Contains spoilers: Emma Stone’s hard-faced corporate CEO has a lot of explaining to do when she is kidnapped by Jesse Plemons’s conspiracy kook. But in this film, asking whether someone is an alien seems an ordinary inquiry
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mma Stone as a kidnapped, shaven-headed pharmaceuticals CEO who might also be the ruler of an alien master race? It says a lot about director Yorgos Lanthimos that Bugonia was arguably his most straightforward film to date.
For this remake of the cult 2003 South Korean movie Save the Green Planet! we were invited into the unkempt home of beekeeper Teddy (Jesse Plemons), a paranoid conspiracy theorist whose internet research has led him to believe that aliens are poisoning his bees – and that only he can save life on Earth from extinction. He enlists his neurodivergent cousin Don (Aidan Delbis) to kidnap high-flying Michelle Fuller (Stone), whose company Auxolith seems to have caused Teddy’s mother some kind of irreversible harm in the past.
Stone enjoys pushing herself artistically for Lanthimos and Bugonia was no different: here we see her knocked unconscious in the back of a car while a panicking Don takes chunks out of her hair with a pair of clippers (Teddy insists that she can only communicate with her alien peers via her hair). By the time she’s been doused from head to toe in antihistamine cream she looks like, well, an alien.
