"Bugonia" Teaser: Emma Stone Is a Corporate Queen Bee Suspected of Being an Alien in Yorgos Lanthimos’s Class-Warfare Satire with Jesse Plemons
The Poor Things duo returns with a bizarre, class-skewering tale of bees, billionaires, and possible extraterrestrials.
Okay, let's count them all up. This will be the fourth collaboration (mind you, the fourth consecutive collaboration) between Oscar-winning actress Emma Stone and acclaimed Greek filmmaker Yorgos Lanthimos. At this point, the duo have joined the ranks of other famous actor-director partnerships that seem to speak a cinematic shorthand: Scorsese and De Niro, Tarantino and Jackson, Nolan and Murphy, Burton and Depp, Carpenter and Russell, Raimi and Campbell, del Toro and Perlman, Bong and Song... okay, you get the point, the list goes on.
So, with each new project, Stone and Lanthimos seem to be pushing into strange and surreal territory, generating offbeat tales that feel both unnervingly off-kilter, yet emotionally driven through the eccentricities of the characters they create. And judging by their previous works together like Poor Things, The Favourite, and Kinds of Kindness, their collaborations are less about conventional storytelling and more like exploring the purely absurd and the odd nature of humanity.
Bugonia, Stone and Lanthimos’s latest film together, appears to be no exception, as this duo once again leaps over conventionality to plunge straight into the pool of stylized chaos, philosophical absurdity, and darkly comic human behavior. And from the looks of it, Lanthimos appears to be offering his take on the current trend of the Eat-the-Rich subgenre, only with an alien conspiracy bent to it. In typical Lanthimos fashion, it’s not just about skewering the wealthy, but also coating a thick layer of deadpan humor into the social tug-of-war between the haves and the have-nots.
Jesse Plemons, who co-starred in Lanthimos’s film Kinds of Kindness last year and may have now joined the director’s repertoire of frequent acting collaborators, plays Teddy. He’s a hard-working warehouse worker who just also happens to be an alien conspiracy nut. After learning that bees have habitually been withering and dying inexplicably, he comes up with a reason. It’s all about preserving the life of the queen bee, as she is the ultimate leader... the ruler of order. And maybe, in Teddy’s eyes, a symbolic stand-in for the inequality of the social order.
Teddy soon applies his theory to Michelle Fuller, a famous CEO of a major pharmaceutical company who has landed herself on countless covers of magazines and lists of the richest and most influential people in the world. She is played by Emma Stone. And the way Teddy sees it, she is propped up by the tireless labor of countless workers who never get the credit, never receive the recognition they deserve, yet must live in a world slowly collapsing—due, in large part, to the very people she represents.
Teddy and his co-worker and best pal (played by newcomer Aidan Delbis) decide to carry out a kidnapping scheme. Their plan? Break into Michelle’s home, abduct her, force a confession, make her admit she knows she’s exploiting the workforce and destroying the planet in the process... and then, finally, kill her. Because, according to Teddy, she’s secretly an alien sent there to destroy Earth.
Written by Will Tracy, the co-screenwriter of The Menu and a writer on Succession, the upcoming film is inspired by the cult 2003 South Korean alien conspiracy comedy Save the Green Planet! from writer-director Jang Joon-hwan. (For comparison, we have posted the trailer for that movie below.)
Bugonia will also co-star comedian Stavros Halkias and Clueless actress Alicia Silverstone. The film is scheduled to open in theaters October 24th.
Watch the film’s first official teaser, posted above.
Official Synopsis:
Two conspiracy obsessed young men (Jesse Plemons, Aidan Delbis) kidnap the high-powered CEO of a major company (Emma Stone), convinced that she is an alien intent on destroying planet Earth.