Megan McLachlan reviews Yorgos Lanthimos’ Bugonia at the Telluride Film Festival and believes while the thriller will divide audiences, it fortifies Emma Stone as an actress of her generation.
One of the questions Best Actress winners receive after the Oscars is, “What will they do next?” Even this year’s winner, Mikey Madison for Anora, turned down Star Wars and had the internet in a tizzy. Everyone had an idea of what she should do next.
Of the recent winners, Emma Stone has had one of the best post-Oscars runs in memory. And she’s had two wins to work with.
After La La Land, she starred in Battle of the Sexes, removing any trace of her movie-star self to step into tennis icon Billie Jean King’s sneakers. Then, she took on a supporting role in Yorgos Lanthimos’s The Favourite, which solidified one of the most important director-muse collaborations of the last decade.
Post-Lanthimos’s Poor Things, she’s worked with Nathan Fielder and Benny Safdie on the absurdist nightmare TV series The Curse, hot horror director Ari Aster on Eddington, and twice more with Lanthimos on last year’s Kinds of Kindness and now, Bugonia.
Bugonia will certainly divide audiences with its balls-to-the-wall intensity and insanity — but they won’t be divided on Stone. As Michelle Fuller, the CEO of fictional pharmaceutical company Auxiolith, she exerts (deserved) movie star swagger with hungry grit like she’s still trying to prove herself. This isn’t the role a two-time Oscar winner needs to do, but one she wants to do, to show us what else she has in her bag of tricks.
Despite being kidnapped by two conspiracy theorists, Jesse Plemons’ Teddy and Aidan Delbis’s Don, her Michelle maintains complete control of the situation. Her steady voice and commanding presence make Teddy and Don look little even when she’s the one sitting on a cot with a shaved head, covered in antihistamine.
Plemons plays Teddy like an intense note on a violin, shrill and low before reaching a deafening screech. He’s fantastic as usual, but the role doesn’t allow him to really show what he’s capable of the way Bugonia does for Stone and even newcomer Delbis’s heartbreaking, memorable turn as Teddy’s cousin.
Without spoiling what Bugonia has in store for audiences — I like to call it elevated B-movie horror (complimentary!) — suffice it to say, you’ve never seen a film like this, and it’s best to experience in a full theater. Of all the Yorgos films, this one feels like the most popcorny and fun, in spite of the menacing Jerskin Fendrix score and end-of-the-world themes.
With respects to Clayton Davis at Variety, who called Stone our modern-day Katharine Hepburn, I love the sentiment — two strong-willed actresses playing interesting female roles — but I disagree. No one has ever been like Hepburn, and no one is quite like Stone at the moment. None of us know what she’ll do next — but whatever it is, it’ll show us a new level from her.
Bugonia opens wide on October 31.
