By Julio Torres
Full disclosure: I am friends with Emma Stone; I have never met Yorgos Lanthimos but I have been a fan since I saw “Dogtooth” in college. Transparency feels like a way of honoring a film about paranoia, gaslighting, lies and manipulation.
On first watch, my sympathy ping-ponged between Jesse Plemons’ Teddy and Emma’s Michelle. He’s a greasy, probably very unwell conspiracy theorist who has kidnapped a cold and robotic girlboss (my favorite little detail is her putting her trench coat on her shoulders to walk out of her mansion, taking three steps to her car and taking it off). Seeing her calmly listening to his deranged nonsense about how she must make contact with her ship made me sympathize with her even though I’m prone to dislike a calculating pharmaceutical CEO. She is after all, his victim. Her cruelty is revealed later though, followed by a series of violent and desperate escalations from both. Yorgos deliberately keeps his audience in the dark for much of the film and in doing so colors the film with his characters’ uneasy paranoia.
It’s in the dizzying, meticulous sparring between the protagonists — each working relentlessly to assert their version of the truth — that the heart of the movie lies. Yorgos’ emphasis and restraint in these scenes make us feel like another person in the room trying to make sense of things, going mad in the process. That unnerving synthesizer score which follows the characters takes this sense of immersion even further. The result feels like scrolling online reading vastly different takes on the same issues. At a certain point, one begins to question … is he right? Could she be an alien?
I thought of all the times that I have been made out to feel like a conspiracy theorist for asking questions like “What else does this media company own?” “Why does my school invest in weapon manufacturers?” “Why is this vaccine no longer recommended?” “What would it mean if this company buys this streamer?”
We have entered an era of necessary skepticism, easily dismissed as paranoia by a ruling class who have positioned themselves as the voice of reason. After all, the skeptics carry cardboard signs while “reasonable” people wear suits. Michelle calmly tells her kidnapper that he’s in an “echo chamber,” saying it almost like she’s trying to help him out of it. This reminded me of politicians saying that young people are getting all confused observing wars via TikTok, that they’re consuming propaganda. Never mind that special interest groups bankroll the career of these politicians in exchange for these opinions. Who’s the propagandist?
I find it impossible to meaningfully praise this film in a vacuum; it is because we as an audience are often manipulated and lied to by forces more powerful than us that this movie resonates and is being so talked about.
Truth is often kept from Yorgos’ protagonists, and getting to the bottom of it rarely ever yields happiness. They’re also almost always very lonely. Teddy proudly states that he’s doing everything on his own, that he’s not part of any movement. Skepticism is isolating, especially when you’re told you’re crazy by those whose agendas clash with the truth. But movies like these can make us feel less lonely.
“We are not alone,” reads a tabloid article about aliens that Teddy has in his kitchen. I choose that as my takeaway here. Maybe we feel hopeless, maybe corporations and politicians can toy with our fates while making us feel crazy for pointing that out. But we are not alone!
Julio Torres is an author, comedian, actor, writer, director and producer. His credits include “Saturday Night Live,” “Los Espookys,” “Fantasmas” and “Problemista.”
