Director Yorgo Lanthimos’ Bugonia, his latest blending of social commentary, dark comedy, light surrealism, and thriller elements, is as bleak as movies tend to get. Belonging to the same 2025 class of movies depicting divided American culture as Ari Aster’s Eddington and Luca Guadagnino’s After the Hunt, Bugonia is another treatise about how the world is eating itself to death in the post-truth era. Taking its title from a Greek myth that bees could spontaneously be birthed from a corpse and leaning heavy into a metaphor that shadows colony collapse disorder, Bugonia has a lot to say about mob mentality, conspiracy culture, and an echo chamber on every corner, but it does so via a minimal number of characters and settings that keeps its opinions and philosophies from growing unwieldy. It’s a lot to take in, but in Lanthimos’ hands, feeling awful about the state of the world is uniquely entertaining.
Small town Georgia warehouse worker and amateur beekeeper Teddy (Jesse Plemons) has grown fed up with the state of the world, and he’s determined to do something about it, with the help of his kindhearted, but easily swayed and neurodivergent cousin, Don (autistic actor Aiden Delbis in an outstanding, brave debut performance). Haunted by the fate of his mother (Alicia Silverstone), Teddy his convinced his cousin that a secret race of aliens disguised as humans are at the heart of all society’s problems, from crop loss to flagging self-esteem. Teddy believes that Michelle Fuller (Emma Stone), the CEO of a successful pharmaceutical company, is a high ranking alien who’s in touch with the mothership. (No air quotes needed on that, since that’s what he truly believes.) Teddy and Don concoct a bizarre kidnapping scheme that barely succeeds, abducting Michelle, cutting off all her hair (because that’s how the aliens communicate), slathering her with antihistamine ointment (to dull her powers), and demanding that she set up a meeting with her leader to talk about taking back the Earth. Understandably confused, but concerned for her own life, Michelle tries to talk her way out of the situation, only to learn that there’s absolutely no reasoning with Teddy.
The script from Will Tracy (The Menu) is a reworking of the cult favourite 2003 South Korean film Save the Green Planet!, albeit updated to better fit the current cultural climate and shift in location. Bugonia is made for an age where people live comfortably in the echo chambers they create for themselves, shaped by lies they’ve been fed, notions they concoct out of nothing, and past experiences that have left them jaded and looking for someone or something to blame. Bugonia unfolds in a world where human beings refuse to take responsibility for their own actions or lack thereof. Nothing is their fault, and no one needs to apologize for anything. “Heightened awareness” becomes a sickness that can drag people and the loved ones around them down into an emotional and mentally damaging abyss.
Plemons is electrifying as Teddy, embodying the most ardent kind of fundamentalist; the sort that can’t be talked to because they hold even their most contradictory beliefs to be sacred and immutable. Teddy dislikes technology, but can’t conduct any of his various tests on the terrified Michelle without it. He takes his hostage to task for damaging the food supply, but subsists on the kind of high fat, heavily processed junk that he should be railing against. He genuinely believes in his doctrine, but is only leading a cult of 2 (1.5 if we’re being honest, as Don never seems totally convinced by his cousin’s more volatile stances). Plemons plays Teddy with the physicality of a trapped, feral animal; cunning, dangerous, and unwilling to admit that they need help.
Bugonia is a kidnapping movie told from the perspective of the abductors, not the captor, but Stone holds up her end of Lanthimos’ dark bargain perfectly. Stone imbues Michelle with a requisite amount of fear, paranoia, and frustration, but also reminds the viewer that she is a wealthy elite who gets by on having a strong presence and not a shred of humility. Plemons and Stone make for such a great team precisely because their mentalities operate on similar wavelengths, despite wildly differing ideologies. They are both to blame for the decline of civilization, but neither wants to admit that.
Bugonia feels like the flip side to the aforementioned Eddington in its depiction of two opposing forces that insist they’re right about everything despite being wrong about a lot. At one point, out of frustration with Teddy’s circular arguments and refuting of known truths, Michelle shrugs and sarcastically blurts out “well, who’s to say?” That one line sums up a lot of what’s going on in more mainstream courting confrontational cinema at the moment. Lanthimos (Poor Things, The Favourite, The Killing of a Sacred Deer) often hints at a lot of similar themes in his films, but Bugonia is the first project of his where all of this is out in the open and on full display amid a small town southern aesthetic. While the film does conveniently dance around certain points for the sake of larger reveals, Lanthimos stages the film in a unique way that parcels out information about the characters in an engaging manner.
The story unfolds not through a lot of long, elaborate takes, but lengthy scenes that force Plemons, Stone, and Delbis to lock into their performances like they’re live on stage. Bugonia is an argumentative film in tone and by design, with the score swelling like a Spielberg film whenever Teddy believes he’s at his most righteous and riled (effectively framing him as a hero in his own mind), and dropping out almost entirely when things turn dark or violent. Bugonia is a film where the divide between reality and fantasy is constantly blurred less through actions and more through carefully measured dialogue.
But with all of its narrative ingenuity and desire to provoke, Bugnoia functions better as a mainstream leaning thriller than it does as a heady dark comedy. And while the closing stages are suitably bleak, nihilistic, depressing, and genuinely shocking to behold, I’m not entirely convinced that Bugonia has achieved much of anything by the time it wraps up. In its own way, the film takes a bold, but easy way out of things, shrugging off everything that came before it just like Michelle does when confronted by Teddy’s perpetual needling. Is this a movie that has something to add to “the conversation” or does it just want to point out that there is “a conversation.” Well, really, who’s to say?
Bugonia opens exclusively in Toronto at Cineplex Varsity on Friday, October 24, 2025. It expands to additional cities and theatres on Friday, October 31.
