Director Yorgos Lanthimos has made a habit of collaborating with Emma Stone specifically on dark comedy dramas with light sci-fi themes, such as 2023’s Poor Things and 2024’s Kinds of Kindness. And the trailer for their latest team-up, Bugonia, contains much of the same eclecticism, setting up a paranoia thriller that’s equal parts about environmentalism and extraterrestrials.
Bugonia, inspired by Korean director Jang Joon-hwan’s 2003 sci-fi film, Save The Green Planet!, follows high-powered CEO Michelle (Stone), who is kidnapped by two conspiracy theorists who believe she’s an alien tasked with destroying the Earth. While the trailer doesn’t reveal much about the strange nature of Stone’s kidnappers, the film certainly leans heavily into the sense of paranoia, all of which is paradoxically underscored by Chappell Roan’s “Good Luck, Babe!”
According to The Hollywood Reporter, Bugonia was initially developed by Hereditary and Midsommar director Ari Aster. As THR notes, this marks one of the rare instances in which Lanthimos will direct a film without having had a role in its early development. Despite not being involved in the initial work on the movie, Lathinmos said he felt drawn to its source material and screenwriter Will Tracy’s fresh take on the tale.
“I was immediately blown away,” Lanthimos said. “I felt it was so funny and entertaining but also extremely impactful and made you really think about things deeply. I immediately was interested in making it. It felt relevant then, three years ago, and even more relevant now, unfortunately.”
Lanthimos didn’t have any qualms about the film’s prescience when it came to Bugonia‘s environmentalism messaging, THR reports.
“Again, unfortunately, not much of the dystopia in this film is very fictional. A lot of it is very reflective of the real world,” Lanthimos said. “If anything, this film says this is happening now. Actually, it became more relevant as time went by. Humanity is facing a reckoning very soon. People need to choose the right path, otherwise, I don’t know how much time [left] with everything that’s happening in the world, with technology, AI, with wars, climate change, the denial of all these things and how desensitized we’ve become to all of these things. [The movie] is more of a reflection of our times and hopefully it will trigger people to think about what’s happening today, all around the world.”
Stone described the film as “really fascinating and moving, funny and messed up, and alive.” And her co-star Plemons—another multi-time Lanthimos collaborator— noted that his role as the abrasive character Teddy might not be to everyone’s taste. Still, he felt up to the task of making audiences understand and appreciate the character through his performance.
“My personal belief is, yeah, for some people it might not be the right thing for them to see. Some people that don’t like violence shouldn’t see these things, but I also think we have an instinct in general to really close the book on things that are scary, that are hard to look at, hard to examine, hard to understand,” Plemons said. “For me as an actor, it is a way that I can try to make sense of some of these things and some of these people who are very difficult to understand. There’s a risk in writing them off as being non-human, because they are and they exist.”
Given that the draw of Lanthimos’ films is often that they are unsettling and occasionally uncomfortable while also being disarmingly funny, Bugonia is shaping up to be another return to form in a hat trick of sorts between its director and his muses.
Bugonia hits theaters on October 24