Bugonia
A Review by Ava Bellows
Photo by Atsushi Nishijima/Focus Features/Atsushi Nishijima/Focus Feature - © Focus Feature
Bugonia
A review
by Ava Bellows
Bugonia is the kind of film you watch and then sit in silence through the credits because your body doesn’t know what to do yet: cry, laugh, scream, shrug, or just let it rot in your chest. Yorgos Lanthimos has made something bleak and absurd and painfully relevant, a film that doesn’t so much dissect modern despair as smear it across the lens and dare you to look anyway.
Photo by Atsushi Nishijima/Focus Features/Atsushi Nishijima/Focus Feature - © Focus Features
The plot, if you can call it that, follows a conspiracy theorist (Jesse Plemons, feral and tender) and his cousin as they kidnap a powerful CEO (Emma Stone, unnervingly calm) because they believe she’s an alien sent to destroy humanity. Which, fine, is obviously insane. Except, is it? That’s the question that throbs at the core of Bugonia, not whether these men are right, but why it feels so possible. The world is crumbling, the rich are thriving, and everything smells like rot. Who needs aliens when you have biotech CEOs smiling on magazine covers while the bees die and your mom can’t afford insulin?
Jesse Plemons as Teddy, Photo Courtesy of Focus Features © 2025 Focus Features, LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Plemons plays Teddy with the unwashed intensity of a man who has absolutely nothing left to lose, except the story that’s keeping him alive. He’s pathetic, terrifying, heartbroken. He’s every man who’s been ground down by the system and found refuge in the fantasy that he’s the only one awake. It’s a performance that aches, even in its ugliest moments.
Photo by Atsushi Nishijima/Focus Features/Atsushi Nishijima/Focus Feature - © Focus Features
And then there’s Emma Stone as Michelle, composed, clipped, capitalist. She plays it with such elegance that it’s easy to miss the cruelty underneath. Or maybe the cruelty is the elegance. Either way, her stillness is a perfect counterweight to Teddy’s unraveling. There’s something in her eyes that suggests she’s always been watching from the other side of the glass, and whatever pain the rest of us are feeling is just noise. If she’s an alien, she’s a good one. If she’s not, she might be worse.
This is a movie about people trying to make sense of suffering and how easy it is to reach for the wrong answers when the right ones are unbearable. There is real empathy here for the conspiracy-minded. Not approval, but understanding. When the world feels rigged, when your body is breaking and the air feels poisoned and your mother died for someone else’s stock price you need an explanation. Lanthimos knows that. And he knows how dangerous those explanations can become.
Photo by Atsushi Nishijima/Focus Features/Atsushi Nishijima/Focus Feature - © Focus Features
The film is also, let’s not forget, funny. In the way that makes you laugh while feeling gross about it. In the way that sounds like a scream if you listen too long. The score doesn’t help. It’s magnificent: mock-epic and operatic, swelling at all the wrong moments like we’re meant to cheer for collapse. And maybe we are. Because the way this film presents it, there’s no fixing this. There’s only understanding it… or not.
Bugonia is a class war dressed as sci-fi horror dressed as satire. It’s about how quickly people get written off as crazy instead of broken. It’s about the rich feeding on the poor with a PR smile. It’s about believing in something so hard it kills you. And it’s also about how believing nothing might be even worse.
This is one of those rare films that feels like it knows exactly what it’s doing even as it unravels. It doesn't hold your hand, doesn't let you off the hook, doesn't pretend to have answers. It just shows you a man chaining a woman to a bed because he’s scared of the future, and then dares you to figure out who the monster is.
I hated it. I loved it. I’ll be thinking about it for a long time.
WATCH TRAILER
Bugonia
DIRECTED BY yorgos lanthimos
very laboratory