Tech CEO Michelle Fuller (Emma Stone) is kidnapped by conspiracy-theorist beekeeper Teddy (Jesse Plemons) because he thinks she’s an alien.
Is there a director-actor partnership quite as creatively fertile as that of Yorgos Lanthimos and Emma Stone? Over the past decade, the Greek filmmaker has steered his favourite actor through a right royal fracas (The Favourite), a fantastical feminist fable (Poor Things), a pitch-black triptych (Kinds Of Kindness), even a 16-minute experimental opera (2022’s Bleat). And back these oddball kindred spirits come, with the gripping and misanthropically funny Bugonia.
Stone here plays Michelle Fuller, the girl-boss CEO of Auxolith Biosciences. Terrifyingly panther-like, and taking all the wrong lessons from Chappell Roan lyrics, she is a true disaster capitalist, the kind to run diversity initiatives while passive-aggressively encouraging staff to work late, “if you need to”.
But she is about to have a very bad day. Eccentric loner and beekeeper Teddy (Jesse Plemons) and his brother Don (Aidan Delbis), a couple of conspiracy theorists who spend too much time on the internet, hatch a hare-brained scheme to kidnap Michelle, shave her head (Stone gets a buzzcut for real on camera) and lock her in their basement. Her crime? She is a suspected alien from the planet Andromeda, sent to destroy the human race — and kill the bees.
A tense and darkly funny thriller, with bigger ideas at play.
Lanthimos is unafraid to bring the politics of our age to the core: Teddy has a stench of incel about him (he chemically castrates himself and his brother), spouting hatred of the elites. But the script takes care not to caricature him, suggesting a grief that has morphed into profound grievance. Cinematographer Robbie Ryan’s unsettling wide-angle lenses contrast the scuzziness of Teddy’s house with the coldness of Michelle’s corporate world, two sides of one grotty coin.
Based on the bonkers 2003 Korean film Save The Green Planet!, it all plays out like a madder, more heightened version of Misery, if James Caan’s character was accused of spraying neonicotinoid pesticides on bees. Set to Jerskin Fendrix’s part-majestic, part-discordant score, a fascinating rhetorical battle ensues, in a power-dynamic back-and-forth, as both Teddy and we the audience engage in the farcical mystery of whether Michelle is indeed not of this world.
While it works perfectly well as a tense and darkly funny thriller, there are bigger ideas at play, the colony collapse of Teddy’s bees serving as a dark omen of humanity’s own end. What begins as Lanthimos’ most straightforwardly accessible film yet ends wildly, divisively, and cynically. This is neither as uncomfortably unpleasant as Kinds Of Kindness, nor as weirdo crowd-pleasing as Poor Things, but it shows a director-actor collaboration in rude health. Long may it continue.
Riveting, unhinged, and sardonic to its honey-soaked core, this is another Lanthimos-Stone winner. (With a great opening-title typeface, to boot.)