Kubrickian echoes reverberate throughout the Greek filmmaker's oeuvre. With Bugonia, those connections are shaped into a singular package that transcends the sum of its homages.
The Oxford English Dictionary added a trove of cinematic terms to its records in 2018, including many adjectives derived from the style of great filmmakers. Many are fairly easy to pinpoint: Keaton, Fellini, Bergman, Altman, Spielberg, Lynch, Tarantino. The Kubrickian, however, proves a bit more amorphous in its definition. It’s instantly recognizable yet irreducible to cliché.
Look at the many supposed inheritors of Stanley Kubrick’s mantle – the Coen Brothers, David Fincher, Paul Thomas Anderson, Christopher Nolan – to see just how widely his influence has dispersed. A Kubrickian film carries connotations of meticulous attention to technical detail, resulting in a precise visual atmosphere. The narrative content often matches this formal meticulousness with elements like obsessive protagonists, oblique storytelling, dark humor and an emotional detachment that highlights their intellectual heftiness.
The absurdist stylings of Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos have frequently inspired connections to surrealists like Luis Buñuel and iconoclasts such as those who emerged from the Czech New Wave. However, the director’s filmography provides ample evidence that he’s cut from the same cloth as Stanley Kubrick. After several features that paid more overt tribute to the late master, Lanthimos’ Bugonia unlocks a new dimension of his work through synthesizing the various threads of Kubrickian style.
Unlike other acolytes of Kubrick, Lanthimos takes a tight-lipped approach to enumerating his influences so his films can speak for themselves. He openly name-checked Barry Lyndon, Kubrick’s historical epic about a shameless social climber, as a guiding light in making his first period film with The Favourite. The presence of Nicole Kidman in The Killing of a Sacred Deer clued many into the film’s many parallels to Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut, another tale of inexplicable havoc wrought on an American family by a patriarch’s wandering eye.
The Killing of a Sacred Deer also paid explicit tribute to Kubrick by using two of his signature camera techniques: one-point perspective and a rigorous tracking shot. Lanthimos previously tended to favour flat compositions, which also reflected the dry nature of his droll satires. This exploration and expansion of space helped mark a new aesthetic frontier for the director as his international recognition helped expand the size of his cinematic canvases.
But rather than continue to imitate the recognizable Kubrickian hallmark, Lanthimos began to develop a calling card of his own on The Favourite. Working with Irish cinematographer Robbie Ryan, who has since shot all of Lanthimos’ features, the distortion of a scene via the fisheye lens has become the distinctive sign of the director’s authorial perspective. The bulging image suggests a similarly clinical distance from the characters while still retaining a sense of perverse humour in its askance glance.
As Lanthimos honed that visual language, so too was he perfecting his direction of actors to fit snugly within these unique frames. Drawing from his theatrical background, Lanthimos inspired his cast to find unconventional entry points into their characters through games and physical exercises. Much like Kubrick, who was famous for requiring dozens of takes to strip actors of their vanity, Lanthimos recognizes a powerful paradox of filmmaking. Sometimes, the best way to achieve one’s most exacting cerebral aims is to let performers access their most instinctual side.
Lanthimos’ latest, Bugonia, might not have the obvious makings of an auteur project, given that it’s a remake of a 2003 Korean film and was scripted by Will Tracy. Yet this sui generis work, which follows two conspiratorial cousins (Jesse Plemons’ Teddy and Aidan Delbis’ Don) who kidnap a girlboss-ing pharmaceutical CEO (Emma Stone’s Michelle) they suspect is an alien, coalesces the assorted strains of Kubrickian style into something that transcends the sum of its homages.
The film’s title, renamed from the story’s original Save the Green Planet!, speaks to a central fascination of Kubrick spanning from Lolita to Eyes Wide Shut. “Bugonia” refers to a mythological process holding that bees would spawn from the carcass of an ox. This sexual and reproductive anxiety is baked into the fabric of Bugonia as one species’ demise becomes another’s opportunity.
Concerned about colony collapse disorder and its downstream effects for natural life, Teddy takes up beekeeping with religious devotion for the preservation of humanity. Lanthimos, like Kubrick, understands the slippery slope when people enter into intensive regulation of sexual activity. Teddy’s monomaniacal asceticism demonstrates the destructive ends to which people are driven when they fixate on an act meant to generate life and pleasure.
While the setting of Bugonia is distinctly (and unfortunately) rooted in America of 2025, its dystopian-inflicted story of radicalized men feels distinctly of a piece with A Clockwork Orange. Regrettably, copycat criminals styled after the protagonist Alex DeLarge have complicated that film’s legacy. But those off-screen shenanigans do not dilute Kubrick’s analytical curiosity on-screen to help understand how antisocial behaviour develops – as well as why it’s so hard to curb once it has taken root.
Lanthimos and Tracy tackle the thorny nature of Teddy in an analogous fashion, refusing any easy explanation for his political violence. The character alludes vaguely to the various ideologies that he cycled through online before concluding that Earth is under attack by Andromedan aliens, an echo chamber mirrored in his secluded rural family home. The crime thriller leading up to Michelle’s abduction gives way to the trappings of claustrophobic captivity. The warping effects of social isolation, as horrifyingly demonstrated in The Shining, haunt the film as confinement pushes all the characters toward new psychological extremities.
Spoilers for Bugonia to follow.
Bugonia tips its hand even further toward Kubrickian antecedents as the standoff continues. Michelle’s strapped into an electronic torture chair meant to reprogram her like Alex’s Ludovico Technique in A Clockwork Orange. Don dies by suicide using a rifle placed in his mouth just as Pvt. Pyle does in Full Metal Jacket. Chapter divisions feature a vision of Earth viewed from a scientific remove, similar to the satellite imagery throughout 2001: A Space Odyssey.
That connection to Kubrick’s cosmic epic becomes even clearer when Michelle reveals that she is an alien, as Teddy theorized. After she returns to her home planet of Andromeda, a council acts on her recommendation that humankind must face immediate termination as a species. Following a telling moment of Michelle’s hesitation before dealing the death blow from above, Bugonia returns to the earth for a final montage of tableaus where all people have dropped dead instantaneously. Like Kubrick in 2001, Lanthimos can place himself so far outside humanity that he convincingly conjures a world without it.
The ironically soothing sounds of Marlene Dietrich’s “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?” form a direct allusion to the coda of Dr. Strangelove, which features test footage of nuclear detonations signaling the mutually assured destruction of humanity while Vera Lynn croons “We’ll Meet Again.” It’s a solidification of Lanthimos’ most powerful Kubrickian connection within Bugonia, a mordantly satiric take on how mankind’s folly will lead to its ultimate eradication. The silliness of these films’ exaggerated scenarios makes their eventual grim evaluations all the more devastating to contemplate.
The Kubrickian tendency toward fastidiousness implies an absence of sentimentality for the people it surveys with anthropological intrigue. But people are often more complicated than their personas, as many cinephiles discovered when Steven Spielberg pushed Kubrick’s long-time passion project A.I. Artificial Intelligence over the finish line. The film’s detractors assailed Spielberg for allegedly injecting his saccharine instincts into the film, assuming that Kubrick would have ended at the dead end for the humanoid robot David. But Spielberg clarified that he executed Kubrick’s original vision, which was to provide one final glimpse of humanity’s beauty even after carbon-based life had gone extinct.
While Dr. Strangelove offers no glimpse of any life continuing following the bomb drops, Lanthimos’ vision of a post-human earth shows evidence to the contrary. Putting the “dead” in “deadpan,” his parting statement reveals that animals, as well as other human-created technology, continue to roam the earth ignorantly of human obsolescence. Their manoeuvring around strewn bodies as Dietrich warbles “when will they ever learn?” is not a cynical epitaph for the species. Bugonia is Yorgos Lanthimos’ thoroughly Kubrickian appeal to recognize the humanity in each other before it’s too late.
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