REEL | Emma Stone and Jesse Plemons Abduct 'Bugonia'

"You know I'm not an alien!"

Focus Features / Element Pictures

Double Academy Award for Best Actress winner, Emma Stone (also a producer), and surrealist Greek auteur Yorgos Lanthimos reteam for the fourth time to broadly remake the madcap 2003 South Korean sci-fi black comedy horror romp, Save the Green Planet! Produced by fellow director Ari Aster, Bugonia tells a strange but sordid web of extraterrestrial conspiracy theories through a high-profile corporate kidnapping.

A bald-headed Stone stars as a powerful pharmaceutical executive abducted by a galaxy-brained Jesse Plemons, who plays a deeply unwell conspiratorial beekeeper lost down the rabbit hole, and his simple-minded cousin (Aidan Delbis), both convinced she's an alien being sent to destroy Earth. Stone, in a stress-induced performance, perfectly plays the part of a coldly calculating businesswoman shifting her strategies in order to survive long enough to manipulate her delusional captors and find a way out of her desperate predicament.

Screenwriter Will Tracy's tricky, mind-bending script highlights its characters' complex motivations of often conflicting disbelief and conviction in their paranoia-enhanced cognitive dissonance. Through this stage-like piece about humanity's culpability in the state of the environment, Lanthimos carefully directs the greater tension or mood of the extreme events to mirror our contemporary societal divisions.

Bugonia takes its outlandishly bleak conspiratorial humour rather seriously as another worthy Stone/Lanthimos collaboration exploring the nature of human power. Its purposely alienating cinematic presentation only heightens the offbeat expression of comedic dread on screen. In their own twisted way, they present a vision of saving the world using the dying bee ecosystem as a worthy metaphor.


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