‘Bugonia’ Review

Mean-spirited, but in the sort of way we all kinda-sorta deserve.

Emma Stone, Aidin Delbis, and Jesse Plemons in Bugonia. (Courtesy of Focus Features via MovieStillsDB)

AT ONE POINT IN BUGONIA, Teddy (Jesse Plemons) asks his cousin, Don (Aidan Delbis), what being free feels like. And Don, who is a little slow—one might even say mentally handicapped—and clearly in thrall to Teddy replies with naïve honesty: It feels like “when we were little, before things got bad.”

Bugonia joins a panoply of films this year that hope to shed light on Our Moment, to help explain How We Got Here. Eddington, One Battle After Another, and After the Hunt are all approaching the same question, just from different angles. The proliferation of social media; the rise of an anti-immigrant police state; MeToo’s excesses and its after-effects: How has American life changed over the last decade? But that line in Bugonia really does hammer the point home in a way that none of those other films quite managed. It’s a blunt statement, and like all blunt statements lacks the sharpness that denotes deep incisiveness, an insight that cuts to the quick. But a blunt statement can still bludgeon you into some kind of understanding.

And few statements are blunter than Things were better when I was young and happy and the world had yet to reveal its cruelties to me. I’m paraphrasing Don’s response, but not inaccurately or uncharitably. The happiness of childhood is the root of all nostalgia, the tragic flaw in each of us: to yearn for a return to the innocence we once had and to understand, on some level, that it’s gone forever.

Now, this is not precisely what Teddy and Don are thinking when they kidnap pharmaceutical executive Michelle Fuller (Emma Stone) from her home. Teddy, having undergone a speed run through the litany of extremist ideologies—alt-lite, alt-right, leftist, socialist, etc.—and having found them lacking, has done his own research and come to believe that Earth is being invaded by Andromedans, an alien species coming to Earth to help make us docile and more easily ruled. Michelle is one such creature.

That docility would render us more like the bees that produce honey outside Teddy’s home, though the bees themselves have had a rough go of it recently, what with all the colony collapses. Collapses that may or may not have been caused by Michelle’s company’s pesticides. We do know that Michelle’s company created an opioid-withdrawal drug that seems to have put Teddy’s mother in a coma; it seems likely that Teddy’s rampage has less to do with invading aliens set to return to their mothership during the forthcoming lunar eclipse than revenge for that grievous familial harm. But you never know. Maybe Michelle is an extraterrestrial.

Emma Stone certainly has the look for it; one thing director Yorgos Lanthimos has seized upon both in his 2023 Frankenstein-esque parable, Poor Things, and here is that Stone is a little odd-looking, her eyes set in her head in a vaguely insect-like way. Of course, I might just be transfixed by Michelle’s shaved head—done to her so she cannot communicate with her Andromedan colleagues, Teddy explains—which only emphasizes Stone’s naturally wide-set features. But then, we’d all probably look a little strange if we found ourselves chained up in the basement of a guy who has learned from the Internet of an alien invasion hiding itself behind girlboss behaviors like 4:30 a.m. wakeups and early morning Krav Maga on the one hand, and buzzwords like “dialogue” and “diversity” on the other.

Emma Stone in Bugonia. (Courtesy Focus Features via MovieStillsDB)

Regardless, Stone is perfect as ice queen Michelle and Plemons makes the most of a rare leading role. All too often, he’s just given bit parts to sink his teeth into, as in last year’s Civil War when he asked that film’s most important question: “Ok. What kind of American are you?” (Or, if you prefer a less terrifying example, when he asked in Game Night how a three-for-one special on chips could be profitable for Frito-Lay.) In Bugonia, Plemons embodies a sort of barely masked frustration that resides just below the surface of our increasingly agitated society, manifesting occasionally in outbursts of not-quite-restrained violence. The guy who, as I wrote earlier, has Done His Own Research and found the rest of us sheeple wanting.

Much will be made of Bugonia’s closing forty or so minutes; whether you think the film goes off the rails or concludes the only way it possibly could have will depend on your tolerance for a sort of surrealist absurdity we haven’t gotten much of since Terry Gilliam has, more or less, exited the scene. Count me in the “that’s the only way this movie could have ended” camp. Ironically, though, this meant that what happens did not come as quite the shock that I imagine Lanthimos intended it to. Whether or not that’s a triumph of foreshadowing or a staleness of provocation is, I suppose, a question left to every viewer to answer.