Emma Stone rules over 'Bugonia'

Most modern stars fit a prototype. Clark Gable begat George Clooney, Robert Redford passed a torch to Brad Pitt, Katharine Hepburn paved the way for Cate Blanchett.

- AMY NICHOLSON

STONE, left, as a kidnapped pharmaceutical CEO, maintains a steely focus over her tormenters, Aidan Delbis, center, and Jesse Plemons.

ATSUSHI NISHIJIMA Focus Features

But Emma Stone has no precedent on Earth. Stone can play shrewd, silly, gorgeous, repellent, frail and frightening simultaneously, in a register at once intimate and grand-scale. If she didn’t exist, some of her movies couldn't exist — especially not the ones she's created with edgy director Yorgos Lanthimos, who whisked her to the Oscars twice for “The Favourite” and “Poor Things,” the latter of which won Stone her second lead actress award.

Those decadent period pieces were like elaborate jewel settings designed to showcase Stone's range. Now with the paranoid comedy “Bugonia,” Lanthimos has stripped away all the ornamentation. Stone controls focus with nothing more than a shaved head, a filthy coat and a tight smile in the basement where her character, Michelle Fuller, the CEO of a pharmaceutical company, is being kept prisoner. Greased all over with a ghastly white antihistamine cream (I'll get to that), Stone’s Michelle stares unblinkingly toward the audience in massive, mesmerizing closeups, coolly explaining why she must be let go. Even in starkness, she shines.

Michelle's captors are cousins Teddy and Don (Jesse Plemons and Aidan Delbis), two working-class conspiracy theorists halfway down the slope of sliding off the grid. When you scan their rural town, a wasteland of Dollar General stores and fast food chains, most of their neighbors seem to have already faded away. So has Teddy's opioidaddicted mom, Sandy (Alicia Silverstone), glimpsed in eerie black-and-white flashbacks. Teddy, a hobbyist beekeeper, opens the film alarmed that now the bees have disappeared too.