Design hawkeyes will have noticed it: As Michelle Fuller, Bugonia’s unusual CEO character played by an in-form Emma Stone, stomps towards her desk in one of the movie’s early scenes, she flits past seating arrangements of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s iconic Barcelona chairs. They’re hard to miss with their cantilevered steel bases, signature boxy leather cushions and late midcentury corporate grandeur. At first, they’re black. As Michelle gets closer to her glassed office, they’re white.
From Michelle’s professional environment to her ultra-modernist home, design pieces by notable names like van der Rohe, Frank Lloyd Wright, Jan Bočan, and more can be found throughout Bugonia. By the end of the film—when (spoiler alert) we learn that Michelle is indeed the alien she’s feared to be, and the reason for mankind’s extinction—one might suspect that director Yorgos Lanthimos and production designer James Price were intentionally toying with the idea of vaunted versus embodied humanity via the sets. The suggestion seems to be that this masked extraterrestrial character uses design in part as proof of her authenticity, yet the objects she surrounds herself with carry a chilly reserve and an efficient immaculateness. Inhuman in their stature and presentation, they’re hints that Michelle might be overcompensating.
“I would almost liken the pieces we included to trophies,” Price tells AD. “You could take these examples as pinnacles of human civilization. So much so that Yorgos wasn’t keen on us even having reproductions.”
Michelle, then, seems to have collected these items as a kind of physical highlight reel of human creativity–and therefore, as subtle self-validation of her humanity. Yet the irony is that once possessed, trophies become static, and even cold, objects. In trying to appear human through idealization, she adds… well, something of a chill to the room. (This isn’t a dig at these pieces, but an observation of her exaggeration.)
Bugonia takes place in 2025, but Price drew inspiration from midcentury sci-fi classics including Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 masterpiece 2001: A Space Odyssey, with its Djinn chairs and Saarinen tables, and the 1965 British spy movie The Ipcress File for some of its more minimal sets (along with all of its inverted villainy, a topic which is in constant flux in Bugonia).
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