"Bugonia" Trailer: Emma Stone Plays a Pharma CEO Abducted by Conspiracy Theorists in Yorgos Lanthimos’s Darkly Comic Thriller with Jesse Plemons
Stone and Plemons lead this claustrophobic satire about paranoia, delusion, and the blurry line between truth and madness.
Ah, conspiracies. They’re the darndest things.
On one hand, conspiracies can be absolutely ridiculous, so far beyond the bounds of reason that they border on insanity. On the other hand, each wild theory often hides a kernel of truth—however small—buried within the mania. And it’s that kernel that makes the conspiracy all the more believable.
But in a world that feels upside down and lopsided, sometimes the truth is stranger than the conspiracy itself. Which begs the question: are conspiracies really that insane, or are they just reflections of a reality too unsettling for us to fully accept, and a society too sick to see the difference between truth and delusion?
Okay, let’s slow our roll. Before we’re fully committed to wearing tin-foil hats, these are just some of the ideas that might start floating through your head after watching the official full-length trailer for Emma Stone and filmmaker Yorgos Lanthimos’s latest collaboration, Bugonia.
It’s a darkly comic, conspiracy-laden thriller in which Emma Stone plays Michelle Fuller, the wealthy CEO of a major pharmaceutical company who gets kidnapped by two conspiracy-obsessed goobers convinced she’s an alien sent to destroy Earth.
Jesse Plemons plays Teddy, one of the two kidnappers. He’s fully convinced not only that she’s an alien, but also that she’s part of a greater plot to wipe out the entire planet.
“I’ve done a ton of research on this. You’re killing our planet,” Teddy declares in the newly released trailer (watch it above). His accomplice, a shaggy-haired fellow named Don, jumps in with a snarled, “Alien filth!” before jamming the barrel of a rifle into Emma’s character’s face.
Don is played by newcomer Aidan Delbis, holding his own alongside two heavyweight actors in a film that seems to be playing like a chamber piece, with just the three of them at the center of this tense, claustrophobic thriller fused with offbeat satire. It’s a Yorgos Lanthimos film, after all, so you know it’s going to have his trademark blend of dark humor, quirky tension, and absurdist punch.
In the film’s trailer, we see Stone’s Michelle Fuller tackled to the ground by Teddy and Don at the poolside of her estate, only to wake up hours later in Teddy’s grungy basement, handcuffed to a rusty bed. Her hair has been shaved off, and her face is caked with white powder—perhaps baby powder of some kind.
When she questions her appearance, Teddy calmly explains: “Your hair has been destroyed... to prevent you from contacting your ship.” To which she snaps back, “What ship?” His answer: “Your mothership.”
Cinematographer Robbie Ryan, once again teaming with Stone and Lanthimos after Kinds of Kindness, Poor Things, and The Favourite, lights the scene in a way that makes the image of Stone’s Michelle Fuller all the more believable as an alien, using extra levels of saturation and blown-out white highlights. It adds a slight layer of artificiality to the characters, where their humanity feels just out of reach.
What’s also interesting is the film’s title, Bugonia. It refers to an ancient ritual in which bees were believed to emerge from the slaughtered body of a bull, if left in a sealed space under certain conditions. It was a myth... an old belief that bees could spontaneously generate from animal carcasses. It was a conspiracy, if you will—something once held as truth but later debunked, exposed as nothing more than misguided imagination dressed up as science.
There’s a subplot detail here in which Teddy has some knowledge of beekeeping (perhaps even a former beekeeper himself), though he now works at a shipping warehouse with Don, possibly eking out a meager living. His daily hardship only fuels his growing obsession with conspiracies and grand delusions of uncovering “the truth.”
If one could be so bold as to connect Teddy’s misguided kidnapping to the film’s title, a theory might be that he sees Michelle Fuller as the key to exposing the world to aliens. Her death, at least in his mind, could lead to a revelation—an emergence of truth, much like the myth of bees born from a carcass. But then again, it’s only a theory, nothing more than speculation.
The upcoming film is written by Will Tracy, best known for co-writing the darkly comic restaurant thriller The Menu with Seth Reiss. Tracy also penned episodes of Succession and spent three years as a writer on Last Week Tonight with John Oliver. More recently, he created HBO’s darkly comic political thriller miniseries The Regime, starring Kate Winslet as a modern European dictator.
Bugonia is actually based on the 2003 South Korean cult black-comedy sci-fi thriller Save the Green Planet! by filmmaker Jang Joon-hwan. That film starred Shin Ha-kyun as a lowly conspiracist who kidnaps and tortures his boss, a pharmaceutical executive, after becoming convinced he’s an alien and that an alien invasion is imminent.
Marking the fourth consecutive collaboration between Stone and Lanthimos, and also co-starring comedian Stavros Halkias and Clueless actress Alicia Silverstone, Bugonia is set to make its world premiere at the Venice International Film Festival before opening in theaters on October 24th.
Official Synopsis:
Two conspiracy obsessed young men kidnap the high-powered CEO of a major company, convinced that she is an alien intent on destroying planet Earth.
A Yorgos Lanthimos film, starring Emma Stone and Jesse Plemons. Only in theaters October 24.
