movie review
BUGONIA
Running time: 120 minutes. Rated R (Bloody and violent content, suicide, grisly images, language). In select theaters Oct. 24.
That “Bugonia” is only a tense two hours is a kind of kindness.
Director Yorgos Lanthimos’ previous collaboration with Emma Stone and Jesse Plemons, the miserable “Kinds of Kindness” in 2024, was a punishing two hours and 45 minutes.
Minutes felt like January days.
Not true of the trio’s new movie, a zany, comic, icky, smelly thriller about the deadly cocktail of loneliness and web browsing.
“Bugonia” buzzes by, if sometimes nauseastingly, and is a huge improvement from Lanthimos’ episodic drivel last year.
Even so, I’m exhausted by the “Poor Things” auteur’s schtick of overly peculiar tales, fishbowl lenses, fast struts down chic hallways, aloof characters and loud, abrupt music.
Enough already.
And, despite the accolades Lanthimos has won her, it would be nice to see the sensational Stone escape from the clutches of his repetitive vision.
You might have forgotten at this point, but the two-time Oscar winner is quite skilled at playing regular people. God forbid.
Like Stone’s CEO role here, Michelle, the actress is very much trapped in her “Favourite” director’s basement.
Michelle is a magazine-ready biomedical executive, who’s captured by a couple of small-town creeps, Teddy (Jesse Plemons) and his cousin Don (Aidan Delbis), because paranoid Teddy is convinced she is an alien that’s been sent to Earth to destroy the planet.
Emma Stone gets weird again for the new movie “Bugonia.” Focus Features
The local bees are dying, and it’s all because of a space-traveling race of Andromedons.
Suffice it to say, he did not come to this conclusion after flipping through Scientific American.
They knock her out, shave her head, chain her to a cot downstairs and demand that, during the lunar eclipse in four days, she takes them to meet her mothership.
Michelle, like a Salem woman at a witch trial, insists she is not an extraterrestrial.
But, considering the polished corporate nonsense CEOs spout these days, she sort of talks like a Conehead. That’s what makes the situation funny, in its messed-up way.
Michelle is a biomedical CEO who gets captured by conspiracy theorists. AP
Therein lies the cleverness of the conceit, which is openly taken from the South Korean film “Save the Green Planet!”: Who do you root for? A Big Pharma suit or some greasy wackos who’ve never heard of soap?
For most of “Bugonia,” we side squarely with Michelle. Stone, who is predictably fantastic, gets most of the desert-dry jokes and her character is an upstanding professional. Most sensible people agree that nobody deserves to be chloroformed and kidnapped on their commute.
Her captors, on the other hand, chemically castrate themselves at the beginning to prevent distraction and sound completely crazy.
Then we learn more about Teddy’s life and predicament, and are reminded that behind every dark-web loon is a real person’s relatable problems.
Teddy and Don believe Michelle is actually an alien. Focus Features
Don is especially heartbreaking. Shy and autistic (played with a documentary calmness by Delbis, who’s on the autism spectrum), he’s dragged along by Teddy, expressing doubts all along the way.
And untethered Teddy is some of Plemons’ best and most dialed-in work. Too often in Lanthimos’ movies, the characters float above the action, remaining remote and austere. Quirky, yet bloodless. Plemons’ performance is the opposite of that — a hair-raising live-wire with steely focus.
As in “Kindness,” there are gory, needle-y and violent scenes that make your stomach lurch. A decapitation here, a shovel bashing in a skull there. The extended electrocution section is particularly squirm-inducing.
Jesse Plemons does some of his best work so far. AP
Even with all the blood, the middle of the movie, while not losing the audience’s interest, does sag as the hot-tempered interrogations and negotiations go nowhere.
And the ending — while surely an organic-wine-bar talker — verges on stupid.
Lanthimos, despite his usual shopping list of indulgences, compellingly shows how an innocent “we are not alone” conspiracy theory can dangerously explode into chaos under the right conditions.
And I was always tickled by his main role being accused of being an alien — I’ve been accusing Lanthimos’ characters of being aliens for years!
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