Emma Stone has been on an extraordinary hot streak as of late, highlighted by her stellar work in Showtime’s The Curse and her Oscar-winning turn in 2023’s Poor Things. That remarkable run continues with Bugonia, her fourth straight big-screen collaboration with Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos, in which she stars as a biomedical bigwig who winds up in otherworldly peril.
Once again displaying the go-for-broke instincts and bonkers agility—a mixture of stern glares, duplicitous smiles, and untrustworthy façades—that have made her Hollywood’s most adventurous actress, Stone is a mesmerizing riot in this bleak satire of our current state of disorder—as is her co-star Jesse Plemons, who matches her intensity and manages to outdo her craziness.
A remake of South Korean filmmaker’s Jang Joon-hwan’s 2003 comedy Save the Green Planet!, Bugonia (in theaters October 24, following its premiere at the Venice Film Festival) is the story of an America torn between conspiracy theory lunacy and corporate iciness—two halves of a shredding 2025 whole that are epitomized by Teddy (Plemons) and Michelle (Stone), the latter the “visionary” CEO of pharmaceutical company Auxolith, and the former a reclusive beekeeper who earns a paycheck toiling in one of Auxolith’s fulfillment centers.
Teddy lives in the messy, dilapidated rural home he grew up in with his mother Sandy (Alicia Silverstone) and which he shares with cousin Don (Aidan Delbis), a burly, curly haired dimwit who goes along with everything Teddy does and says. Unfortunately, Teddy is a madman convinced that shadowy forces are killing the bee population and, with it, the Earth. The individual he blames for this calamity is Michelle, who resides in a luxurious modernist mansion (where she uses light therapy masks to stay youthful and takes boxing lessons to keep tough) and works at an equally imposing building of steel and glass.
Whereas Michelle is put together and insincere—the latter proven by her starring role in a diversity training video and her decrees about employees leaving early—Teddy is disheveled and heartfelt, and he has a plan to right what he views as wrong with the world. The maiden step in his strategy is to chemically castrate Don (as he’s done to himself) because clarity and freedom come from eliminating sexual urges (“It’s all neurons, dude!”).
Then, with the aid of a syringe full of knockout drugs, he and Don abduct Michelle from her home and spirit her back to their basement. On the journey, Teddy orders Don to shave Michelle’s head, because hair is the way she communicates with her cohorts. She’s subsequently chained up in the basement and, lying on a filthy cot, coated in antihistamine lotion for other opaque reasons.
There’s a method to Teddy’s madness: he believes Michelle is an alien from the Andromeda Galaxy who, along with her fellow E.T.s, are colluding to ruin the planet. As evidence of this fantastical notion, Teddy references Michelle’s Instagram photographs as well as her narrow feet, thin cuticles, and slight overbite.
Unsurprisingly, Michelle finds this insane, and that’s before Teddy (who’s dubbed his house “the headquarters of the human resistance”) reveals his demands: that the corporate titan record a message to her emperor demanding that he meet with Teddy and Don aboard his spaceship to negotiate his species’ withdrawal from Earth. When Michelle doesn’t adequately comply, things go from heated to violent, pushing this hostage situation to the brink of disaster.
Buoyed by Will Tracy’s tight and combative script, Lanthimos dramatizes his action by alternately getting right into his characters’ faces and remaining at a droll remove, and his fondness for extreme low-angled imagery heightens the film’s wobbly sense of reality.
The director’s askew aesthetics are a natural fit for his absurd material, as are his two leads. Stone seethes with ruthlessness and cunning, and her Michelle is scariest (and funniest) when attempting to conceal her disgust and contempt for Teddy in order to tell him what he wants to hear, only to have it emerge in a sarcastic quip or disingenuous “yay!” Plemons’ Teddy, by contrast, is a smug maniac who’s convinced that he (and he alone) has figured out Michelle’s They Live-ish plot to subjugate mankind through capitalistic villainy, and the actor—his hair long, his beard scraggly, and his clothes as untidy as his mind—evokes 21st-century red-pilled “echo chamber” psychosis with witty vigor.
Be it Teddy badmouthing Michelle’s trendy jargon while employing his own pretentious verbiage, or the criminal clumsily trying to hide a shotgun in his pants, Bugonia paints a ridiculous portrait of a here and now in which both sides of the socio-political divide—the callous corporate power brokers and the deranged always-online masses—are equally detestable and destined to bring about doom.
Tracy’s dialogue is often inspired (the best line: Teddy telling his prisoner, “Don’t call it a dialogue—this isn’t Death of a Salesman!”), and Lanthimos embellishes the proceedings with just the right number of horrifying touches, most of them via fantastical flashbacks that convey the subconscious bitterness and anguish driving Teddy to take extreme measures. Jerskin Fendrix’s over-the-top old-school orchestral score is like Bernard Herrmann on ecstasy, adding to the wild and woolly mood.
Revelations about its protagonists’ prior relationship and the meddling of Teddy’s former babysitter-turned-police officer Casey (Stavros Halkias), who also has a deep, dark secret, speed Bugonia along its bizarre path. The director ratchets up the tension at the same time that he exposes his main characters as simultaneously sick and sane.
Michelle and Teddy, it turns out, have similar goals and yet scant means of comprehending, much less partnering with, each other, so consumed are they with their deceptions and delusions. To its credit, even after laying its cards on the table, Lanthimos’ latest proffers no simple answers, suggesting that everyone involved is, in their own way, guilty of causing this calamity, which results in gnarly injuries, torture, bloodshed, multiple corpses, and additional ghastly discoveries.
Bugonia is an amusingly timely nightmare that’s hardwired into our present-day irrationality and dishonesty, deriving humor and horror from the fact that, amidst ubiquitous chaos and madness, even the best intentions beget destruction. With Stone and Plemons delivering year-best performances, it’s a gonzo satire that’s on target to a borderline uncomfortable degree.
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