Emma Stone’s Apocalyptic Showdown Blooms in “Bugonia”

Even for those of us who cherish Stone’s earlier films—say, the way she both embodied and skewered girl-next-door innocence in the campus comedy “Easy A” (2010)—it’s been thrilling to see her embrace darkness with such wild abandon, while also maintaining meticulous control. Following the romantic musical “La La Land” (2016), the apotheosis of her sunny phase, Stone’s evolution has been nothing if not purposeful; in addition to picking boundary-pushing roles, she has emerged as a significant industry player, celebrated for her work as a producer. (Projects she has backed include the films “A Real Pain” and “I Saw the TV Glow,” both from 2024, and the miniseries “The Curse,” from 2023, in which she co-starred.) Stone is one of the producers on Lanthimos’s new film, “Bugonia,” and also its star, and there is an acid delight in seeing her cast as a figure of ruthless authority: Michelle Fuller, the C.E.O. of Auxolith, a company that manufactures drugs and pesticides. Michelle is high-powered enough to have appeared on the covers of Time and Forbes, and to have been photographed with another famous Michelle (Obama). She’s a barracuda in a dark suit, with a blood-chilling mastery of doublespeak. Even when she outwardly affirms humane, progressive values—an inclusive corporate culture, shorter employee hours—Michelle can’t help but undercut her own sham platitudes. Recording a speech that repeatedly uses the word “diverse,” she snaps, “Can we try to diversify the language a little bit?” Michelle exists on a level that is invulnerable to reproach, termination, or cancellation. The only way to take her down would be through extreme stealth and deadly force, and, even then, she’s enough of a fighter that success would hardly be guaranteed. A pair of peculiar men—Teddy (Jesse Plemons) and Don (Aidan Delbis), who are cousins—learn this the hard way. After lying in wait outside the glassy modernist fortress that Michelle calls home, they ambush her; engage in some tense, amusing slapstick fisticuffs; then overpower and sedate her. When Michelle awakens, she is tied up in the basement of Teddy’s farmhouse, her face and body smeared with anti-itch cream and her hair fully shorn—necessary precautions against her escape, Teddy insists. Baldness becomes Stone, bringing out the serpentine menace in her glare: what diabolical ideas are being cooked up inside that exposed noggin? Teddy claims to know. Michelle, he says, is an alien from the Andromeda galaxy, bent on conquering planet Earth. He has already drilled this idea into Don, who is neurodivergent, and who makes a largely obedient accomplice—but not, in Delbis’s sweetly haunting performance, an unquestioning one. Teddy’s reasoning is a confusion of save-the-world alarmism, garden-variety derangement, unhealed trauma, and single-minded revenge. He’s a beekeeper, and he blames Auxolith’s pesticides for accelerating colony-collapse disorder; the precarious state of his beehives becomes the film’s governing metaphor for a world on the verge of destruction. Teddy demands that Michelle take him and Don to her Andromedan leader in the hope of forcing the invaders to retreat. Michelle, unsurprisingly, says that she is not an alien. What is surprising is the utter rationalism of her response. She doesn’t scream or shout or plead for her life; instead, she calmly lays out the unhappy probable outcomes of Teddy and Don’s actions, and advises them to free her while they still can. So poised is Stone’s delivery that you begin to wonder if Michelle really is from Andromeda. Stranger still, the answer scarcely seems to matter. After all, the human and the alien in Lanthimos’s films have always been divided by the most porous of membranes. Think of the cool Buñuelian satire of “The Lobster” (2016), which seemed to look down on its hapless human characters from an extraterrestrial remove—a distance magnified, visually, in “The Favourite” and “Poor Things,” which peered at their specimens through distortive fish-eye lenses. (The cinematographer Robbie Ryan has wisely relaxed the technique here, possibly figuring that it would have been redundant.) Or think—if you must—of “Kinds of Kindness” (2024), a triptych of grim tales with Stone and Plemons in various roles and psychological configurations; the result could have been the work of a Martian experimenter, subjecting the same human vessels to fresh injections of misery. The movie was a wearying experience, but it epitomized the disquieting chill at the heart—or, rather, the core—of Lanthimos’s work. Everything human is alien to him. “Bugonia” is an altogether more intoxicating specimen. Lanthimos’s gaze, so exactingly attuned to human ugliness, has seldom given us lovelier things to look at. The colors are richly saturated, and when something catches Ryan’s eye—say, a bee alighting on a wildflower—the images shimmer with an almost radioactive intensity. One is reminded of the chemical smog that grants us such vibrant sunsets; who ever said the end of the world wouldn’t be beautiful? The production design is by James Price, and what he and Ryan do with interior space is remarkably subversive: Teddy’s farmhouse, though strewn with lovingly detailed clutter, becomes a zone of psychological warfare as vast and cavernous as Auxolith’s headquarters. For an abduction thriller, “Bugonia” displays little interest in generating claustrophobia, and Michelle is neither a victim nor an easy point of identification. Even when she’s in shackles, she and Teddy are on unnervingly equal footing. So, too, are Stone and Plemons. The threat of conspiracy theories run amok carries a sharper, less funny sting now than it did twenty years ago, and Plemons delivers the venom in unusually concentrated form. Teddy, as ruddy and scruffy as Michelle is pale and bald, has a courtly manner that conceals an unpredictable propensity for violence, and it is hard to imagine an actor better equipped than Plemons to make sense of the contradiction. Teddy can be methodical in his brutality, as when he subjects Michelle to sustained electric shocks; he can also lose it completely, lurching across a dining-room table and assaulting her in a murderous rage. What unites Teddy and Michelle, ironically, and makes them formidable foes, is a matter-of-fact cynicism about politics. Teddy says that he’s cycled through every position under the sun—alt-right, alt-lite, leftist, Marxist—before deciding he was done with labels forever. “Ninety-nine point nine per cent of what’s called activism,” he tells Michelle, “is really personal exhibitionism and brand maintenance in disguise.” “Bugonia” is its own skillful exercise in brand maintenance—more an expertly engineered Lanthimos product, perhaps, than a full-bore Lanthimos triumph. But that’s more than enough. Tracy’s dialogue, though absent the staccato non sequiturs of the director’s earlier work, has a bracing nastiness; every visual flourish and every menacing thrum of the score, by Jerskin Fendrix, escalates the intensity of Stone and Plemons’s bravura showdown. This movie offers an uncommonly pleasurable descent into hell, and for that reason, I suspect, it will elude the criticisms that have been flung at two other recent provocations, Luca Guadagnino’s “After the Hunt” and Ari Aster’s “Eddington,” both of which likewise sneered at performative politics and were attacked as noxiously reactionary. It’s worth noting that Aster is a producer on “Bugonia,” and he cast Stone in “Eddington,” as a trauma survivor in thrall to her own dark conspiracies. It was one of many poor choices in that film; I’ve seldom seen an actor of Stone’s calibre so egregiously squandered. Lanthimos, it’s safe to say, would never. ♦