Yorgos Lanthimos finds the personal in the political – and vice versa – in Bugonia, reuniting with Emma Stone and Jesse Plemons for a sci-fi conspiracy thriller that examines our current moment through an aptly dark comedic lens. In his follow-up to the somewhat underseen 2024 triptych Kinds of Kindness, the director returns to a more conventional narrative structure while retaining the provocative qualities that have made Lanthimos such a singular filmmaker.
Based on Jang Joon-hwan’s 2003 South Korean film Save the Green Planet!, and adapted for Lanthimos by The Menu‘s Will Tracy, Bugonia is a pointedly contemporary reframing of the source material as a sociopolitical and existential parable. Plemons is captivating as Teddy, a rural beekeeper whose conspiracy-laden ideology has taken a violent turn since his mother (Alicia Silverstone) fell into a coma – the result of an experimental drug trial offered by Auxolith, a pharmaceutical company whose use of harmful pesticides may have contributed to her illness. Teddy enlists his loyal and impressionable cousin Don (scene-stealing newcomer Aidan Delbis) to help him kidnap Auxolith CEO Michelle Fuller (Stone), whom Teddy believes is secretly part of an alien race intent on destroying our planet.
The idea that powerful billionaires are actually aliens on a mission to destroy humanity is an attractive theory – it would explain their more inhumane qualities, their utter lack of empathy for the majority of the population, and their inability to relate to the working-class. It’s certainly a more easily digestible explanation than the hideously banal truth. It’s not that the wealthiest and most powerful people in the world are somehow incapable of humanity; they can just afford a reality in which 99% of humanity is a pesky abstraction they choose to ignore. Auxolith is, like its real-life corporate analogs, omnipresent: Teddy works in an Auxolith packing facility, and the economy of his entire rural town is dependent on the company. To the extent that there is a conspiracy afoot, it’s the ways in which corporations are allowed a monopoly on so many aspects of our lives, including our income, housing, and healthcare.
Plemons gives a steely, unnerving performance as Teddy, whose off-putting vibe is matched by Stone’s cunning subversions. From the outset, Lanthimos and Stone present Michelle as the Terminator of girlbosses, a CEO who’s concerned with much more than appearances and surfaces. She regularly trains in physical combat and has a pretty extensive health and fitness regimen that makes her initial capture – a hilarious sequence featuring Teddy and Don in cheap Jennifer Aniston masks – much more difficult than anticipated. Stone has always been a brilliant physical performer, but in Bugonia, as with Poor Things, she’s proven herself a master of her own physicality in ways that transcend mere comedic utility.
Teddy and Michelle’s tense sparring matches comprise the bulk of Bugonia, which functions in part as a character study of guys like Teddy – emotionally repressed men who fall down ideological rabbit holes on the internet, flitting from one extreme to the next, and becoming increasingly isolated in their search for answers; their lack of emotional literacy eventually calcifying into nihilism and violence. Teddy believes that his mission, to prove that humanity is worth saving, is a hopeful one. How he achieves that goal, however, is fraught with violence and a refusal to engage with his so-called enemy in good faith.
You could say the same of Michelle, whose attempts to defuse the situation smack of artifice and echo her introductory scene, in which Michelle recites a bunch of pleasant corporate jargon for an internal human resources video about embracing diversity. As Michelle points out, the more she repeats the word, “diversity,” the less it sounds like anything at all. Compassion has never been a core value of corporations, which only perform humanity when it’s materially advantageous to do so – not unlike an alien attempting to blend in among human beings.
In certain respects, Bugonia is adjacent to Ari Aster’s Eddington, another facet of a prism reflecting and refracting our contemporary political era. As such, it’s hardly surprising that Aster produced Bugonia, or that screenwriter Will Tracy is among Eddington‘s producers. Lanthimos’ film implies that Teddy, like Emma Stone’s Lou in Eddington, was abused by his father. Both characters have complicated relationships with conspiracy-minded mothers, and both are desperate to find meaning in a world that’s filled with senseless violence and indifferent to their suffering. Teddy and Lou are righteous characters whose sense of justice has been skewed by systems that betrayed them, and though their coping mechanisms – conspiracy-driven violence, joining a cult that preys on abuse survivors – are difficult to identify with, it’s much easier to empathize with the parts of them that were victimized.
As Bugonia builds to its bloody, bleakly comedic climax, there’s an inclination to interpret Lanthimos’ perspective as nihilistic, a warm embrace of the end of humanity’s great failed experiment. But consider the origins of the film’s title: In Mediterranean agricultural lore, “Bugonia” was a ritual based on the idea that entire colonies of bees could spontaneously spawn from the carcass of an ox or cow; from death springs new life. Beneath his violence and extremist ideology, Teddy ultimately believes a better world is possible. He’s just a worker bee who’s become unmoored from the colony and can’t find his way back home. For bees, and perhaps people, isolation is a death sentence.
- Release Date
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October 31, 2025
- Runtime
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118 minutes
- Director
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Yorgos Lanthimos
- Writers
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Will Tracy, Jang Joon-hwan
- Producers
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Ed Guiney, Andrew Lowe, Emma Stone, Lars Knudsen, Miky Lee, Ari Aster, Jerry Kyoungboum Ko
