Emma Stone, Jesse Plemons Likely Headed Back to Oscars for Bugonia


The team that brought you 2018’s The Favourite, 2023’s Poor Things and 2024’s Kinds of Kindness — filmmaker Yorgos Lanthimos and actress/producer Emma Stone — has struck again, this time with Bugonia, which had its world premiere at the Venice Film Festival on Aug. 28 and has been screening at the Telluride Film Festival over the Labor Day weekend. I caught it on Saturday at the Werner Herzog Theater, and I’m quite confident that, like the daring The Favourite and Poor Things, and unlike the slight Kinds of Kindness, it will be a significant awards season player.
Adapted by Will Tracy, a former editor of The Onion who later wrote on Succession and penned 2022’s The Menu, from Jang Joon-hwan‘s 2003 South Korean film Save the Green Planet!, Bugonia is an absurdist comedy. It centers on two American oddball cousins (Jesse Plemons and Aidan Delbis), one of whom “does his own research” and the other of whom follows him deep down a rabbit hole, who team up to kidnap an American corporate titan (Stone) because they believe she is actually an alien intent to destroy the earth. As a massive effort to locate the CEO is mounted, the abductors and the abductee (who is chained up in the basement of the abductors’ home) engage in a battle of wits, with the abductors growing increasingly menacing as the clock ticks toward a lunar eclipse at which they expect her to take them to her leader.
At a time when social isolation, information silos and the deliberate propagation of misinformation in the real world are fueling widespread and dangerous conspiratorial beliefs and real acts of violence, a story like this, with characters like these, seems frighteningly plausible. Though elements of it evoke thoughts of The Twilight Zone or Black Mirror, it also calls to mind dark social satires like 1975’s Dog Day Afternoon and 1976’s Network, the latter of which was name-checked by Stone, during a post-screening Q&A, as a film that seemed sensationalist when it was released, but 50 years later seems stunningly prescient.
I think that it’s very possible that members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences will appreciate the intent of Bugonia — which Focus Features will release in U.S. theaters on Oct. 24 — and recognize it in a variety of categories, including best picture, best director and best adapted screenplay. The Academy, as it is currently composed, has far less of an aversion to “genre films” than the organization used to. See: Oscar recognition for 2017’s The Shape of Water, 2019’s Parasite, 2022’s Everything Everywhere All at Once and, yes, Poor Things.
But whatever happens in other categories, I think it’s almost certain that Stone, a four-time Oscar nominee who won best actress for 2016’s La La Land and Poor Things, and Plemons, a best supporting actor Oscar nominee for 2021’s The Power of the Dog, will be nominated for lead acting awards in recognition of performances that required a tremendous level of commitment — and make a haunting impression.
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