Bugonia

I’d skipped Kinds of Kindness, the middle entry of three consecutive collaborations between Emma Stone and Lorgos Lanthimos; some issues with their Poor Things adaptation soured me on watching. But Bugonia drew me back; it’s a deliberately odd drama with sci-fi trappings and some pretentions; the film hinges on the idea that aliens might already be here on earth, or so some zoned-out conspiracy theorists imagine. They kidnap a CEO who they believe actually comes from the planet Andromeda and hope to unmask her an an extra-terrestrial, but things take an unexpected twist…

Spoiler alerts therefore apply; Bugonia has been out for a few months now, and I’m going to explore it from the POV of someone who has seen the whole film, or who doesn’t mind discussing plot details. Although in a Twilight Zone fashion, given the simple set up of Bugonia, who couldn’t see that twist coming? Otherwise this would just be the story of two men kidnapping and torturing an innocent woman. The most compelling stretch in Bugonia comes when Michelle Fuller (Emma Stone) starts to play along with the fantasy imaginings of Teddy (Jesse Plemons) and Don (Aidan Delbis). She’s held in a basement where they shaved her head and are passing massive jolts of electric current through her body, and her escape attempt depends on her convincing them that she’s the alien they’re looking for.

In the climax of Bugonia, spoilers, spoilers, spoilers, we discover that Michelle Fuller is an alien after all, and that the ridiculous conspiracy theories that Teddy and Don willingly believe are almost entirely accurate, only misunderstanding what the purpose of the alien invasion is. Teddy and Don haven’t been dealt a great hand in life, and the pathos of their modern George and Lennie routine is accentuated by the illness of their mother and the potentially sinister role that Fuller’s company play in her suffering. Hair turns out to be a key part in communication, and Teddy and Don’s hirsuteness seems to correspond with their astuteness in terms of their vision of what’s going down; they are literal longhairs, and that comparison chimes with a final sequence in which the Andromedan overlords end human life on earth, Where Have All the Flowers Gone? plays on the soundtrack and nature reclaims the earth from the grasp of rotten, selfish humans.

Getting this highfaluting moral out compromises any argument in Will Trace’s script, adapted from Save The Green Planet! by Jang Joon-hwan. We know that it’s irresponsible CEO’s who are behind the mountain of conspiracy theories, fake adverts and outright scams perpetrated on us, but we shouldn’t hate or fear these people because they’re aliens, but because they fail the basic tests of how to act like human beings. Endorsing wacky conspiracy theories and hoping they might be true feels like how humanity got into utter shambles of 2025 rather than how it might get out. Fanning the flames of conspiracy theories might have been a fun anti-authority stance in the 60’s or 70’s, but in 2025, it’s a fire that’s already burning the house down and doesn’t need any encouragement. Stone, Plemons and Delbis all do a bang-up acting job here, but once the secrets are revealed, Bugonia’s message feels garbled and confusing. The telling is good, but even the most dynamic plot twists on Twilight Zone had a grim logic behind them; Bugonia’s fanciful suggestion that we might all be one big alien science experiment seem like sixth-form juvenilia when finally unpacked.

Tags: #EmmaStone #Aidan #Delbisaliensconspiracy #theoriesemma #stonefilmjesse #plemonskidnappingmovienaturereviewtorturetrump/epsteinyorgos #lanthimos #Bugonia #BugoniaFilm