Bugonia.

In Portland, of all the things I could do and did do, one thing I wanted to make sure to get in was a trip to the movies. Some might say you could watch a movie anywhere, Angela, so why would you spend some of your time in another place sitting in a dark room watching a movie that you could’ve watched at home? Others might say, I get it. There’s something about—in the midst of all of the hubbub of being out of town, all of the mental stimulation of being somewhere new, especially somewhere cool, in the midst of all of that busyness and generation—turning your brain off for a second, watching someone else live their life—it’s comfortable. Maybe it’s what makes us so tied to our phones: this sense of getting to be on auto-pilot while someone else is in the spotlight. 

I knew I wanted to go to the movies, and there was a super cool indie movie theatre (shoutout to Cinema 21) that was a 20-minute walk from my hotel room. Living in Atlanta proper now, instead of the suburbs, and in a walkable area, to me, 20 minutes sounded like a very reasonable amount of walking time. Never mind that Portland gets dark at like 4 pm, and I am one of ten Black people in the city, which means that everyone I walk by might have some kind of reaction to me being there, for better or worse. Never mind all that—I wanted to go to this movie theatre! Tickets were only $10 and popcorn was $4.50! How many times in my life would I get to go to the movies so affordably? So I walked, and I talked to my parents while I walked, and they kept checking how much longer I had to go because I’d told them that while Portland was kind of a dream in a lot of ways with its trees and its cozy weather and its dope Tin House, where every day I was learning so much, it was also kind of like Iowa in the sense that as a Black person, I didn’t see myself much when I was out and about, and every time I did, it was a surprise. My parents were worried about me, walking around there at night, and to be honest, I was a little worried about me too, but I wanted to go to this theatre—I wanted to see Die My Love, which felt full of interesting casting choices (Jennifer Lawrence! Robert Pattinson! LaKeith Stanfield!). A lot of people had told me that they had mixed feelings about the movie and that they couldn’t stop thinking about it, both of which made me want to see it urgently, to understand more clearly what they meant. 

So I made it to the movie theatre (yay!), but Die My Love was sold out because of course it was sold out, reader, tickets were TEN DOLLARS: how was every movie not sold out every night? I got to the back of the line so that I could reassess my options, and then went with my second choice, Bugonia, mainly because I heard the guy selling tickets tell someone in front of me that Bugonia was almost sold out too (!). I had been hesitant to see Bugonia alone because the marketing for it seemed so scary! (See: poster of Emma Stone, her head shaved, her face covered in what looked like blood?) I have been very taken with Yorgos Lanthimos’ movies since Poor Things, and I loved that after Poor Things, he didn’t go with something else that might have broad appeal but instead with Kinds of Kindness, which is so weird (!)—it’s like four speculative short films, one after the other, and they are amazing and so uncomfortable and didn’t get nearly as much buzz, but made me feel like I understood who he was as an artist, someone who wondered, What if? 

I loved Poor Things, and I couldn’t stop thinking about Kinds of Kindness, and I liked The Favourite (What if the queen was gay?), and I still haven’t see The Lobster, but it’s on my list. I wanted to see Bugonia eventually, but ideally with other people, so that I could talk through the scary parts and remind myself that I was securely in a different world. I worried that if I saw it alone, the horror parts of it would get embedded in my brain, hard to detangle later. When I got to the front of the line, there were only two tickets for Bugonia left, and I took one, tried not to think about it too much.

I had to sit in the second row, and I contemplated leaving while the trailers ran because it had just been $10 and while it would still be a waste to spend $10 and then not get what you paid for, it technically wouldn’t be as much of a waste as spending $25 and not getting what you paid for. I contemplated leaving, but then the movie started, and it was…funny? It was about two country guys in Georgia, one of whom thinks aliens have come to Earth (the other isn’t so sure). He wants to kidnap a popular CEO (played by Emma Stone) and prove she’s actually an alien! What if aliens existed and were hiding among us? Simply put, the movie is about how that plays out, and sure, there are suspenseful parts and sometimes really violent parts but the movie—like all of Lanthimos’ movies I’ve seen—is grounded in a sense of play. It’s about What if? And then what, and then what, and then what? Lanthimos’ movies are what I’d call art for art’s sake, which means they are not for everybody, but if you’re the kind of person who just wants to hang out in someone else’s mind, see what they get up to in their imagination, then this movie (all of his movies?) might be for you. 

I laughed more than I expected watching this, and I didn’t have nightmares. I also didn’t walk home afterward to my parents’ and my own relief. I called a Lyft, got a Black woman driver, and we didn’t talk much, but I wondered how long she’d lived in Portland, and why, and if she still feels—in a place that doesn’t hold much of you— surprised and comforted by being among your own again. 

Image: Universal Pictures