Bugonia (2025) Focus/Comedy RT: 118 minutes Rated R (bloody violent content including a suicide, grisly images, language) Director: Yorgos Lanthimos Screenplay: Will Tracy Music: Jerskin Fendrix Cinematography: Robbie Ryan Release date: October 24, 2025 (US, limited)/October 31, 2025 (US, wide) Cast: Emma Stone, Jesse Plemons, Aidan Delbis, Stavros Halkias, Alicia Silverstone, Cedric Dumornay.
Rating: ****
Filmmaker Yorgos Lanthimos is an acquired taste. He established that early on with Dogtooth (2009) and continued the trend with The Lobster (2015), The Killing of a Sacred Deer (2017) and Poor Things (2023), all bearing his unique signature style. I haven’t enjoyed all of his films, but I admire his artistic bravery. He’s got balls!
YL’s latest work Bugonia is freaking INSANE! It’s a twisted hybrid of sci-fi, dark comedy and kidnap thriller. A remake of the 2003 Korean film Save the Green planet, it stars his muse apparent Emma Stone as Michelle Fuller, the high-powered CEO of a major pharmaceutical company. Powerful and affluent, she carries herself at all times with total confidence. There’s not a single crack in her perfect façade. It stands to reason then that she’s made a few enemies in her ascent to the top of the mountain. One of them, a disturbed beekeeper/conspiracy theorist named Teddy (Plemons, Killers of the Flower Moon), kidnaps her from her driveway with the help of his neurodivergent cousin Don (Delbis). They take her to their home where they lock her up in the basement and terrorize her.
Sounds like a fairly standard kidnap thriller, yes? Well, NO! Remember, this is Yorgos Lanthimos we’re talking about. Wait until you hear why Teddy takes Michelle. He’s convinced she’s a member of an alien race called the Andromedans posing as a human. Believing the Andromedans are planning an invasion, he shaves off all her hair so she can’t communicate with the mother ship. What’s his endgame? He wants Michelle to set up a meeting with her alien colleagues so he can negotiate a peace treaty. Supposedly, she’ll be rendezvousing with the mother ship in a few days time during a lunar eclipse. She tries to talk some sense into Teddy, but he’s gone too deep down the rabbit hole to listen to reason.
Teddy’s theory is so preposterous, it can’t be true. He has to be crazy, right? Not necessarily. Therein lies the film’s brilliance. Whereas most directors would establish early on that Teddy is acting on a delusion, YL takes a different road. Working from a screenplay by Will Tracy (The Menu), he presents the story in such a way that makes the viewer think maybe Teddy is onto something. Yes, the whole alien thing sounds like the ravings of a madman, but is it? Could he be right?
Michelle talks a good game trying to convince an increasingly agitated Teddy she’s not an alien, maybe too good a game. There’s something a little odd about her behavior. Listen to how she speaks. She’s uncommonly fluent in her speech and there’s a noticeable lack of emotion. It could be argued that this is typical of corporate boss types, but is that what this is? It might also be an alien trying to imitate human behavior. YL doesn’t commit to either thing leaving the viewer in a state of unknowingness. Some will be put off by this, no doubt. Others, like me, will love it.
It may not seem like a whole lot is going on in Bugonia. It isn’t filled with action and mayhem. It’s light on special effects. Most of it takes place in the basement where Teddy interrogates Michelle while Don stands at the ready with a rifle. These scenes brim with quiet but palpable intensity. There’s an undercurrent of danger flowing just beneath the surface. The tension is broken by occasional bursts of bloody violence. It’s actually cathartic. YL, aided by cinematographer Robbie Ryan (Poor Things), films these scenes in a way (i.e. different camera angles) that speaks to the shifting powers dynamics between the two. Teddy is ostensibly the one in charge, but Michelle effortlessly and consistently gains the upper hand with her superior intelligence. He’s got the gun, but she’s got the brains. It’s hardly an even match-up.
Production designer James Price is another MVP here. What he does with the film’s aesthetic is artistic brilliance. Check out the contrast between the places Michelle and Teddy call home. She resides in a cold, sterile modernist house with no personality while he’s in one of old, lived-in place that just screams danger lives here. It says so much about the characters and their respective states of mind. The lighting further augments the sense that they all reside in some version of hell.
Stone turns in another great performance as Michelle, a woman of power with a cold and indifferent demeanor. Her words to employees say they have the right to leave on time. Her passive-aggressive tone tells them she expects them to stay and work late. She nails the role perfectly. Plemons is equally great as Teddy, an unstable type dealing with a mother (Silverstone, Clueless) left comatose by a failed drug trial funded by Michelle’s company. Delbis, who really is on the autism spectrum, makes an astonishing debut as the accomplice who doesn’t fully grasp what’s going on. He just does what he’s told.
More than anything, Bugonia is an angry film. It’s angry at humanity, what we do to each other and what we’ve done to the planet. YL uses bees and a phenomenon called Colony Collapse Disorder as a metaphor for the human race and where we’re headed if things don’t change. It’s a bit of a reach, but okay. I love that YL isn’t afraid to lean into the irrationality of it all. He taps right into the insane, cluttered mind of the antagonist and runs wildly with it. Bugonia is brilliantly bonkers!
