'Bugonia' may or may not be about aliens; it's definitely about alienation

toggle caption Atsushi Nishijima/Focus Features

As the end credits began to scroll at my screening of Bugonia, the audience sat silently in the darkness for several long seconds.

Director Yorgos Lanthimos' latest film follows Teddy (Jesse Plemons), a grimy, raw-boned conspiracy theorist who, alongside his cousin Don (Aidan Delbis), kidnaps Michelle (Emma Stone) a steely Big Pharma CEO, because he's convinced himself she's an alien.

It's not uncommon for a movie to lull a theater full of people into a moment of collective contemplation, of course. Such silences take various forms, depending on the film that precedes them: stunned, or thoughtful, or weighted with emotion. But Bugonia is a Lanthimos film. Which explains why, at its conclusion, the audience decided to take a moment to sit with it, before a lone voice pierced the gloom:

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"The f***," it shouted, "was that?"

Reader, I grinned. For those of us who count ourselves firmly in the tank for Lanthimos as a filmmaker, that cry of hapless, outraged bumfuzzlement is one reason we love seeing his stuff with a crowd. Because if it's true that art comforts the disturbed and disturbs the comfortable, the occasional plaintive cry of disturbed confusion can make the moviegoing e