The bees are dying. That’s the ecological crisis that drives Teddy (Jesse Plemons) to kidnap high-powered CEO Michelle Fuller (Emma Stone), shave her head, and chain her in his basement. She’s a member of the Andromedan alien race, you see, and this is the only way he can gain an audience with their emperor and persuade them to leave their planet. Never mind that Teddy has no evidence of said alien incursion, except for what he learned from random YouTube users and conspiracy theory podcasts. Never mind that Teddy may be nursing a personal grudge against Michelle for a botched medical trial that put his mother (Alicia Silverstone) in a coma. He’s trying to save the world.
For much of Bugonia, the darkly comic new sci-fi thriller from Yorgos Lanthimos, you wrestle with how you feel about Teddy, played with a shuffling, angry awkwardness by Plemons. With his long, stringy hair and clearly deranged belief about aliens living among us, he should come off as the worst kind of tinfoil-hat conspiracy theorist, a representation of the rotten core of our post-2020 paranoid society. And yet, Plemons gives one of his gentlest performances so far, as a man who genuinely believes he’s trying to save humanity, even if it means he has to kidnap and torture a woman to do it. It’s a remarkable tonal balancing act from Lanthimos, who perfectly weaponizes his brand of unnerving filmmaking to make the most unpredictable, genre-bending movie of the year.
