"Emma Stone enjoys pushing herself artistically for Lanthimos and Bugonia was no different: here we see her knocked unconscious in the back of a car while a panicking Don takes chunks out of her hair with a pair of clippers (Teddy insists that she can only communicate with her alien peers via her hair). By the time she's been doused from head to toe in antihistamine cream she looks like, well, an alien."
"Stone is superb as the cut-throat girl boss trying to turn her company's rep around with performative empathy: feel free to leave at 5.30pm, she tells her staff, before reminding them that this isn't compulsory, and that they really should make sure they have done all their tasks first. But hey, it's up to them!"
"Plemons's stressed, sweating Teddy is her match: a man pushed so close to the edge that no amount of smooth-talk, or even hard evidence, can dissuade him from his mission. There is no reasoning with this type of person."
Bugonia centers on Teddy, a conspiracy-theorist beekeeper convinced that aliens are poisoning his bees and that pharmaceutical CEO Michelle Fuller is part of an extraterrestrial plot. He and his neurodivergent cousin Don kidnap Fuller, shaving her head because Teddy believes aliens communicate through hair. Emma Stone delivers a nuanced performance as Fuller, employing corporate manipulation tactics and performative empathy even while imprisoned in Teddy's basement. Jesse Plemons portrays Teddy as an unhinged, unreasonable man immune to logic or evidence. The film explores themes of paranoia, corporate deception, and the impossibility of reasoning with conspiracy theorists, presenting a darkly comedic examination of modern anxieties and social media-fueled delusion.
Read at www.theguardian.com
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