Bugonia Review: Emma Stone Transforms in Disturbing Sci-Fi Comedy

About 40 years ago, a New York senator and lifelong politician named Daniel Patrick Moynihan said, “Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts.” It was as catchy then as now, with the phrase lingering still in the zeitgeist like a faded bumper stick tagline. Yet if the ongoing collapse of American democracy in the social media century proves anything, it’s that, nope, folks actually do love choosing their own facts, figures, and when possible full-blown alternate realities to boot. It’s a brave new world out there, and one that begs the perpetual riddle of our era: how do you converse with someone who sounds like they’re from another planet?

At a glance, Yorgos Lanthimos’ Bugonia, which marks another pitch black satire from the Greek auteur with newfound shades of science fiction, appears to tackle this head-on via its morality play about a mentally unwell crank who kidnaps a pharmaceutical executive he is convinced is secretly an alien. How can Emma Stone’s high-powered CEO Michelle possibly relate to this dirt poor, deranged employee who has been fed a steady diet of YouTube and reddit conspiracy theory algorithms for years?

But then again, when looked at it from another angle, how can Teddy, Jesse Plemmons’ delusional working class schmuck, possibly convey his lifetime of sorrow to a woman whose joy and purpose in life is taking from sad sacks like him? After all, long before he showed up on her front lawn with a syringe, he’d spent Xenu knows how many years slaving away in her packaging department, shipping off drugs of dubious merit across the U.S.

But the slippery (and perhaps now familiar) trick about Yorgos Lanthimos is that he is not necessarily interested in the larger sociopolitical and philosophical subjects he loves mining for his sense of irony and cynicism. In setups as loaded as Begonia’s, he certainly notices them; at times he’ll wave at them with the glee of a child playing on the beach. But like that same seaside lad, Lanthimos is as eager to bend, undermine, and maybe outright destroy any structures he’s built in the sand, just for the joy of watching things crumble apart. For such an idiosyncratic storyteller, movies like Bugonia are as much about the schadenfreude of their scenarios and doomed protagonists, as they are any big, capital-‘M’ Message.

Sometimes it’s fun to just tear things, people, and finally parables down for the lulz, and as an arthouse setup and punchline delivery, Bugonia has a lot of bleak pleasure in its horror show premise, especially in the quieter moments where Lanthimos’ wide camera lenses are content to purely bask in Stone and Plemons’ talents going tête-à-tête.

The confrontations start early when after spending a day in the life of the lonely CEO, and the even lonelier incel stalking her—an irony since Teddy has his cousin Don (Aidan Delbis) for company—the loner cousins make their move. The pair kidnap Stone’s pharmaceutical diva at knife point, albeit even that is a bit of a fluke since the executive makes a convincing case she can physically overpower both men while soaking up the lyrics of Chappell Roan off her radio in the same way Popeye devours a can of spinach. Nonetheless, Michelle eventually wakes up with her hair shaved and face covered in stark white powder (preemptive measures, Teddy explains to Don, to stop her from contacting her mothership for help).

Teddy has a simple request: allow him to meet with her emperor in space and negotiate a peace treaty that will prevent the aliens from continuing to poison the world with their drugs and misery that leaves little people like Teddy and Don so hopeless. Otherwise… they will be forced to torture her. Audiences have every reason to find abject sympathy and terror for the woman trapped in a basement with these weirdos, unable to possibly communicate in a reasonable way with their demands. But the more that secrets unfold, the more it is hard to not notice Teddy the Apiculturist has one point: in the modern world, Michelle was a queen bee, and Teddy little more than a drone. That doesn’t make it any less chilling when the electric shock wires come out.

Bugonia marks the fourth film that partners director Lanthimos with his newfound American muse, Emma Stone. Long may their relationship continue. Two of their previous three collaborations resulted in some of the most compelling and subversive genre-adjacent films in the last decade, the anti-costume drama The Favourite and the feminist reclamation of The Bride of Frankenstein, Poor Things. Both earned Stone Oscar nominations (plus a win in Poor Things’ case). I see no reason to doubt Bugonia will not continue the trend with another nomination and quite possibly a win. As with her previous Lanthimos joints—and even the indulgent misfire they made in between, Kinds of Kindness—Bugonia’s Michelle provides Stone with a striking departure from anything else in her repertoire.

Even under extreme duress, the film’s often smiling and reasonable sounding CEO is regal, watchful, and quietly thinking. Visually her stark buzzcut silhouette harkens back, I suspect deliberately, to Sigourney Weaver in Alien 3, which fits the genre mischief that defines so much of Lanthimos’ English-language work. While I wouldn’t say Stone’s executive quite resembles an actual extraterrestrial, there is something deeply reptilian and unsettling in the way she clocks Teddy and Don’s many, many foibles, even as she speaks to them with the benign friendliness of a memo from corporate. It’s a tremendously textured creation that invites profound empathy as she’s confronted with the cosmic dread of our age: communing with the terminally online. Yet between the raindrops of her choices, Stone’s gaze constantly asks the audience to make the more grounded evaluations of this exec that would never cross poor Teddy’s mind. 

Still, in that role, Plemons has the more difficult part. Whereas in the original Korean film which Bugonia adapts, Jang Joon-hwan’s Save the Green Planet! (2003), the Teddy character is unquestionably the protagonist through whose eyes this story unfolds, the casting of Stone, the added gender dynamics of that change, and possibly even the American inclination to empathize with the “winner” over the “loser” in the game of capitalism, conspire together to make Teddy a far more antagonistic presence in Bugonia. In the last 20 years, we’ve been given many more reasons to fear the incel, and Teddy takes that to the immediate dangerous degree when in the film’s opening scenes he convinces his neurodivergent cousin to chemically castrate himself so they won’t be “distracted” by any of Michelle’s feminine wiles.

Teddy is deeply troubled and troubling, which makes him a fairly rich vein for an actor of Plemons’ talent to mine. Anyone who saw this same performer walk away with Civil War in a single scene last year is aware that he knows how to play scary. Teddy is not that though; it’s his pitifulness draws which the viewer in. Like a whodunit true crime mystery, you want to understand the root of his delusions, which on a certain level should have grand implications for our social moment.

One imagines that screenwriter Will Tracy—who was on hand Monday night for Bugonia’s surprise screening at Fantastic Fest—certainly saw the opportunity to tap into them when revisiting Save the Green Planet! Prior credits for Tracy include scathingly satirical portraits of capitalistic rot in The Menu and Succession. Those themes were also strong in the Korean film, and they’re definitely present in Lanthimos’ stylistically divergent remake. Yet in the same way that Lanthimos appears to be moving past the darkly acerbic ironies of his movies with screenwriter Tony McNamara—wherein The Favourite and Poor Things favored shocking visuals paired with loquacious bitchiness in the dialogue—the class subtexts of Bugonia better resemble a window-dressing that the picture is speeding past.

Lanthimos and frequent cinematographer Robbie Ryan have dialed back on the fish-eyed lenses of their previous work (though some still appear), and instead seem to favor desolate wide angles captured on a log lens. The characters mostly wither in isolation in the frame, unable to escape their own plight, much less communicate with anyone else in the room. The effect might mirror socioeconomic realities in the 21st century, however the intent seems more to taunt and savor their withdrawn agonies.

While there may not be any actual aliens in the film, Bugonia feels a bit like a cool, detached intellect’s observation of a primitive species. Stone and Plemons are both tasked with finding layers of humanity in an implausible concept, but Bugonia mostly settles for a remote contempt toward all parties. The screenplay is subversive, but the movie as a whole is just nihilistic.

This glibness undercuts the impact of the final third act revelations and resolutions, hollowing out what could have been a much more poignant finale. Still, after so many years of appreciating Lanthimos’ wry skepticism toward humanity, it is perhaps unfair to hold too much against a film that views us all as foolish, fleshy things. As an exercise in dark humor and bold acting, Buognia borders on becoming another triumph. As a full cinematic experience, it ultimately registers as an intriguing, if bizarre, space oddity.

Bugonia premiered at Fantastic Fest on Sept. 22 and opens in limited release on Oct. 24, and in wide release on Oct.  31.