A banal chamber-piece whose broad critiques of corporate greed, tech-based paranoia, ecological disaster, and humanity’s overall uselessness as a species feel tired and dated on arrival, Yorgos Lanthimos’ Bugonia sits in some gray middle zone of his filmography, merging the uncomfortable humor, off-kilter realities, and distressing violence of his early films (Dogtooth, The Lobster) with the more accessibly straightforward narrative of his recent features with cowriter Tony McNamara (The Favourite, Poor Things). Bugonia is, in fact, the first of his features for which Lanthimos doesn’t have any writing credit; the screenplay by Will Tracy is an adaptation of the 2003 Korean film Save the Green Planet! It isn’t so much that the film doesn’t possess enough of his personal stamp, stylistically; this is still unmistakably a Lanthimos joint (with many of his previous behind-the-scenes collaborators returning), but a surprisingly tepid and talky one (until its final minutes, at least) that’s content to succumb to the despair of our current time without offering a sliver of any sort of unique or specific insight.
It begins with the bees. With all the sereneness of a nature documentary, Teddy (Jesse Plemons) describes their process of pollination in voiceover to his cousin Don (Aidan Delbis)— like sex, but less messy, and no one gets hurt. But the conversation quickly turns, and it becomes obvious that something else is afoot here, editor Yorgos Mavropsaridis intercutting between the two men’s clumsy workout regimen in the unassuming rural home they share, and the orderly daily routine of Michelle (Emma Stone), the high-powered CEO of a pharmaceutical company. The briefest glimpse of her workday points to the sort of executive she is: she’s the kind who likes to clean up messes as quietly as possible, the kind who has her face on magazine covers proclaiming her as some sort of prodigy and photos with the likes of Michelle Obama adorning her office, the kind who wants to appear like a benefactor to her employees, encouraging them to go home at 5:30 to be with their families— unless they still have work to finish, in which case they should definitely get that done first. Meanwhile, Teddy’s worldview unfolds as he explains to the innocent Don how they killed the bees, they killed their family, they’re killing the planet. The “they” in question being aliens from the planet Andromeda, of which Teddy is certain Michelle is one. So he hatches a plan with Don to kidnap her and convince her to beam them up to her mothership.
Once the kidnapping occurs, the bulk of the action remains confined to the interior of Teddy and Don’s home— tense meals at the kitchen table, or confrontations in the basement where they keep Michelle chained up. Which makes the choice to film Bugonia in VistaVision that much more perplexing. The photography is as lush as Jerskin Fendrix’s grand orchestral score, which punctuates action scenes with blaring horns and percussive beats, highlighting James Price’s detailed production design that breathes life into the spaces these characters inhabit. But the extra-wide frame detracts from the sense of entrapment that ought to accompany this story, which hinges so much on focuses on the characters’ faces.
Not that that technicality diminishes their performances. Stone, in her fifth collaboration with Lanthimos as both producer and actor, exudes a confident bluster that flummoxes her scene partners at every turn. She also appropriately sort of looks like an alien, her shaved head and white lotion slathered over her skin by her captors accentuating her angular face and wide features. Plemons, with greasy skin and stringy hair— the picture of a basket tinfoil hat conspiracy theorist— is always adept at not only making unpredictable swings, but selling them. Delbis, a non-professional actor making his feature film debut, balances out the volatile and often despicable leads with a much-needed dose of goodness.
But if Bugonia is an allegory for the dire contemporary climate, it’s an extraordinarily shallow one. There are gestures toward ideas, like the penchant for younger generations to blindly latch onto causes for the sake of appearing to activate for something. Possessing no existing ideology, Teddy cycles through every political fringe group, from alt-right to Marxist, clutching at something to believe in, until he begins to cobble together research from YouTube videos on the Andromedans— a subject he finally derives some knowledge and power and sense of self from. But Teddy and Michelle’s verbal sparring, ranging from clipped deliveries of Lanthimos’ signature dry humor (although Bugonia contains arguably the least punchy dialogue in his filmography, the jokes landing with barely a snort) to nuclear outbursts, never digs deep into their desires, for themselves and the world at large; they’re merely spouting platitudes, even the crux of the conflict hinging on Teddy’s sick mother failing to provide an emotional hook. Bugonia boasts a couple of wonderfully surreal black-and-white segues, and its final twist— following an explosively goopy climax— is a gleefully daring swing of the sort the rest of the movie desperately needed.
Bugonia had its world premiere in competition at the 2025 Venice Film Festival. Runtime: 118 minutes.
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