On brand for a filmmaker with a much-written-about preoccupation with characters suffocated by various forms of claustrophobia, Yorgos Lanthimos’ latest pitch-black comedy, Bugonia, revolves around a kidnapping. The victim is a Forbes cover-attracting, half-heartedly optics-conscious pharmaceutical CEO named Michelle (Emma Stone). The perpetrators are Teddy (Jesse Plemons), an amateur apiarist who works by day at one of her company’s heartlessly quota-obsessed factories, and his neurodivergent cousin Don (Aidan Delbis), who goes along with the plan mostly because he isn’t sure how to push back against the one-track-minded Teddy. 

Snatching her from her glassy, impersonally decorated compound while wearing paper Jennifer Aniston masks, Teddy and Don are abducting Michelle because Teddy, who ravenously digests conspiracy-forward podcasts and other media, is convinced his boss is an alien. With the high hair density, thin cuticles, and narrow feet to ostensibly prove it, she has, he’s certain, been sent by her race to invade and then decimate Earth’s resources. Teddy isn’t looking for revenge (though the eventually revealed fact that his mother, the Alicia Silverstone-portrayed Sandy, lies comatose because she participated in some company-run scientific tests is definitely more of a motivating factor than he’s willing to admit) but to convince Michelle to take him and Don aboard her mother ship. He wants to negotiate a deal with her and her fellow leaders so that they’ll pack up their things and go. The more-optimistic-than-is-sensical Teddy doesn’t think of himself as an activist, a role he sees as mostly motivated by personal-brand maintenance, and more as a quasi-savior figure. He’s willing to torture Michelle if need be, though he’d prefer not to. (You can probably guess how that will pan out in this movie directed by an auteur fascinated with rather than avoidant around pain.)

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Photo credit: Atsushi Nishijima/Focus Features