Bugonia: Bleak & Angry View of Humanity

Bugonia is not a flower, as I had originally thought.  The word means that bees are spontaneously generated from a slaughtered ox or cow.  "Bugonia" received an A.A. nomination for Best Picture and Emma Stone received one for Best Actress in a Leading Role.  Jesse Plemons received a G.G. nomination for Best Actor in a Leading Role, but he didn't get an A.A. nomination, which I think he deserved.  In any case, despite the excellent acting, the film was just pretty good.  It's worth seeing, but it doesn't warrant the received critical acclaim.  Emma and Jesse do a fine job, but neither role has sufficient range to win an A.A.  The film is classified as a dark comedy, and that's partly true, but it's primarily an occasionally-violent, depressing drama.  Furthermore, it's a rip-off of the excellent and better movie, "10 Cloverfield Lane" (2016 – see my blog review of it, but, don't see Cloverfield first, because then it will spoil "Bugonia" for you). Teddy (Plemons) is a bee-keeper who also works the warehouse of a hi-tech pharmaceutical company.  The company's CEO, Michelle Fuller (Stone), is famous and her company has lots of political influence.  Teddy is rather unkempt and lives in a dilapidated house with his cousin, Don (Aiden Delbis).  Teddy is convinced that Michelle is an alien from the Andromeda species and that she and her alien cohorts are slowly destroying life on Earth!  For example, the number of Teddy's bee colonies have been declining over the past few years.  Jesse has learned  this "truth" from conspiracy podcasts, rabbit-hole online research, as well his own experimentation.  The aliens look nearly exactly like humans, although there are subtle differences that only Teddy and very few others can discern.  Don, in a folie a deux, has "bought the farm" on this.  There is some type of cataclysmic event involving the aliens that Teddy desperately wants to prevent.  He needs Michelle to beam them both to the mother ship prior to the upcoming lunar eclipse, which will occur in only four days.  Once onboard, Teddy will negotiate with the aliens and get them to agree to depart from Earth, thereby leaving the planet to its own destiny. Four days before the eclipse, Teddy and Don kidnap Michelle and chain her up in their house basement.  Teddy starts aggressively interrogating Michelle and places pressure on her to confess her alien status, including physical abuse.  Michelle at first vehemently denies that she is an alien, but, after she realizes this is hopeless, she admits that she is one in the hope that she somehow can get through to Teddy.  Initially, I thought the film was an interesting study of how impossible it is to talk a paranoid schizophrenic out of his delusion and the psychodynamics of schizophrenia as well as folie a deux, but the movie has other intentions. Most of the footage is Teddy interrogating Michelle, which is interesting, but not riveting.  On the whole, the movie has a very depressing and pessimistic…