Joss Whedon got the idea for Buffy, The Vampire Slayer by contemplating an ironic reversal: what if the girl followed into a dark alley by a monster turned around and slayed her attacker. In Bugonia, Emma Stone and her frequent director Yorgos Lanthimos (and writer Will Tracy) contemplate another reversal in this remake of a 2003 Korean film Save the Green Planet!: what if alien abduction is when aliens were the abducted, not the abductors?
Stone is the abductee, a high-fashion, Ivy-educated, slick, female CEO abducted by two low-income, blue collar, uncredentialed, unschooled, unkempt, almost unemployed white male cousins, one of whom has a mom (Alicia Silverstone) in a coma due to faulty medical treatments sold by Stone’s corporation. Stone’s the girl boss from the longhouse debated recently by conservative writers like Helen Andrews and Peachy Keenan. The low-income son, Teddy Gatz (Jesse Plemons) is also a low-wage worker in an Amazon-style warehouse owned by Stone’s firm. It’s potentially a MAGA movie, with the white males (and probably the black males too) left behind in the new DEI economy.
The film begins with the position that the white males may be crazy. Teddy and his autistic cousin Don believe the world’s controlled, not by the Jews, George Soros and the Tides Foundation, the Rockefellers, (a human) Big Pharma, or embedded communists, but by aliens among us. They’re uneducated, as Sandy Cortez from Westchester would say, getting all their (mis)information from the dark web, with no Nina Jankowicz in power to protect them from the worries of their pretty little heads.
Stone’s abducted, her auburn locks shaved and then burnt (because these are alien antennae that would allow her to call her ship for help), her body rubbed with an antihistamine cream to neutralize her powers, and chained up in a basement. Her lead captor, Teddy, who has Trump’s hair and skin coloring, wants her to organize a meeting with the leaders of her race (from Andromeda), to demand they withdraw from Earth and leave humanity alone. According to him the Andromedan ship will pass near earth in three days, when it’ll be undetectable because of a lunar eclipse.
In a nod to Buffy, Michelle beats up her two captors with some expensive self-defense training moves, once when they first capture her and again in their basement, in the latter scene telling Teddy she’ll always beat him because she’s a Winner and he’s a Loser. This is a theme in Stone’s career. Her second appearance on TV was on Medium, set in her real-life hometown (Phoenix), where she played a young woman raped by politician father, who then faked her death to escape and leave him as the most likely culprit in her disappearance. In her 2023 Lanthimos film Poor Things she plays a girl killed and resurrected as a female Frankenstein, who then metes out revenge on those who’ve wronged or attempted to control her. In her best movie, Cruella, she plays a slightly psychopathic Estella/Cruella de Vil, who uncovers her origins and dispatches a homicidal Emma Thompson.
The audience is gradually moved to poise between the idea that CEO Michelle (Stone) is a human kidnapped by white-trash kooks and Teddy Gatz’s belief that she’s really an alien. After Michelle tries for a day, with some parodic vacuous corporate PR speak, to convince her captors that they’ll suffer least if they call the cops, confess, and let her go immediately, she then adopts a new strategy, agrees to their hypothesis and begins to explain how Andromedans are here to help, including a cure for Gatz’s comatose mom. As Stone paints a picture of the alien civilization, bits of The Man Who Fell to Earth, the Alien franchise film Prometheus, and the myth of Atlantis are invoked, slightly higher cinematic and literary fodder than Gatz’s worldview from the 1988 cult classic They Live. According to CEO Michelle the Andromedans are here To Serve Man. But with or without some clarified butter?
It’s a well-made, well-cast and gripping movie. But like some of the previous Stone-Lanthimos collaborations, it has a malignant sense of life. (Perhaps as the interstellar object 31/Atlas “rockets” past earth, the scientific debate on whether it’s acting more like a spaceship or a comet will generate a genre of “alien or not” fictions.) It’d be interesting to see what Stone and Lanthimos could do if they tried to make something edifying.