Warning: This review contains spoilers.
Fresh off the heels of 2023’s “Poor Things” and 2024’s “Kinds of Kindness,” Emma Stone and Yorgos Lanthimos are back together for “Bugonia,” also starring Jesse Plemons and Alicia Silverstone.
This remake of the 2003 South Korean sci-fi classic “Save the Green Planet” pairs Lanthimos’ signature isolationism with dynamic camera angles and vivid color grading; “Bugonia” seems to exist in a world that mimics our own, albeit with a touch of the surreal.
Over the past decade, Lanthimos and Stone have had a series of high-profile collaborations culminating in the four-time Academy Award winning “Poor Things,” with Stone taking home the trophy for actress in a leading role. As a result, hype for “Bugonia” represents a potential career peak for Lanthimos, and an opportunity for Stone to continue her ascent to superstardom.
The introductory sequence, in which bees pollinate vibrantly colored flowers, drives home the central undercurrent of the film: the fragility of the climate that the human race has so wantonly polluted.
“Bugonia” manages to refine its message into a singular scathing critique of how isolation shapes responses to trauma, and the danger of unproductive responses to injustice.
Although the endangered status of bees is only referenced a couple of times throughout the duration of the film’s nearly two-hour runtime, buzzing sounds throughout the score serve as a subtle but persistent reminder that despite the antics of individual characters, their environment and society are on the brink of collapse.
Stone plays Michelle Fuller, a wealthy pharmaceutical CEO who is kidnapped by Plemons’ character Teddy and his neurodivergent cousin Don. Her captors are convinced she is a member of the alien race of Andromedons disguised on Earth to destroy humanity. This campy premise is almost overstuffed with symbolism and allegorical messaging, but career-best performances by Stone and Plemons allow the film to drive home its central claim: Humanity is the problem.
In fact, “Bugonia” skillfully differentiates between the themes it contains and the message it hopes to convey. Despite discussing abuse of power by police, unethical practices in pharmaceuticals, the disinformation epidemic and the ever-growing gap between what people can be convinced of and what is actually true, “Bugonia” manages to refine its message into a singular scathing critique of how isolation shapes responses to trauma, and the danger of unproductive responses to injustice.
The opening montage of Michelle’s solitary and almost robotic lifestyle establishes how her wealth and power separate her from the rest of the world. Of course, her alterity is ultimately revealed to be far more literal in the film’s final sequence.
This duality initiates a provocative juxtaposition, asking the viewer to consider which side they will choose.
On the other hand, everything about Teddy is equally alien in its own way. The isolating feeling that the film conveys when depicting his daily life and environment cements the significance of managing trauma in isolation as the vector for Teddy’s descent into what initially seems to be paranoid delusion.
This duality initiates a provocative juxtaposition, asking the viewer to consider which side they will choose. Throughout the film, save for a few sinister glances, Michelle is painted as the victim. Her acerbic wit and sarcasm in the face of being chained to a bed in a basement and tortured by a man who has “done his own research” make her an extremely likeable protagonist.
However, it is then revealed that a failed pharmaceutical trial from Michelle’s company left Teddy’s mother, played by Silverstone, comatose in a long-term care facility. Stone’s ability to embody the apathetic performance of regret, paired with the steely resolve of a CEO determined to maintain a bottom line, leaves the audience conflicted, pondering their initial notions of who the protagonist is meant to be.
From there, we are pushed to side with Teddy as a kind of tragic hero, driven to delusion and violence as a result of not only the circumstances surrounding his mother’s illness, but also due to his history of being sexually abused by a childhood babysitter, Casey, played by comedian Stavros Halkias. Casey reappears in Teddy’s life, now under the auspices of his job as a police officer, when he visits Teddy and Don’s house to investigate Michelle’s kidnapping.
Ultimately, the film flips the script again when Don takes his own life. After pleading with Michelle to take him with her to the alien realm and allow him to escape the world that denies his agency and ability to direct his own life, Don commits suicide after she consents.
This shocking turn of events gives the viewer insight into the true nature of the dynamic of Teddy and Don’s relationship, and how, in his desire to regain control of his own life, Teddy ultimately forced another individual to submit to the same kind of control that he is rebelling against by convincing himself that aliens are lording over the world.
Even more shockingly, Michelle then discovers a secret room in the basement containing a collection of corpses that reveal the extent of Teddy’s efforts. He had been kidnapping, testing, torturing and dissecting suspected Andromedons for years. While Michelle unravels Teddy’s murderous investigations, Teddy brutally kills Casey, his childhood abuser. As such, we as viewers are forced to realize that, within the context of the world Lanthimos has built, it is impossible to choose a side.
This campy premise is almost overstuffed with symbolism and allegorical messaging, but career-best performances by Stone and Plemons allow the film to drive home its central claim: Humanity is the problem.
It is this subversion of the typical formulaic protagonist-antagonist archetype that allows “Bugonia” to ultimately cement its message. In a collapsing ecosystem where the wealthy exist in a state so separated from the rest of humanity that they become alien, we can expect nothing but the eventual extinction of the human race. Teddy sought renewal, and claimed to want to free the human race from Andromedon control, but all he was able to achieve in the end was self-destruction, as he sought individual satisfaction at the expense of others.
Don’s decision to take his own life reflects the cost of Teddy’s scheming and the danger of repeating the misdeeds of oppressors while repackaging them as something for the greater good.
Most importantly, however, Michelle represents the insulation of the ultra-wealthy from the strife and destruction they create. In her life on Earth, she was worlds away from the experience of the average person, and when she makes the climactic decision to eliminate human life on Earth after deeming it a failed experiment, she does so from her far away spaceship, with an action as flippant as popping a bubble.
“Bugonia,” in portraying a satirical, fictionalized Earth, reminds us of our current reality while also poking fun at us for relating to a story about aliens. It also showcases the acting abilities of its two lead actors, Stone and Plemons, as they expertly subvert the audience’s expectations and bring the required nuance to their roles, typical of Lanthimos’ signature exaggerated, ironic narratives.
