The new Yorgos Lanthimos film Bugonia is a wild, delirious ride, with an ending that’s driving certain critics to ranting fury. But it’s starting strong with the public, giving Lanthimos his best opening weekend ever.

Which is only just, since this is the best Lanthimos film since The Favourite back in 2018.

Bugonia concerns a pair of rural men, Teddy Gatz (Jesse Plemons) and his autistic cousin, Don (newcomer Aidan Delbis), who abduct Michelle Fuller (Emma Stone), the CEO of the pharmaceutical company Auxolith, because they’re convinced she’s an alien come to destroy Planet Earth through corporate means. The cousins plan to force her to arrange a meeting with the “Andromedan” rulers on the mother ship, so they can negotiate a deal with the aliens to leave Earth in peace.

Teddy works for Fuller’s company as a lowly package shipper. His mother Sandy (Alicia Silverstone) was once an opioid addict who later became a test subject for an experimental Auxolith drug. This put her into a coma, and she lives in a local care center, still emotionally tethered to Teddy, a situation that appears in his mind as if her soul is a floating balloon he holds tenuously by its string. Teddy’s father deserted them long ago, leaving Teddy and Don as the last family members living in unwholesome isolation in a dilapidated farmhouse where God knows what has been going on for years.

There are definitely shades of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) here, that unforgettable tale of heartland horror about a rural family once employed in the local slaughterhouse that is now long since closed. Cross that with another admirable cinematic antecedent, They Live (1988), John Carpenter’s brilliant take on Reagan-era corporate yuppies as aliens secretly overrunning the earth, and you’ve got the seeds that sprout into Bugonia.

There’s an action-packed act one, including a hilarious abduction scene complicated by the fact that Michelle spends a lot more time in the gym than Teddy or Don. She beats them in several rounds of fighting all over her vast, manicured lawn before they finally bring her down with a hypodermic needle. Then for act two, screenwriter Will Tracy (The Menu, The Regime, Succession) has Michelle and Teddy face off against each other in a series of debates going nowhere. It’s a point raised by a number of critics:

They are two people forcefully asserting, in turn, their clashing versions of reality, without ever listening to each other, without ceding any ground. They talk at each other, but nothing ever sinks in, nothing ever sways the other person even minutely; they just keep talking.

It’s funny because this critical point tends to get made in pious deploring tones, suggesting that all might be well “if they’d just talk it out.” As if the problem here is faulty communication — shades of Democratic Party members, always insisting it’s the loss of civility and clear, respectful discourse that’s making our political situation so dysfunctional and grotesquely punitive. And not the massive class disparity with Teddy and Don on one side and our world’s Michelle Fullers on the other.

The fact is these characters share no common ground, not to mention that Michelle never argues in good faith. Besides, Teddy has already heard it all before, and he’s mentally armed himself against the alien/corporate point of view. He even, in mid-rant, cynically sums up the next several points she’s going to make. And he knows that talking is never going to lead to her “ceding ground” in his direction in a way that addresses the plight of the rural working class. The whole reason Michelle keeps saying “Talk to me” is because — whether she’s an alien or a corporate CEO or, as Teddy believes, a horrifying blend of the two — she’s mastered the art of rhetorical spin that puts those she’s addressing at a further disadvantage. It’s all a series of power plays with her.

We see this early on while watching Michelle go through her typical day, before the abduction. At one point, she announces that, from now on, all Auxolith employees can leave at 5:30 p.m., presumably after a reasonable eight-hour day. No more “bad old days” of crushing mandatory eighty-hour weeks. But then she goes on to remind her employees that “we are running a business here,” so if there’s still work left undone, the worker could choose to stay to fulfill their implied duty to the company. Michelle concludes that she’ll leave it up to the individual worker’s “conscience.”

And you know what that means. Now each worker gets the message — they’d better work even harder to be even more productive, or else. And the boss is completely off the hook, because she can always claim each employee made their own choice to work soul-killing overtime.

Even captive, with wrists and ankles bound (and head shaved because, according to Teddy’s research, aliens communicate through their hair), Michelle seems the far more formidable figure, not least because of her rhetorical skills. She’s so expert at turning lines of argument against her interlocutor that Don panics when he’s alone with her, knowing he’s no match for her sophistry. And what she talks him into is — well, I can’t say. Spoilers and such.

But it’s no spoiler to note that Don is right to panic, because to say the least, there’s no way this ever-intensifying “take me to your leader” plot can end well. Bugonia is permeated with pitch-black humor, tragic poignancy, and deep dread, which makes it an armrest-clutching experience to watch. Highly recommended!

Here Tracy and Lanthimos have found inventive ways to depict our increasingly deranged political impasse in America, making them freshly enlightening as articulated in unexpected ways by extreme characters. Bugonia is clear that we’ve reached this point for good reason — ceding any further ground to corrupt ideologues building empires of wealth on human suffering can’t be allowed to go any further.

It’s a shame I can’t discuss the film’s ending here, because it’s a doozy. And it’ll probably define your whole experience of the film, regardless of what you thought of it before the last four minutes. I loved it for its sheer madness, which has an emotional logic of its own, but there are certain reviews that are one long screech of fury over the way this ending supposedly ruins everything that went before.

I can give you a hint at the head-spinning quality of it by noting that, over the last shots in the film, the old Pete Seeger antiwar anthem “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?” is sung by Marlene Dietrich. All the verses. For those who don’t know, by the time Dietrich recorded the song in 1962, she was a jaded, world-weary old-time Hollywood diva who’d seen it all. To say the least, her aging, heavily Teutonic, deeply ironic smoker’s voice cuts against the sad sweetness of the melody and lyrics in a way that you’ll remember for a long, long time.

Don’t miss this one. Lanthimos has announced he’s taking a break from overwork after his paroxysm of filmmaking that brought forth Poor Things (2023), Kinds of Kindness (2024), and now Bugonia in rapid succession. Who knows when he’ll be back? Needless to say, Bugonia beats them all.