Emma Stone is once again stepping into the strange and surreal world of Yorgos Lanthimos this time, as a mysterious alien CEO who may or may not be trying to save humanity.
In “Bugonia,” a dark sci-fi comedy from the acclaimed Poor Things and The Favourite director, Stone plays Michelle Fuller, a pharmaceutical mogul whose polished corporate façade hides an otherworldly secret. When two paranoid cousins, Teddy (Jesse Plemons) and Don (Aidan Delbis), kidnap her believing she’s an alien plotting to take over Earth, their conspiracy theories turn out to be disturbingly accurate.
Michelle’s introduction awkwardly interacting with her employees in sterile boardrooms immediately signals that something is off.
“It was so sort of perfect,” Stone says. “You don’t know whether that’s her being not human or her being an inhuman CEO.”
The film takes a bizarre turn when Teddy and Don shave her head to prevent her from “communicating with her mothership” a grotesque ritual rooted in Teddy’s conviction that aliens transmit through hair. He believes her ship will arrive during an upcoming lunar eclipse, setting the film’s ticking clock.
But when the truth finally emerges, the situation unravels in trademark Lanthimos fashion: philosophically strange, violent, and deeply sad.
In the film’s shocking final act, Michelle reveals that she is, in fact, an empress from Andromeda and that humans are a genetic creation of her species, placed on Earth after her race accidentally wiped out the dinosaurs upon arrival. Over thousands of years, however, she laments that mankind has become “a poison to the planet.”
“She really does, I believe, want very much to save the world,” Stone explains. “It’s devastating to her in the end to have to make peace with the fact that they have become a poison to the planet and that the planet needs to move on.”
When Teddy accidentally detonates a bomb vest meant for her, Michelle’s last shred of faith in humanity dies with him. Returning to her ship, she literally pops the bubble on a holographic model of Earth — triggering the extinction of the human race.
As Marlene Dietrich’s haunting 1960s rendition of “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?” plays over apocalyptic imagery of lifeless cities, Lanthimos leaves audiences in silence and reflection.
Stone says the film’s themes resonate far beyond science fiction.
“There’s this draw to addiction and to destroying other people and destroying yourselves and poisoning everything,” she says. “But there’s also a great capacity for hope and positivity. It’s just which side is going to win out in any given moment.”
Lanthimos and screenwriter Will Tracy best known for his satirical work on Succession and The Menu weave those contrasts into a visual and emotional tapestry. The Andromedans’ world, the director notes, avoids typical sci-fi clichés: “We wanted something we hadn’t seen before something organic. Even their mothership looks almost like a sea creature in the depths of an ocean.”
Their intricate costumes knitted, cocoon-like full-body suits turned out to be as torturous as they looked.
“It was like a cage underneath and it trapped all heat,” Stone laughs. “It looked cozy, but it was the polar opposite.”
Plemons, meanwhile, recalls a more gruesome memory: a prop of his severed head used for one of the movie’s explosive moments. “I have a great photo of Emma holding it,” he jokes. “I’ll cherish it forever.”
For Lanthimos, the ending’s ambiguity is the point. “If people feel hopeful at the end or sad or hopeless or whatever there’s room for everyone,” he says. “And then maybe, when they think about it again, they’ll find some hope if they didn’t originally.”
Bugonia, like much of Lanthimos’ work, asks viewers to sit in discomfort to look at humanity through alien eyes and decide whether our species deserves saving.
And for Emma Stone, that tension between love and loathing for the human condition marks the start of what she calls her “alien era.”