Bugonia is basically the plot of The Gruffalo + Colony Collapse. Like, so much of this movie relies on not knowing anything about it going in, besides the incredible lip syncing that Emily Stone does to a Chappell Roan song or how they really actually for real shaved her head for the role and Emily Stone wore a wig to hide it but kept asking people if they could tell she was wearing a wig, but beyond that you’re supposed to go in cold, right.
Like, the movie is about conspiracy theorists who, essentially (spoilers), need to imagine that there is an alien plot to extract all the resources from Earth because how in the world could things be this awful without some supernatural explanation, which is kind of an amazing and dark commentary on how bad things have become for us. Jessie Plemons plays a perfectly opaque fast-talking self-radicalized vigilante in the vein of Luigi Mangione (which is the first and last time I’m going to engage in discourse about that guy) while Emily Stone plays A Regular Person caught up in some Real Bad Stuff.
The moment when the exec realizes that Teddy will be impervious to argumentation from the angle of being mentally ill, because it leads to the first instance of physical violence, and the winnowing of options she has to talk her way out of this.
The teenage actor who plays Donny, Aidan Delbis, is mesmerizing, and a lot of the drama of the movie has to do with his motives in going along with his cousin’s antics. Someone on the internet commented Delbis, who has autism, “doing a movie with Jesse Plemons, Emma Stone, and Yorgos Lanthimos while not knowing who any of them are is simple king shit,” which I couldn’t agree with more. The way that the trio toggle between masking their true feelings and intentions and unconsciously revealing their inner emotions is central to the enjoyment we get out of watching them, because the is-she-or-isn’t-she of the film is so increasingly obvious, yet unsolvable, and, increasingly, unimportant. Take, for instance, Stone’s smile at dinner when she realizes that Teddy has made a fatal error in his research on CCD (colony collapse disorder), how she can’t help herself in correcting him.
There are a lot of these lines which drop like a thud and make clear just how deep Teddy is in his own radicalization and how absurd the idea of him even being remotely correct appears. His scientific certainty, the level of detail about the alien culture he is investigating, well beyond anything he could’ve learned through internet research that’s well informed–hence, the Gruffalo. Sometimes a mouse is just a fucking liar.
One of my favorite choices in the movie is the subtlety with which they handle an (spoiler) alluded to history of sexual abuse of a minor in the movie. One of the characters brings it up in a roundabout way three or four times over the course of the film and in each of those mentions the character is played as schlubby, empathetic, even comic. The way in which Lanthimos does not play sad piano music, ever, over the character and the character’s repeated attempts at reconciling with Teddy in cryptic and maudlin ways is a slow burn that pays off–to mix metaphors.
The preshow included a supercut of Emma Stone dancing in movies and interviews, even footage of her dancing in between scenes for one movie and then using that routine in the end credits for ANOTHER movie which was worth the price of admission.
Also, for some reason Vanity Fair got her to teach people how to ride a pogo stick, which you think you don’t need to see but you kind of do?
For reasons that Dana Stevens covers well, the ending kind of tanks everything, but if you leave about ten minutes from the end you should have a pretty good ride.
