Bugonia apparently comes from an ancient Greek term bougoníā, which was the practice and belief that bees were spontaneously generated from the carcass of a dead ox or bull. And this is kind of where we start, in the company of Plemons' disturbed character Teddy and his apparently intellectually challenged cousin, Don (Aidan Delbis), tending to their bee hives in the garden of their rural home somewhere in the USA. Teddy seems to be obsessed with colony collapse disorder (CCD) and the supposed end of life on Earth and Don - well, tags along!
Teddy comes across as a conspiracy theorist, living out of his basement having studied the above data and believes that there is a spaceship out there somewhere planting their species on earth to destroy it - and the human race. Skip to Stone's character, Michelle, stomping her way through becoming the best businesswoman on the planet, face on Forbes Magazine, highly successful, rich and taking no prisoners in terms of corporate efficiency. The Queen Bee in Teddy's frame of reference and in parallel with his beekeeping activity.
Talking of which, Teddy has cooked up a plan to take her as prisoner as he truly believes that she is an alien from the mothership out there, here to do the deed, destroying everyone. So the pair of them grab her on her way home from work one day, chain her up in their basement and Teddy, the brains, starts to challenge and provoke her into admitting that she is an alien and recording a confession and message on a digital recorder. With this he intends to get an audience with her 'Emperor' on said mothership - on the next lunar eclipse, in 3 days - to negotiate their surrender.
The interrogation at times gets out of hand as he shaves her head (hair being used to connect with her species, Teddy says), and much worse as she flatly refuses to admit the allegations. At one point, in order to escape, she does record an admission - but then Teddy refuses to accept it as it is clearly in English, not what should be her language. The battle goes on, sometimes getting bloody as Teddy gets more frustrated with her, and he, him - and the situation she finds herself in - apparently dealing with a fruit-loop with whom it's impossible to negotiate.
Then there's Teddy's mum who is in the care of Michelle's organisation, having been kept alive for the last 5 years following an incident in which her company seems to have been responsible for allowing it to happen. Teddy loves his mum and holds Michelle and her firm responsible. Then there's the local Bobby who, as it turns out, used to be Teddy's babysitter - and there was some sort of incident between them back in the day, which he demonstrates much remorse over now. So some threads to suggest that Teddy's after simple revenge for all sorts of stuff relating to control and power over other people's lives from the past.
The two hour runtime simply flies past as we watch open-eyed at most of what is going on, trying to put pieces of the puzzle together and predict an outcome - which I won't spoil here! It's a great thrill ride though, so keep alert and hold onto your hats! You can dig as deep as you like really with all these strings to the storyline and have fun putting it together in amongst the dark, grizzly but sometimes comic delivery.
Emma Stone and Jesse Plemons are fabulous throughout - the best - and it's worth seeing for their performances alone. But there's more, as we'd expect from this director as the cinematography, sound and direction are fabulous. It's a wonderful work of art and now available on Amazon Prime Video as I write. Don't miss it! Addendum I've now discovered that it's an adaptation of Jang Joon-hwan's Korean film, Save the Green Planet! (2003) so I shall be hunting that down next!
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