{"id":327524,"date":"2025-10-23T22:12:13","date_gmt":"2025-10-23T22:12:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/327524\/"},"modified":"2025-10-23T22:12:13","modified_gmt":"2025-10-23T22:12:13","slug":"bugonia-review-emma-stone-beguiles-in-alien-abduction-comedy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/327524\/","title":{"rendered":"&#8216;Bugonia&#8217; review: Emma Stone beguiles in alien-abduction comedy"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>Most modern stars fit a prototype. Clark Gable begat George Clooney, Robert Redford passed a torch to Brad Pitt, Katharine Hepburn paved the way for Cate Blanchett. But <a class=\"link\" href=\"https:\/\/www.latimes.com\/entertainment-arts\/awards\/story\/2023-12-13\/emma-stone-wry-everywoman-to-brilliantly-weird-in-poor-things\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Emma Stone<\/a> has no precedent on Earth. Stone can play shrewd, silly, gorgeous, repellent, frail and frightening simultaneously, in a register at once intimate and grand-scale. If she didn\u2019t exist, some of her movies couldn\u2019t exist \u2014 especially not the ones she\u2019s created with edgy director <a class=\"link\" href=\"https:\/\/www.latimes.com\/entertainment-arts\/movies\/story\/2025-04-07\/yorgos-lanthimos-photography-webber-gallery\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Yorgos Lanthimos<\/a>, who whisked her to the Oscars twice for <a class=\"link\" href=\"https:\/\/www.latimes.com\/entertainment\/movies\/la-et-mn-the-favourite-review-20181119-story.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">\u201cThe Favourite\u201d<\/a> and <a class=\"link\" href=\"https:\/\/www.latimes.com\/entertainment-arts\/movies\/story\/2023-12-07\/poor-things-review-emma-stone-mark-ruffalo-yorgos-lanthimos\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">\u201cPoor Things,\u201d<\/a> the latter of which won Stone her second lead actress award.<\/p>\n<p>Those decadent period pieces were like elaborate jewel settings designed to showcase Stone\u2019s range. Now with the paranoid comedy \u201cBugonia,\u201d Lanthimos has stripped away all the ornamentation. Stone controls focus with nothing more than a shaved head, a filthy coat and a tight smile in the basement where her character, Michelle Fuller, the CEO of a pharmaceutical company, is being kept prisoner. Greased all over with a ghastly white antihistamine cream (I\u2019ll get to that), Stone\u2019s Michelle stares unblinkingly toward the audience in massive, mesmerizing close-ups, coolly explaining why she must be let go. Even in starkness, she shines.<\/p>\n<p>           <video playsinline=\"playsinline\" loop=\"\" preload=\"none\" title=\"This is Emma Stone\u2019s planet now as the alien comedy \u2018Bugonia\u2019 proves\" data-video-id=\"0000019a-1219-dbd0-a1ff-737b654e0000\">               <\/video>               <img class=\"image\" alt=\"\"   width=\"473\" height=\"840\" src=\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/10\/1761257533_581_\" decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\"\/>             <\/p>\n<ul data-element=\"action-bar-menu\" class=\"flex gap-2 list-none  absolute w-full h-10 top-0\">\n<li data-element=\"action-bar-share\" class=\"flex  w-full h-10 top-0 lg:items-center lg:justify-center \">\n<p> Share via     Close extra sharing options  <\/p>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Michelle\u2019s captors are cousins Teddy and Don (<a class=\"link\" href=\"https:\/\/www.latimes.com\/entertainment-arts\/movies\/story\/2024-06-13\/jesse-plemons-kinds-of-kindness-civil-war-cannes-best-actor\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Jesse Plemons<\/a> and <a class=\"link\" href=\"https:\/\/www.latimes.com\/entertainment-arts\/movies\/story\/2025-10-22\/aidan-delbis-was-still-in-high-school-when-he-landed-a-lead-role-in-bugonia\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Aidan Delbis<\/a>), two working-class conspiracy theorists halfway down the slope of sliding off the grid. When you scan their rural town, a wasteland of Dollar General stores and fast food chains, most of their neighbors seem to have already faded away. So has Teddy\u2019s opioid-addicted mom, Sandy (<a class=\"link\" href=\"https:\/\/www.latimes.com\/entertainment-arts\/story\/2024-08-21\/alicia-silverstone-poison-berry-london\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Alicia Silverstone<\/a>), glimpsed in eerie black-and-white flashbacks. Teddy, a hobbyist beekeeper, opens the film alarmed that now the bees have disappeared, too.<\/p>\n<p>Why is his backyard colony collapsing? Teddy has a couple theories \u2014 the climate is poisoned, the workers are scrambled \u2014 which also apply to humankind. (This isn\u2019t a subtle movie, it\u2019s a barbaric yawp.) But Teddy thinks the real problem is Michelle. She doesn\u2019t merely manufacture toxic chemicals. She\u2019s an alien manipulating our world.<\/p>\n<p>Specifically, Michelle is an Andromedan from the galaxy next door. Teddy, the ringleader, is sure he can prove it. For one, Michelle\u2019s cuticles are suspiciously thin. For another, there\u2019s no way this taut, wrinkle-free woman is 45 years old, as her many magazine profiles claim. Her beauty regimen is so expensive, it\u2019s literally beyond belief. (To save you the trouble of looking it up, Stone herself is merely 36.)<\/p>\n<p>Teddy has a plan to make Michelle take him to her mothership during the next lunar eclipse. But first \u2014 and, just as crucially \u2014 he needs Michelle to admit he\u2019s right, for the sake of his ego. He\u2019s a guy with nothing: no money, no prospects, no future other than more soul-draining hours of scanning boxes at a warehouse where Michelle\u2019s headshot looms on the break room wall. His alien research is all he\u2019s got.<\/p>\n<p>Will Tracy\u2019s script, an adaptation of the glumly funny 2003 Korean satire \u201cSave the Green Planet!\u201d is itself a study of online brain rot, which has become exponentially more perilous over the last two decades. \u201cI don\u2019t get the news from the news,\u201d Teddy boasts. Beyond that, it\u2019s about the human need to have a reason to get out of bed, to have a purpose to exist. Teddy is so proud of his mission that he\u2019s chemically castrated himself to focus on defeating the Michelle-things and, in a harrowing conversation, he tries to flatter Don, a vulnerable young man with autism, into agreeing to get neutered, too. The pairing of Teddy\u2019s conviction with his limp ponytail tilts the scene from tragic to absurd.<\/p>\n<p>Michelle\u2019s confession will vindicate such sacrifices \u2014 it will make Teddy and Don\u2019s invisible lives exceptional. And Teddy is fine extracting it from her by torture. From <a class=\"link\" href=\"https:\/\/www.latimes.com\/entertainment-arts\/movies\/story\/2024-04-11\/civil-war-review-kirsten-dunst-cailee-spaeny-alex-garland-action\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">\u201cCivil War\u201d<\/a> to <a class=\"link\" href=\"https:\/\/www.latimes.com\/entertainment\/movies\/la-et-mn-game-night-review-20180222-story.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">\u201cGame Night,\u201d<\/a> Plemons has a knack for playing characters who are doggedly, dangerously obtuse, a key he\u2019s still working in here. But he\u2019s so pathetic that you can\u2019t help but feel for the guy. Still, it\u2019s Delbis\u2019 Don, with his halting speech and flimsy grasp of the stakes, who really breaks your heart.<\/p>\n<p>The two cousins appear so unhinged that Lanthimos doesn\u2019t spend much time teasing us to question if they\u2019re correct. He trusts we\u2019ll focus on what\u2019s wrong with them, which is pretty much how the world already works: Angrily question the system and get called crazy. Calmly maintain the status quo, as Michelle does, and be treated as rational, even if continuing to do things the way they\u2019ve been done is a disaster. For the record, Teddy is apolitical. \u201cAlt-right, alt-light, leftist, Marxist,\u201d he says, checking off the groups he\u2019s sampled and abandoned, concluding that \u201c99% of activism is just personal exhibition.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Michelle suffers so much abuse that a plot rundown would sound like a <a class=\"link\" href=\"https:\/\/www.latimes.com\/entertainment-arts\/movies\/story\/2024-10-01\/tobin-bell-saw-franchise-interview-jigsaw-doesnt-see-it-as-a-trap\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">\u201cSaw\u201d<\/a> film. But Stone makes it OK for us to laugh at Michelle\u2019s torment. Forced to smear herself with a lotion that Teddy claims saps her powers, she does it with feathery spa fingers like she\u2019s getting a facial. This celebrity CEO who buddies around with Michelle Obama is near-impossible to break. \u201cLet\u2019s just unpack the problem here,\u201d she says with pitch-perfect composure. Michelle is fluent in the perky command, the passive voice, the slippery non-apology, the kind of language that frames  cruelty as blameless happenstance. Her corporate-speak makes her sound inhuman.<\/p>\n<p>At first, Lanthimos uses her character as a spoof of lady-bosses who feign enlightenment while reigning over the same bad workplace. Yet Michelle, terrifying as she is, proves to be admirably sharp and resourceful. Unlike her jailers, she doesn\u2019t have to tie people down to talk them into doing what she wants. \u201cI agree,\u201d she insists over and over again, with steely cheer that bends Teddy and Don\u2019s resolve. Her assurance even mind-melted me. There\u2019s a beat when Michelle casually insists that a clear piece of glass is actually opaque. Even as I\u2019m writing this sentence, I still don\u2019t believe my own eyes.<\/p>\n<p>But Michelle and Teddy are at an impasse. They talk past each other like speeding spaceships, continually smashing into the same blockade: Teddy simply doesn\u2019t believe that Michelle is a person. So none of her arguments \u2014 and nothing in the Geneva Conventions \u2014 matters to him until she says exactly what he needs to hear. Meanwhile, it\u2019s hard to root for the one sheriff in town, Casey (Stavros Halkias), to save the day. He has a history with Teddy that makes him no hero.<\/p>\n<p>The truth is, the rich and the poor do live in different universes, places that the production designer <a class=\"link\" href=\"https:\/\/www.latimes.com\/entertainment-arts\/awards\/story\/2024-02-05\/poor-things-production-design-holds-nothing-back\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">James Price<\/a> and cinematographer <a class=\"link\" href=\"https:\/\/www.latimes.com\/entertainment-arts\/awards\/story\/2024-02-15\/craft-poor-things-cinematographer-robbie-ryan\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Robbie Ryan<\/a> capture succinctly, contrasting Teddy and Don\u2019s cluttered farmhouse with Michelle\u2019s sterile mansion and office park surrounded by dead grass. The men eat microwaved taquitos, she pounds vitamins. As H.G. Wells warned in <a class=\"link\" href=\"https:\/\/www.latimes.com\/archives\/la-xpm-1986-12-28-ca-635-story.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">\u201cThe Time Machine,\u201d<\/a> the classes are on track to evolve into separate species, so it\u2019s no wonder Michelle feels entitled to behave like a predatory Great Black Wasp.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cBugonia\u201d is a hilarious movie with no hope for the future of humanity. What optimism there is lies only in the title, an ancient Greek word for the science of transforming dead cows into hives, of turning death into life. Ovid\u2019s <a class=\"link\" href=\"https:\/\/www.latimes.com\/entertainment\/movies\/la-et-mn-mini-metamorphoses-review-20170323-story.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">\u201cMetamorphoses\u201d<\/a> described the process roughly two millennia ago: \u201cFrom the rotting flesh \u2014 a well-known fact \u2014 bees everywhere are born.\u201d Like everyone in the movie, he sounds confident and totally cuckoo.<\/p>\n<p class=\"infobox-title\">&#8216;Bugonia&#8217;<\/p>\n<p class=\"infobox-description\"><b>Rated:<\/b> R, for bloody violent content including a suicide, grisly images and language<\/p>\n<p><b>Running time:<\/b> 2 hours<\/p>\n<p><b>Playing:<\/b> In limited release Friday, Oct. 24<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Most modern stars fit a prototype. Clark Gable begat George Clooney, Robert Redford passed a torch to Brad&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":327525,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[162975,99580,19919,162974,34581,83398,171,19835,162972,162971,162969,3196,121383,162973,162970,67,132,68,14164],"class_list":{"0":"post-327524","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-entertainment","8":"tag-alien-comedy","9":"tag-bugonia","10":"tag-character","11":"tag-cousin-teddy","12":"tag-don","13":"tag-emma-stone","14":"tag-entertainment","15":"tag-future","16":"tag-invisible-life","17":"tag-lanthimos","18":"tag-michelle-fuller","19":"tag-movie","20":"tag-real-problem","21":"tag-rural-town","22":"tag-teddy","23":"tag-united-states","24":"tag-unitedstates","25":"tag-us","26":"tag-way"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/327524","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=327524"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/327524\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/327525"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=327524"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=327524"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=327524"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}