‘Genre-hopping blast’ ‘Bugonia’ scores 100% on Rotten Tomatoes as critics praise ‘extraordinary’ performances by Emma Stone, Jesse Plemons

Following its premiere at the Venice Film Festival on Thursday, the reviews are in for Yorgos Lanthimos and Emma Stone's latest collaboration, Bugonia, and it sounds like the duo have another major awards contender on their hands.

Currently boasting a 100 percent rating on Rotten Tomatoes, the film follows a pharmaceutical executive (Stone) who becomes the target of an obsessive conspiracy theorist (Jesse Plemons), convinced she’s a disguised alien plotting Earth’s destruction.

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Variety’s Owen Gleiberman writes that Lanthimos is “at the top of his visionary nihilistic game in a movie about what’s happening to the world.” He adds that the film, adapted from the 2003 South Korean cult favorite Save the Green Planet!, “grows more supple and fascinating as it goes along.” While he highlights Stone’s work, it’s Plemons who, he says, delivers the film’s “most extraordinary performance.”

This marks another chapter in the acclaimed creative partnership between Lanthimos and Stone, which has already yielded The Favourite (10 Oscar nominations, 1 win) and Poor Things (11 nominations, 4 wins, including Best Actress for Stone). Bugonia is set to screen at two major Oscar-launching festivals, Venice and Telluride, ahead of its limited release on Oct. 24, expanding wide on Oct. 31.

David Rooney of The Hollywood Reporter describes the film as “a genre-hopping blast of suspense, sci-fi, paranoia and dark comedy made all the more arch by Jerskin Fendrix’s high-drama score.” He commends both leads, saying Stone and Plemons are “in top form, clearly vibing with the director’s idiosyncratic sensibility and upping each other’s game.”

While Peter Bradshaw of The Guardian is more reserved in his response, writing, “For me, Bugonia doesn’t have the ingenuity and elegance of Lanthimos’s previous film Kinds of Kindness, nor the emotional generosity and audacity of his steampunk fantasia Poor Things.” However, he singles out the film’s conclusion: “Bugonia is a very well made film, and while it is not true to say it is less than the sum of its parts, it is less than that final and very powerful part.”

The film's overall message on the state of the world is also noted by several critics including Pete Hammond of Deadline who writes, "Bugonia may be way out there, but I haven’t seen a film this year that feels as much of the moment for a world spinning out of control. It is indeed pure entertainment, but we should pay attention to what it is trying to say."

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