Bugonia Review: Emma Stone's Latest Yorgos Lanthimos Film Is Weird, Tense, And Brilliant

Yorgos Lanthimos is a patient filmmaker. It might not feel that way from a distance, looking at his larger body of work, but the key to his success as a director of strange, darkly comic, often harrowing films is his willingness to sit through the quiet moments with his characters. Whether you're watching "The Favourite" or "Dogtooth" or "Poor Things," you will find these quiet moments, these carefully placed cinematic ellipses, and each time they reveal something.

Lanthimos' patience serves him well in many ways, but the most obvious to even a casual viewer is the way he's able to create a sense of pure, nail-biting unpredictability in each of his films. Through the performances he gets from actors, through the way he blocks out scenes, and through simple tricks of pacing, the director makes movies that are nearly impossible to predict, even when they become so intimate that there are only a few ways the story can go.

"Bugonia," Lanthimos' latest, is certainly an intimate film. A darkly comic thriller with shades of science fiction built in, it follows three main characters, mostly unfolds in one location, and yet pushes the viewer to the absolute limits of their nerve endings with madcap, absurd energy. It's another triumph from a singular voice in cinema, and another Lanthimos movie you sort of never see coming.

"Bugonia" centers on a small house in the middle of nowhere, where beekeeper Teddy (Jesse Plemons) and his cousin Don (Aidan Delbis) are plotting something dark. According to Teddy, mass die-offs of bees and things like the pharmaceutical poisoning of humans are all tied to a vast alien conspiracy, and the only way to stop it is to force his way into an audience with the alien Emperor.

To make this happen, Teddy and Don hatch a plan to kidnap Michelle (Emma Stone), the high-powered CEO of a local drug company, believing that she's not only an alien, but one capable of getting them in to see the alien leadership. Michelle, shorn of all her hair and chained to a cot in Teddy's basement, is naturally horrified by her ordeal, and works to convince Teddy that he's made a huge mistake. In Teddy's mind of course, the more she protests, the more Michelle confirms she actually is an alien with a secret agenda to control the fate of humanity. But the more the captive and captor talk, the more the film makes us question who's manipulating who.

This duel between the seemingly delusional kidnapper and his seemingly panicked captive makes up the backbone of "Bugonia," and it certainly works in the film's favor that Stone and Plemons are now experienced actors in Yorgos Lanthimos' stock company of favorites. Here, unlike recent successes like "Poor Things" and "Kinds of Kindness," the scope is dialed down. Much of the vital action takes place in Teddy's house, and much of that takes place in Teddy's basement, where a sequence of events so tightly coiled they could be a stage play unfold. To pull off what goes on down there — from awkward moments to shocking revelations to outright human cruelty and manipulation — you need a certain degree of trust, and it's clear that the director and his stars have that. "Bugonia" is never afraid to get messy, not in terms of violence so much as in terms of emotional cacophony, and Stone and Plemons both deliver exceptional performances within Lanthimos' carefully constructed framework.

"Bugonia," written by Will Tracy, is a remake of a South Korean film titled "Save The Green Planet!" — and yet it often feels like the most American movie Yorgos Lanthimos has made so far because of the sheer force of paranoia and conspiratorial thinking looming over the whole piece. Teddy is frightening in his determination, in his complete faith in the belief system he's concocted, but he's also a guy carrying tremendous pain and distrust of a corporate machine. At the same time, Michelle is a member of said corporate machine, but she's also a person capable of fear and panic and flailing for any advantage in what could be a fatal game. It's not hard to see modern America, or even modern Capitalism, reflected in this struggle, and "Bugonia" becomes a film not just about captor and captive, but about two survivors simply trying to make it to the other side of whatever this strange situation actually is.

The feelings it evokes are specific to this American moment, yet Lanthimos also makes them feel universal, and he's helped along by a truly epic, startling score by Jerskin Fendrix. As the film drives forward, and Jesse Plemons and Emma Stone push themselves into deepening levels of intensity, we are forced to confront our own feelings of alienation, loss, and despair in the world, and wonder what we'd do about them if brought to our limits. Aren't we all aliens in our own way, and doesn't that speak to a certain unity rather than division? That may be true, but our capacity for violence, for cruelty, also makes that unity a constant project, a battle that we'll never win but can perhaps keep fighting to try if we can survive long enough. These thoughts swirl through "Bugonia," pollinating and fertilizing it like Teddy's bees, enriching every moment with a sense of melancholic meaning. The patience of Yorgos Lanthimos allows for all of this, and makes "Bugonia" one of his best films — a tense, funny, jaw-dropping descent into absurdity that'll stay in your brain for days.

"Bugonia" lands in theaters on October 24.