Hey readers,
Bugonia is a ferociously strange, darkly funny, and unexpectedly moving sci‑fi black comedy that takes Yorgos Lanthimos’ fascination with human cruelty, delusion, and power to a new, more overtly political place.
Plot and premise.
The film follows Teddy, a traumatised, conspiracy‑obsessed beekeeper, and his cousin Donny, who kidnap Michelle Fuller, the hyper‑successful CEO of a biotech corporation they are convinced is an alien intent on wiping out humanity.
Over three increasingly unhinged days before a looming lunar eclipse, they interrogate and torture her in a cluttered cellar, trying to “prove” her extra-terrestrial nature and force her to call off the apocalypse they believe she’s planning.
Lanthimos uses this outlandish premise to keep the audience off balance: the more Teddy lays out his theories, the harder it is to dismiss his paranoia entirely, because the evidence of corporate and environmental rot outside the cellar walls feels painfully familiar.
The film drip‑feeds revelations about both captor and captive, pushing viewers to constantly revaluate who is victim, who is monster, and whether those categories even hold in a world built on exploitation.
Performances and characters.
Emma Stone and Jesse Plemons anchor Bugonia with two of the year’s most compelling performances, embodying characters who are simultaneously repellent and deeply human.
Stone’s Michelle spends much of the film shaved, shackled and smeared in ointment, yet she never loses an air of haughty control; she weaponises corporate jargon and psychological manipulation as effectively as any sci‑fi death ray.
Plemons, meanwhile, makes Teddy a genuinely tragic figure, a grubby, obsessive loner whose grief and trauma have metastasised into a worldview where violence feels like the only rational response.
Around them, Aidan Delbis brings a jittery innocence to Donny, caught between loyalty and dawning horror, while Stavros Halkias’ apparently comic policeman slowly becomes a far more poignant presence than his casting suggests.
The ensemble works because Lanthimos never lets anyone be just a symbol; every character is ridiculous, but every character is recognisably human, too.
Style, tone, and direction.
Visually, Bugonia is unmistakably Lanthimos: the camera prowls through low ceilings and cluttered rooms, turning the cellar into a suffocating maze where reality itself seems slightly skewed.
Robbie Ryan’s cinematography finds queasy beauty in fluorescent hum, peeling paint and bee boxes, while Jerskin Fendrix’s score layers on a paranoid thrum that keeps even the quietest moments vibrating with unease.
When the film finally bursts out into the stark white volcanic landscape of Sarakiniko Beach for its climactic stretch, the shift in geography feels like a spiritual rupture as much as a visual one.
Tonally, the film is a tightrope walk between grim horror and deadpan absurdity, and it mostly nails the balance.
Scenes of brutal captivity are punctured by bizarre sight gags, off‑kilter line deliveries and long, awkward silences that build laughter and dread at the same time, making the audience complicit in the film’s constant oscillation between empathy and revulsion.
Themes and ideas.
Beneath the kidnapping plot, Bugonia is seething with ideas about capitalism, climate collapse, and the seductive logic of conspiracy theories.
Teddy’s cosmology of evil aliens is transparently a way of making sense of an economic system that chews up people and ecosystems alike, yet the film refuses to treat him as merely deluded; in a world of toxic spills, worker exploitation and ecological freefall, who wouldn’t start looking for an inhuman intelligence behind the curtain.
Michelle, by contrast, embodies the way power justifies itself, spinning every atrocity as “innovation”, every sacrifice as necessary progress, even while her company profits from environmental devastation.
The title itself, echoing the mythical practice of generating bees from a slaughtered bull, hints at the film’s fixation on whether anything living and hopeful can emerge from a carcass of violence.
Bugonia keeps asking whether radical action in the face of extinction is heroic, insane, or both, and it never settles on a comforting answer; its final movements are deliberately maddening, forcing viewers to sit with the possibility that humanity might not deserve a neat redemption arc.
How it compares and overall verdict.
As an English‑language remake of the South Korean cult film Save the Green Planet!
Bugonia stays true to the core setup while filtering it through Lanthimos’ own brand of chilly surrealism and his ongoing collaboration with Emma Stone.
Compared to the more fragmented Kinds of Kindness, this feels like a sharper, more focused return to form, with a single, propulsive narrative that still leaves room for philosophical detours and grotesque humour.
For viewers:
* Fans of Lanthimos’ The Favourite and Poor Things will likely revel in Bugonia’s dark wit and moral perversity, though its cruelty and bleakness are dialled up a notch.
* Newcomers may find the tonal shifts jarring and the ending divisive, but those willing to ride out the weirdness will discover one of 2025’s most distinctive, argument‑starting films.
Bugonia is not an easy watch, but it is a bracing one: a film that laughs at humanity’s stupidity even as it mourns what that stupidity has cost, and that lingers long after the credits as a question more than an answer.
Cheers for reading X
No comments