Abby Olcese
Fair warning: This piece includes spoilers for both “Bugonia” and “Wake Up Dead Man.”
At some point recently, my feelings about the state of the world started shifting from “How can I fight this?” to “How will we fix this?” The last year alone has seen the erosion of LGBTQ+ rights, the deportation of immigrants and refugees, and the ongoing dissolution of social institutions that were supposed to be around forever. It turns out USAID, the Department of Education, and so many other cornerstones of modern life in the U.S. can all just…go away if someone wants them gone badly enough.
What’s truly frightening is that the conditions we’re living under now are human-created. We created climate change and let it get worse, ignoring warning after warning. Our elected officials appointed inexperienced cronies to gut programs that helped millions of people around the world. Even worse, none of the problems we’ve created for ourselves are new. They’re the rotten fruit of unjust and exploitative practices that have existed pretty much forever. All of it begs the question: What does humanity deserve? Will God (if God exists) forgive us? Should God forgive us?
Appropriate to the spirit of the times, two recent films — Yorgos Lanthimos’ Bugonia and Rian Johnson’s Wake Up, Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery — offer considerations of these questions. Perhaps also appropriate to our current apocalyptic vibe, their polar opposite answers feel distinctly Biblical in nature. Both movies are concerned with the long-lasting impacts of our cruelty toward each other and the world we live in. Bugonia’s response is pure Old Testament, retributive and bent toward regenerative destruction. By contrast, Wake Up, Dead Man offers a New Testament-flavored commitment to mercy and grace.
At around the one hour mark in Bugonia, kidnapped healthcare CEO Michelle Fuller (Emma Stone) is having dinner with her captors, Teddy (Jesse Plemons) and his cousin Don (Aidan Delbis). Teddy has kidnapped Michelle believing she’s an Andromedan, part of an alien race trying to control humanity and destroy the planet. When Teddy, a beekeeper, brings up the topic of Colony Collapse Disorder during their dinnertime discussion, Michelle fires off the following response:
“I know you want there to be a master plan, Teddy,” she says. “You want the bees to be dying so it can be my fault and you don’t have to think about the real reasons species die.”
Teddy, who’s experienced more than his fair share of suffering, desperately needs a reason for why his life is so hard. His mother (Alicia Silverstone) is in a coma following an experimental opioid addiction treatment created by Michelle’s pharmaceutical company. Teddy is also constantly being followed by local cop Casey (Stavros Halkias), his old babysitter, who keeps offering half-hearted apologies for molesting Teddy as a child. It’s no surprise Teddy is a conspiracy theorist. He needs his suffering to be a problem with a single, fixable cause.
Teddy’s perceived solution — aliens are trying to destroy the earth — seems nuts, until we discover it isn’t. Michelle isn’t just an alien, she’s the emperor of the Andromedans. Her people discovered Earth and created humans, making them essentially Gods, as far as we would define it. They’ve watched us as our hubris grew and we destroyed ourselves, each other and the planet that gives us life. The Andromedans conclude that to save the rest of life on Earth, we have to be destroyed.
Teddy’s problems, like those of so many other people, are human-generated. If there is a God, Lanthimos and screenwriter Will Tracy posit, based on what we’ve done to each other, they’d have no reason to give us additional chances to fix things. As Michelle tells Teddy, “Humans can’t help who you are. It’s in your genes.”
Fascinatingly, Wake Up Dead Man shares many themes in common with Bugonia. At the heart of its central murder mystery is a generations-old sin that’s caused years of resentment and unnecessary suffering for everyone involved. It is a movie about the ways we hurt each other. But Rian Johnson’s film reaches a different conclusion than Bugonia, one informed by Johnson’s background as a former evangelical Christian: We can help who we are. Living with the knowledge that we can always seek sincere forgiveness for wrongdoing and learn from it could be the key to our physical, social and spiritual salvation.
Josh O’Connor’s Father Jud Duplenticy knows the power of redemptive mercy better than most. Before his life as a priest, he was a boxer who killed a man in the ring. In seeking atonement for his actions, he found deep meaning in a relationship with a loving God who meets people where they’re at and is constantly at work in us, trying to help us make better choices in spite of our failings.
That belief is put to the test when Father Jud is assigned to the parish overseen by Monsignor Jefferson Wicks (Josh Brolin), a Christian nationalist whose hateful sermons and bitter attitude poison his dwindling flock up until the point of his mysterious murder. The key to solving Wicks’ murder, uncovered by Father Jud and returning private detective Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig) is Wicks’ late grandfather, a priest who denied his “harlot whore” daughter, Wicks’ mother, her inheritance after he died.
Rather than do something godly with his money like give it to the poor, the grandfather — whose judgmental attitudes toward his daughter likely turned Wicks into the man we meet — put all his money into a jewel. He hid this jewel from his desperate daughter by swallowing it and carrying it to his tomb. That act drives Wicks’ mother insane and puts undue burden on a young girl, Martha, who witnesses the whole thing and is sworn to secrecy. Many years later, the older Martha (Glenn Close) shares what she knows with Wicks as an act of defiance against Father Jud, kicking off the events that lead to Wicks’ murder.
At every turn in this story, guilty parties — Wicks’ grandfather, Martha, Wicks himself and the church’s other parishioners — could have made choices that led to vastly different outcomes. Unfortunately, their self-righteousness matters more to these characters than actual righteousness, so they caused a cycle of grudges and greed that built up to a breaking point. It takes Father Jud’s steadfast belief in grace and mercy — a belief that even gets Blanc to act with uncharacteristic kindness toward people who’ve done nothing to deserve it — to break that cycle.
Both Bugonia and Wake Up, Dead Man know that, in the words of Romans 6:23, “the wages of sin is death.” The difference between the two is whether death is our only option. Bugonia seems to believe that we’re on a collision course, and that at this point, nothing awaits us (or should await us) but annihilation. Wake Up, Dead Man, in its illustration of sin, reinforces the importance of kindness, patience and selflessness — we are responsible for the mess we’re in, but we have always had, still have, the potential to fix it as well.
Where you fall on the spectrum between the two films’ philosophies is largely a matter of personal preference. As a churchgoer, I’m more inclined to side with Wake Up, Dead Man’s position of open-hearted community, but I suspect I’d align with it even if I didn’t believe. As understandable as Bugonia’s position is, there’s a sense of defeatism to it that leaves behind a bitter taste. The suffering its characters face is cruel and meaningless. The systems they’re caught in can’t be solved. It’s in our genes, after all. Johnson’s vision considers the pursuit of righteousness as an ongoing journey, each stage imbued with meaning, learning and connection. In Johnson’s eyes, the question of “how will we fix this?” isn’t laden with dread or defeat, but filled with creative possibility.
