Bugonia

Grade: B-

I had a problem with Bugonia’s screenplay. I shouldn’t get specific about it. By the end, though, we learn something that explains it away, and even made me forgive the bone I had to pick. It’s really quite sagacious of writers Will Tracy and Jang Joon-hwan how, in the 11th hour, they made an issue a non-issue. Director Yorgos Lanthimos (The Favourite, Poor Things) and Emma Stone collaborate yet another time for Bugonia. They are becoming the next Scorsese and De Niro – or Scorsese and DiCaprio, for that matter.

Bugonia has subject matter that I didn’t find too dissimilar from a chapter in Lanthimos’s Kinds of Kindness film, where Emma Stone, as Jesse Plemons’s wife, returns home after being lost at sea for a while. She is different when she comes back, and Plemons is suspicious that it’s not the real her, but an alien or “Stone clone” of some kind. Kinds of Kindness was an anthology type film made up of three mini-movies, performed by the same ensemble of actors. I’ve seen people say that Bugonia could have been a fourth chapter, and I could see it working excellently had it been cut down to 45 minutes.

The premise, right off the bat, is an exciting and awesome one. Emma Stone plays Michelle – a confident, successful, badass boss-lady CEO of a pharmaceutical company. Great! I’m sold already. Where else does it go? Meanwhile, in a more rural area of Fayette County, GA, where it’s set, Teddy (Jesse Plemons) and his neurodivergent cousin Don (Aiden Delbis) are plotting to kidnap Michelle. Don is a good guy deep down, fairly unwittingly along for the ride, as the Lennie to Teddy’s George. One of the drugs from Michelle’s company put Teddy’s mother (Alicia Silverstone) in a coma, so he has a personal history with her. Not to mention the detail that Teddy is a conspiracy theorist, getting all his news, information, and legal/medical advice from Dr. Internet – and he thinks Michelle is an alien.

They ambush Michelle, cut off her hair (to prevent her from communicating with her mothership – because, apparently, that’s what hair is for), and bring her to their house. Teddy believes Michelle has been sent to Earth to take out the human race. He wants to facilitate negotiations, which would hopefully lead to her race pulling out of Earth and leaving us alone – taking place on the next lunar eclipse, happening in a few days.

Lanthimos has put Stone through the wringer in his films – and here, she gets a buzz cut and some electroshock, set to Green Day’s “Basket Case.” Plemons does a fine job at playing frantic and tortured. Delbis, on the autism spectrum in real life, makes one hell of a feature film debut. This is all an interesting idea that gets laced and bogged down with pretentious gobbledygook about governments, society, politics, and the like. Stone sometimes plays along by telling them she’s an alien and she’ll meet Teddy’s demands, and other times she says “of course I’m not an alien.” I didn’t need it to dwell so much on a subplot involving a local cop, and the history he has with Teddy that keeps getting brought up. Maybe this would have been more suited as a Kinds of Kindness featurette. One could say we really don’t have the time to listen to them whine.

The movie keeps us guessing until the final minutes, where we do finally get an answer to the question on everyone’s mind. This isn’t like K-PAX, where we never find out whether Kevin Spacey’s character is an alien. I loved the ending, even before it gets to the wonderful cover of an old folk song that you probably know. It has multiple verses, and by the time it gets to the last one, the song has circled back around to the first idea. In this version, it modulates up a key at almost every verse – then, halfway through, unexpectedly, the key changes go back down. When you consider the lyrical and dramatic progression, it’s fitting. I was ready to write Bugonia off with a less kind rating, but it had one more trick up its sleeve, which ended up changing everything.

Grade: B-