""I know you want there to be a master plan," the kidnapping victim says to her captor. In Bugonia, the latest movie by Yorgos Lanthimos, Emma Stone plays girlboss biotech CEO Michelle Fuller, and Jesse Plemons is Teddy Gatz, who works at a fulfillment center for Michelle's Auxolith corporation, in a town hollowed out by the opioid crisis and other disasters."
"Teddy, a beekeeper, is especially conscious of colony collapse disorder, which is possibly linked to neonicotinoids released into the environment by Auxolith, and which he connects to larger systemic issues as well as his own more intimate trials, his mother having slipped into a coma while enrolled in a trial for Auxolith's experimental opioid-withdrawl drug. And so he has yanked Michelle from her home, chained her up in his basement, and subjected her to enhanced interrogation, convinced that there is a master plan."
"The median American voter has a remarkable ability to diagnose a social malaise while misapprehending its causes in monumentally scattershot ways. Bugonia, as explicitly as the quoted "master plan" dialogue indicates, allegorizes a particularly American paranoia. Things as they are so sinister that publicly available explanations for them are inadequate, Teddy believes, and if these secret, sinister causes were just revealed, people would finally awaken in outrage to things as they are."
Bugonia follows Michelle Fuller, a biotech CEO, and Teddy Gatz, a fulfillment‑center worker and beekeeper who abducts her. The town suffers from the opioid crisis and environmental harms tied to Auxolith. Teddy links colony collapse disorder and his mother’s coma during a clinical trial to systemic corporate and technological failures, and he interprets those harms through conspiratorial delusions. He chains Michelle in his basement and stages an enhanced interrogation driven by belief in a hidden "master plan." The film allegorizes American paranoia and traces how economic despair and technocracy failures feed extremist, conspiratorial thinking.
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