‘Bugonia’ Review: An Eternal Rollercoaster

Watching “Bugonia,” you experience the five stages of grief on a consistent loop, never quite understanding which toss or turn you’re destined to go through. Director Yorgos Lanthimos is known for his eerie films, in which casts speak as though it’s their first day on earth, as seen in his 2015 film, “The Lobster,” and his 2023 film, “Poor Things.” 

The film had a stacked cast, including Emma Stone as Michelle Fuller, a CEO accused of being an alien, and Jesse Plemons as Teddy Gatz, a conspiracy theorist who kidnaps Stone in hopes of saving Earth. Both Stone and Plemons have been featured in Lanthimos’ films before “Bugonia,” but the pair reunited for the film truly outdid themselves with the absurdity that they were able to act into. 

Starting with a sequence of Teddy and his cousin, Don (played by Aidan Delbis), beekeeping in their backyard, the film gives us a metaphorical introduction to their mission to save the world. The overall plan to “save the world” involves Michelle, as Teddy is positive that she is an alien, and wants to be taken to her mothership on the solar eclipse. 

Teddy was first introduced to Michelle through her company, administering an experimental drug to his mother for her opioid addiction. When the drug put his mother in a coma, Michelle’s company settled on paying for his mother’s care in a hospital. With the building animosity for Michelle, there was much more reasoning behind Teddy’s kidnapping of Michelle than anticipated. 

Teddy and Don’s task to kidnap Michelle is not extremely thought out, as they both think that nobody necessarily pays attention to them as people in the first place, so nobody will notice what they have done. The two purchase masks of Jennifer Aniston’s head and massive amounts of antihistamine cream, and prepare their house to be kept away until the solar eclipse. 

From the get-go of the movie, it is clear that Michelle is a girlboss of some kind – she practices fighting techniques daily, controls a major corporation, and has been the cover of a myriad of magazines. But once she is about to be kidnapped, her fighting tactics have no stance in comparison to the sedative that Teddy injects into her. The shots of the fight itself feel like you’re a fly on the wall, with an essence of the understanding that you aren’t supposed to be watching the events that are unfolding. 

Once Teddy and Don successfully capture Michelle, Don shaves Michelle’s head so that she can’t contact her mothership, and they make their way back to their house. With the announcement of the fact that Stone actually shaved her head, it made it so much more interesting to watch, since it had to be a one-take kind of scene.

With Michelle’s awakening, both Teddy and Don are dressed extremely business-like. With Teddy and Don’s crude and sloppy attempt to show power in the situation with a firearm and a somewhat menacing stance over Michelle, she finds a way to control thesituation. Every word that Michelle states back to Teddy and Don is calculated, and it almost gives this energy as if she knows nothing will happen to her, making the audience wonder if that’s because she’s an alien or just her status as a person. 

Throughout the film, the biggest wonder was how law enforcement failed to find her through literal searches under the table, and Teddy and Don were not skilled enough to hide it well enough. Teddy’s babysitter from when he was a child, who turned into a cop, Casey Boyd, played by Stavros Halkias, met with Teddy twice in the film and even asked him questions about Michelle that led nowhere. It’s implied in the film that Casey did something to Teddy as a child to make him have the psychotic tendencies that he has now, and with every conversation they have, Casey finds ways to apologize for it. 

A large portion of the movie was Michelle’s time spent in the house, awaiting the solar eclipse, and flip-flopping between saying she’s an alien or a human – it almost seems like whenever it was convenient and could help her escape, she decided to say she was an alien, and vice versa with being human. Michelle’s lack of urgency to actually escape Teddy’s house was conflicting, especially when there were multiple instances where she could’ve escaped the house/fought against Teddy and Don. 

Within Michelle’s successful attempt to escape, she convinced Don that they needed to escape to her mothership as soon as possible, without Teddy knowing, to which Don shot himself. Teddy’s discovery of his cousin’s passing put him into a rage, to which Michelle quickly de-escalated the conversation by explaining that she had the cure to his mother’s coma that her company had induced, and that it’s simply hidden in the back of her car, labeled “antifreeze,” just to keep it safe and undiscoverable. 

As the story progresses and begins to escalate with Teddy’s mother dying from the anti-freeze, the lunar eclipse finally arrives. The day of, Teddy and Michelle come out from hiding and show up at Michelle’s work after she hadn’t been seen or heard from in days. With the entire company being flabbergasted, they walk through the building business as usual, and make their way to Michelle’s office, where Teddy believes Michelle is going to take him to a meeting on her mothership. 

With explosives strapped to his body, Michelle convinces him to get into her closet, and uses the enter button to “send him to her mothership,” in which he ends up exploding instead. 

At the end of the film, it is unexpectedly revealed that Michelle was indeed an alien, and that Teddy’s theories were correct all along, which was an incredibly unanticipated ending of the movie, as Teddy is portrayed to be insane and mentally ill throughout the storyline. “I don’t think the movie would make much sense or be of much interest if he were just crazy or wrong or stupid or immoral,” said Will Tracy, the writer of the film. 

Footage of Michelle’s mothership is shown, and she ends up deciding to end Earth, instead of her previous motivation on Earth, to save it. The film concludes with Michelle popping a bubble around the earth (which is apparently flat) and killing the human population. Sequences of different groups of people who have passed, lying in the spots where they died, play, and “Where Have All The Flowers Gone?” covered by Marlene Dietrich, accompany the scene, leaving the film off with a very poignant effect.

“Bugonia” is sure to win something at the upcoming Oscars, even though audiences are surprised Plemons wasn’t nominated for Best Actor; the film is nominated for Best Picture, Best Original Score, Best Actress, and Best Adapted Screenplay. The film leaves your mind blank with a “What did I just watch?” kind of feeling, making someone question their realities and various conspiracy theories.