Bugonia (2025)

Yorgos Lanthimos has made his most expensive film. It’s also, rather surprisingly, perhaps his most straightforward. Bugonia adapts Jang Joon-hwan’s 2003 South Korean cult oddity Save the Green Planet!, tracking two conspiracy theorists who kidnap a pharmaceutical CEO under the conviction that she’s an alien hellbent on planetary destruction. Yes, really.

The premise sounds absurd. It is absurd. But Lanthimos, working with his fourth collaboration with Emma Stone, uses that absurdity to ask genuinely uncomfortable questions about power, paranoia, and who gets to decide what counts as madness in a world that often seems genuinely mad.

Jesse Plemons plays Teddy Gatz, a beekeeper and conspiracy obsessive who, together with his autistic cousin Don (Aidan Delbis), abducts Michelle Fuller (Stone), CEO of the pharmaceutical behemoth Auxolith. They shave her head (allegedly how she communicates with her species), chain her in their basement, and begin an interrogation that forms the bulk of the film’s runtime. What could have devolved into torture-porn theatrics instead becomes a claustrophobic chamber piece about class rage, corporate sociopathy, and the thin line between justified anger and dangerous delusion.

The performances carry significant weight here. Plemons, frequently cast in variations of menacing normalcy, finds new layers in Teddy. He charts a devolution from self-assured interrogator to increasingly unhinged gunman, brandishing a shotgun like Pacino in Dog Day Afternoon. There’s real pathos underneath the paranoia. Stone, meanwhile, adopts the slippery vernacular of corporate doublespeak. Her passive-aggressive tone doesn’t just feel alien to Teddy’s world-view; it actively provokes him. You understand why he finds her maddening. Whether that makes her actually extraterrestrial remains, cleverly, beside the point.

Delbis deserves particular mention. His performance as Don provides emotional ballast when the film threatens to tip into pure nihilism. There’s genuine tenderness in how he navigates the story, offering perspective shifts that complicate our understanding of both the kidnapping and Teddy’s motivations. It’s grounded work in a film that could easily have spun off into pure abstraction.

Lanthimos makes a striking visual choice during the interrogation sequences. He shoots Plemons from below, Stone from above. With her shaved head and wide, unblinking eyes, Stone recalls Renée Jeanne Falconetti in The Passion of Joan of Arc. Why frame a pharmaceutical executive as a martyr? The question lingers throughout. Lanthimos refuses clean moral categories. Both parties occupy compromised ethical ground, and the film gains tension from its unwillingness to deliver easy judgments.

The thematic material resonates uncomfortably with our present moment. Corporate malfeasance, conspiracy theories metastasising online, the sense that institutional systems have failed ordinary people catastrophically. Teddy’s paranoia isn’t presented as baseless fantasy. His grievances have weight. The film acknowledges that rage without endorsing the methods it spawns. This feels important. Too often, stories about conspiracy theorists treat them as either comic relief or irredeemable villains. Lanthimos does neither. He examines how genuine suffering curdles into dangerous belief systems, and whether the powerful have earned the benefit of doubt we’re conditioned to grant them.

That said, the film stumbles occasionally. The middle section, confined largely to that basement, can feel repetitive despite the psychological warfare between Stone and Plemons. I also found myself wishing Lanthimos had trusted his imagery more. The commentary on pharmaceutical greed and economic inequality, though sharply observed, sometimes tips toward the obvious. We get it: corporations are rapacious, the system is broken, the powerful exploit the vulnerable. These are worthwhile observations, but they don’t need quite so much underlining.

Still, these are minor complaints. Robbie Ryan’s cinematography, captured on 8-perf 35mm film with VistaVision cameras, gives everything a tactile, almost grimy authenticity. The contrast between Michelle’s sterile modernist home and Teddy’s worn-down dwelling speaks volumes before anyone utters a word. Jerskin Fendrix’s score (allegedly composed around just four words: bees, basement, spaceship, Emily-bald) provides an appropriately unsettling soundscape. It’s dissonant without becoming overbearing, amplifying dread without announcing itself.

The film premiered at Venice to largely positive notices, and I think it deserves them. This is Lanthimos at his most furious, channelling genuine anger about how the world functions (or doesn’t) through his typically askew lens. It’s political without being preachy, absurd without being frivolous. In my opinion, that’s a difficult balance to strike, particularly when dealing with material this volatile.

Does the film have all the answers? No. Should it? Probably not. Bugonia operates more as provocation than prescription. It asks who we demonise and why, whether our institutions merit the trust we place in them, and what happens when that trust evaporates entirely. These aren’t comfortable questions. The film doesn’t pretend otherwise.

Whether Michelle is actually an alien becomes almost irrelevant by the end. The real horror is how easily we’ve created systems that feel genuinely inhuman, and how predictably those systems generate the very paranoia that threatens to tear everything apart. If that’s not worth 118 minutes of your time, I’m not sure what is.