Review: Bugonia (2025)

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Misanthropy seems to be the point in a Yorgos Lanthimos movie, so the acidic perspective on humanity that Bugonia offers does not surprise me. What did surprise me is how the film held my attention, largely due to the remarkable performances at its centre. While I might have found nothing to laugh at in this supposed black comedy, I was engaged throughout the runtime.

Written by Will Tracy, who wrote The Menu (2022), and based on the South Korean film, Save the Green Planet! (2003) from Jang Joon-hwan, Bugonia follows a deranged man, Teddy (Jesse Plemons), who kidnaps a powerful business executive, Michelle (Emma Stone), whom he believes to be an alien. Teddy, and to a lesser extent his autistic co-conspirator and cousin, Don (Aidan Delbis), believe that aliens from Andromeda have infiltrated the most powerful institutions on the planet in order to brainwash humanity and poison the earth. He’s a beekeeper, so he uses the death of bees from pesticides as the greatest evidence of this supposed plot. Although, over the course of the film, we learn that Teddy’s research into Andromedans is much more extensive (and deranged) than initially thought.

Bugonia begins with Teddy and Don preparing to execute their plan, intercut with Michelle going about her meticulously regimented and seemingly inhuman daily routines as an executive. Teddy and Don’s country home is ramshackle, messy, and lived in; Michelle’s mansion is sparse and immaculate, seemingly untouched. Teddy speaks in a rambling, passionate manner; Michelle speaks to her subordinates in a dispassionately clipped manner. From the get-go, we’re presented with the contrast between these people, where even if Michelle isn’t an alien, the class differences are so extreme that they almost might as well be different species.

Once Lanthimos establishes these patterns, Bugonia cuts to the chase. Teddy and Don kidnap Michelle outside her house, bring her back to their country home, and imprison her in the basement. From then on, we witness their interrogation of her and increasingly intense and bizarre manner of engaging with her. Michelle tries to get free. Teddy tries to get her to admit the truth, as he sees it. Will she escape? Is she actually an alien? This is where the central tension of the film lies.

However much the script teases the remote possibility that Michelle is actually an alien, most of the film hinges on the tense conversations between Plemons and Stone, with Delbis acting as the awkward witness. Plemons is fantastic here. He has always had an outsider intensity that is equally as effective at making him a plucky underdog (Friday Night Lights) as a creepy villain (Breaking Bad). Here, he seems to wed the two, such that his Teddy is creepy and deranged, but also sympathetic and even impressive in his ingenuity. His plot is remarkably in-depth. At first he seems like a run-of-the-mill schizophrenic whose delusions dictate his reality, but the deeper we get into the film, the more we start to wonder whether Teddy might know something we don’t.

Stone is equally effective, and playing at an unusual register for her. Typically, her performances are defined by pluck and humour masking deep wells of anxiety, but Michelle doesn’t seem like an anxious person. Even tied to a chair in a dingy basement and threatened with electrocution, she seems in control of the situation. She uses a lower register in her voice and controls her posture to such an extent that she radiates calm while Plemons radiates frustration.

I also have to commend the performance of Aidan Delbis, who is effective as Don, the hapless cousin who’s roped into Teddy’s plot, despite his half-hearted belief in it. An early scene where Teddy convinces Don to let him inject him with a substance which will chemically castrate him is horrifying, but Delbis underplays it like a sad child roped into doing something by a parent that they don’t understand. However, Don isn’t just a patsy here. Later, when he threatens Michelle with a shotgun, we start to comprehend that he’s capable of far more than mere passive acquiescence.

The performances dominate Bugonia as after the first act, the film is almost a chamber piece between Plemons and Stone in the basement, arguing over supposed alien plots, negotiating with each other, and putting on a proper face for the occasion so as not to let the other person think they can be manipulated. The strangeness of Teddy and Don’s plot also governs the proceedings. Lanthimos delights in the bizarre and the cruel, so his camera positively luxuriates over Teddy and Don shaving Michelle’s head (to cut off her ability to transmit to her mothership, of course...) or lathering her skin in cream (to make her invisible to scans, don’t you know?). No act of bizarre cruelty is too much for Lanthimos’s camera, as we’ve seen throughout the years, and so those with a queasy stomach or a low tolerance for torture best look elsewhere. Bugonia goes to some insane places, some more obvious than others, and the camera is there to make us experience that insanity in excruciating, close-up detail.

The element of Bugonia that is most baffling to me is the idea that it’s meant to be funny. Certainly, it’s normal to laugh at odd things happening on screen, but most of Bugonia is far more disturbing than humourous. Perhaps it’s just a matter of my reading too much into the commentary and publicity around the film that calls it a black comedy rather than the content of the film itself, but considering Tracy as the writer and Lanthimos as the director, there’s likely more than a bit of truth to the comic approach. If that’s the case, the effect was completely lost on me. I don’t think I laughed once at this dark vision of human desperation.

I’m often turned off by such sour depictions of humanity, and I will say that the grimness of Bugonia did try my patience near the end. But I also have to admit that I was engaged by the tension between Plemons and Stone and intrigued as to whether the film would boldly answer the question of whether Michelle is an alien or not. Bugonia is very much a Yorgos Lanthimos film in form, content, and tone, but more than many of his works, the subject matter and performances fit the presentation. A movie about such a bizarre view of the world deserves a skewed approach.

6 out of 10

Bugonia (2025, USA)

Directed by Yorgos Lanthimos; written by Will Tracy, based on Save the Green Planet! by Jang Joon-hwan; starring Emma Stone, Jesse Plemons, Aidan Delbis, Stavros Halkias, Alicia Silverstone.

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