I Finally Watched This Unhinged Emma Stone Thriller on My Flight and I Was Stunned

I have the unfortunate ability of staying wide awake on long-haul flights. Sleep is just not an option, and I'm often twiddling my thumbs, trying to pass the time. On my most recent cross-country trip, I decided to watch Bugonia, the conspiracy theory black comedy led by Emma Stone and Jesse Plemons. As the final credits rolled, I sat, stunned, in my seat as the soft glow of the screen flickered in my wide eyes. I don't think a film has ever shocked me so much in my life.

If my love for the Wes Anderson cinematic universe is any indication, I appreciate an auteur. Yorgos Lanthimos is very much his own brand of weird, and Bugonia marks his fourth collaboration with Stone since 2018, following Kinds of Kindness, Poor Things and The Favourite. While I'm not quite sure it's for me, the absurdist style is something I can appreciate.

The film's plot is downright outrageous. Plemons stars as Teddy Gatz, a conspiracy theorist living on an isolated homestead with his Autistic cousin, Don (Aidan Delbis). Teddy is convinced that pharmaceuticals CEO Michelle Fuller (Stone) is actually a member of the Andromedans alien species who are covertly attempting to destroy earth and subdue humans. Naturally, all that's left to do is kidnap Michelle and force her to arrange a meeting with the aliens' mothership during the impending lunar eclipse.

The actors both give intense performances—Stone as a hardened, girl-bossing, corporate-speaking CEO and Plemons as a blue-collar, grieving son pushed to the fringes of society. The lynchpin of film is Teddy and Michelle's non-extraterrestrial connection. As it turns out, Teddy's mother, Sandy, was a drug addict who underwent a clinical trial facilitated by Michelle's company. It failed, leaving Sandy in a coma.

Bugonia is simultaneously tragic and ironically funny, something akin to a joyride in a clown car going 120 miles an hour. But buried beneath the absurdities are real and uncomfortable questions. Teddy and Michelle serve as each others' foils. The former represents fringe society, the poor, powerless, overlooked, dismissed. The latter is wealth, power, control, authority, credibility. Society trusts people like Michelle. It instantly distrusts people like Teddy. Bugonia's fundamental question, the thing that left me unsettled was if that trust and distrust is actually merited on both sides. That being said, the fact that it's been sidelined in the Oscars race is mind boggling.