ELLE Exclusive: Emma Stone On Why Bugonia Might Be Her Most Unsettling Film Yet

There’s a certain rhythm that emerges when Emma Stone and Yorgos Lanthimos work together, a shared language that doesn’t need translation. After the dreamlike anarchy of Poor Things and the fractured morality of Kinds of Kindness, their latest collaboration, Bugonia, feels like both a continuation and a rupture. If their past films stretched the limits of human strangeness, Bugonia dives headfirst into the paranoid chaos of the present.

Reuniting once more with the director who’s become her most daring creative partner, Stone plays Michelle, a biotech CEO whose life, and sense of power, implodes when she’s kidnapped by two conspiracy-obsessed cousins (Jesse Plemons and newcomer Aidan Delbis). The pair, convinced she’s an alien bent on humanity’s destruction, drag her into a basement interrogation that spirals into something between hostage crisis and philosophical showdown.

For Lanthimos, Bugoniais like a mirror to the “In the world we live in now,” he says, “people exist in certain bubbles reinforced by technology. The more isolated those bubbles become, the harder it is for anyone to truly see the other.” The film turns that premise into something electric and unsettling, a claustrophobic fever dream about belief, fear, and the stories we tell ourselves to feel safe.

Stone’s Michelle is not the wide-eyed creature of Poor Things or the fractured romantic of Kinds of Kindness; she is all composure and calculation, a woman accustomed to commanding every room she enters. “Michelle’s natural way is in being a CEO and being in charge,” Stone says. “She tries instantly to become that, even in the midst of an insane situation.” But Bugoniatakes that instinct for control and tests it under pressure, stripping her character, quite literally, down to something raw, defenceless, and deeply human.

Lanthimos has always been fascinated by power dynamics: the ways people perform authority, submission, or love as if they’re all versions of the same impulse. In Bugonia, that fascination reaches its sharpest edge. Michelle begins as the archetype of corporate domination — ruthless and inhuman, yet as the film progresses, the image starts to dissolve. “You watch her reveal, or try to conceal, all these other layers,” Lanthimos says. What begins as an abduction slowly becomes an interrogation of the self, both hers and her captors’.

It’s also a film about relationships, though not in any conventional sense. The connection between Teddy (Plemons) and Don (Delbis), cousins united by paranoia, forms a cracked reflection of family and loyalty. “They’re all each other has,” Plemons says of their dynamic. “It’s tragic and beautiful at the same time.” Don, as Lanthimos notes, becomes the film’s moral compass, a vessel for our own confusion and empathy. Through him, the story’s moral certainty dissolves, much like the audience’s.

That dissolution, the refusal to let viewers settle into easy categories of good and evil, is quintessential Lanthimos. Across The Favourite, Poor Things, and Kinds of Kindness, he has built worlds that feel both grotesque and tender, absurd yet painfully human. Bugonia, though darker and more grounded than his previous works, still carries that unmistakable tone: part nightmare, part black comedy, part societal exorcism.

And at its centre stands Stone, once again both muse and mirror to Lanthimos’s imagination. Together, they’ve created a trilogy of modern collaborations that feel like a dialogue between artist and actor, each one pushing the other toward greater strangeness and deeper truth. “He doesn’t explain much,” Stone has said of their working relationship. “He creates space for discovery.” It’s that trust, that willingness to venture into the unknown, that makes their creative partnership so electric.

With Bugonia, the pair move from the surreal to the sinister, from fantasy to fever dream. It’s a story that could only have emerged now, in a world flooded by misinformation and meaninglessness, and one that only Lanthimos and Stone could make both terrifying and tender. As the doomsday clock ticks in the film’s final act, what remains isn’t fear, but recognition: that beneath the noise and paranoia, we are all just trying to be seen, and to believe in something real.

Bugonia, from Universal Pictures India (distributed by Warner Bros. Discovery), releases in cinemas across India on October 31, 2025.

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