jerskin Fendrix score gets poured noisily over these frames like a bag of spanners so as to try and compensate for the lack of feeling and amplitude within the images themselves; you don't have to look too hard to spot the character who exists purely to stumble into the kidnappers' home at a crucial juncture and have his head stoved in with a shovel. In the film's closing moments, Lanthimos's nihilist streak arrives at its natural endpoint, yet what's intended as a final coup de cinéma - maybe even the primary reason this director took on this project, unsurprisingly ironic needledrop and all - seems barely distinguishable from the studied lifelessness that's preceded it. (Bodies contorted into poses; all vitality drained away.) Some contemporary directors are so keen to turn themselves into saleable brands - reliably weird, reassuringly quirky - that they get stuck in a rut. It's not the worst idea for Lanthimos to take a step back and have a creative rethink: if he digs any further into this furrow, folks will be calling him the new Wes Anderson.

Bugonia is now showing in cinemas nationwide.