On December 23, 2023, I reviewed the movie "Poor Things" that starred Emma Stone, with the director Yorgos Lanthimos is by far one of the worst movies I have ever seen. Like the other horrific movie "Everything Everywhere All at Once", released in 2022, Poor Things was nominated for several Oscars, with Emma Stone, for completely unknown reasons, winning for Best Actress. Clearly, there is something very wrong with the Academy Awards voting process.
The new movie Bugonia is the fourth collaboration of Stone and Lanthimos, and while not as bad as Poor Things, this movie is insane, weird, disgusting, and disturbing, with an ending that, despite its off-the-wall craziness, I saw coming from a mile away. Emma Stone plays Michelle, a high-powered, very wealthy Pharmaceutical executive who works in an impressive glass building, drives an impressive Mercedes SUV, and lives in a palatial house. Unfortunately, Michelle has an employee named Teddy (Jessie Plemons) who works in one of the company's warehouses, and is also a beekeeper, who has a dying mother and thinks that Michelle is an alien from another planet who eventually plans to kill everybody on the planet Earth.
Teddy kidnaps Michelle along with his mentally challenged brother Don (Aidan Delbis), taking her to their dilapidated house and tying her up in their basement. They shave her head because Teddy believes that she can contact her alien mother ship with her hair. Michelle's baldness results in many scenes of close-up arguments between Michelle and Teddy, showing Emma Stone's head and her face covered in a crazy-looking white powder, adding another strange element to this movie. There are occasional visits from a local police officer, Casey (Stavros Halkias), and ongoing conversations between him and Teddy about the time when Casey was Teddy's babysitter and hints of child abuse.
Teddy's mother, Sandy (Alicia Silverstone) has been dying for years and is currently in a local nursing home. It was unusual to see well-known actor Silverstone in a role that has almost no speaking parts that occur within flashbacks.
The ending of this film is both crazy and violent, with an attempt to shock the audience that failed because within a story this insane, the only conclusion that could have happened is the one that did happen at the end.
Like the horrible Poor Things from two years ago, this movie is receiving high 86% ratings on Rotten Tomatoes, once again scoring too high only because the ideas and scenes have never been seen before, and not because this movie is very good or great. The odds are high that this film will receive a Best Picture nomination, and Emma Stone will be nominated for Best Actress, this time hopefully she will not win again.
My rating for this film is 50% only for some of the acting, with an emphatic recommendation to run from this strange nightmare of movie making.
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