Emma Stone's conspiracy comedy Bugonia delivers layers of weirdness with an acquired taste in humour

You are an iron-willed CEO with Louboutins and a G-Class Mercedes Benz. You have the smooth face and athletic body of a woman a decade younger than your 45 years, thanks to the incredibly expensive anti-aging regimen you’re on. 

You have martial arts training later, where you regularly beat the pants off men with 30 pounds on you. During the day, you run the powerhouse international company Auxolith Corp, employing a sizable portion of the surrounding town — with only a few hushed-up employee poisonings here and there.

You have a firm handle on the bad press connected to the chemicals you peddle; chemicals that no reputable scientific journal has (definitively) connected to beehive colony collapse around the world. 

You have everything, you think, as you drive up the long stretch of driveway to the mammoth house you live in alone.

But if you really have nothing to worry about, who are those two masked men running out from behind your car, armed with a syringe and a bottle of… is that bug spray?

So begins Bugonia, the bizarre conspiracist comedy from director Yorgos Lanthimos, loosely remade from South Korea’s Save the Green Planet! Though, to be fair, it really starts days before, where in a lonely, deserted family home that no longer boasts much family those two masked men hatch a plot to kidnap CEO Michelle Fuller (Emma Stone). 

That plan is spearheaded by Teddy Gatz (Jesse Plemons), an amateur apiarist, professional conspiracy theorist and disgruntled employee of Fuller’s company with more than a few skeletons in his closet.

But hanging beside those skeletons is a clear, if radical, theory inspired by them: that Fuller is an alien overlord from the Andromeda galaxy, sent to Earth in disguise to subvert and control the human race. 

According to Teddy, only he and his cowed, easily manipulated, neurodivergent cousin Don (Aidan Delbis) can stop her. 

However rompingly sci-fi that sounds, don’t get it twisted: this is no Stranger Things. Belying the bracing mix of absurdist humour and unsettling, banal violence Lanthimos is famous for, Don and Teddy’s strategy runs decidedly more Black Snake Moan than Black Mirror.

That strategy is simple: chain up Fuller in the basement, torture a confession out of her, then somehow barter a trip onto her mothership — set to arrive, Teddy is sure, during the lunar eclipse in a few days. 

For an audience, the biggest hurdle in getting into Bugonia are the hazy layers of social commentary, cryptic character backstories and slapstick diversions of barbed humour bumping up and over one another.

Haven’t spent much time on QAnon message boards or watched the techno-feudalist documentary HyperNormalisation? Good luck making sense of Teddy’s worldview: that humanity is a “dead colony, atomized in a trillion directions,” misled by the “global Democratic order” controlling society through “hyper-normalized dialectic.”

Not a fan of confusing, low-concept, arthouse films? The dreamlike, monochrome visual excursions to Teddy’s past may be a bit much for you. For example, when you see him pulling his dying mother Sandy (Alicia Silverstone) through the air by a string like an escaping balloon, you may scratch your head. Because, wait, how much of that is Lanthimos saying what happened?