Bugonia Review - Yorgos Lanthimos Builds a Hive of Paranoia
There’s a gaze in cinema – cold, comical, and surgical – that Yorgos Lanthimos has perfected over the years. His worlds tilt slightly off-kilter, offering absurdity as both mirror and hammer. With Bugonia, he tilts the lens toward the very real-world anxieties of conspiracy, corporate collapse, and the fracturing of our shared reality. The result is one of this year’s most unshakable films.
The premise is deceptively simple: Michelle Fuller (Emma Stone), the polished CEO of an expansive pharmaceutical company, is abducted by the eccentric, conspiracy-obsessed Teddy Gatz (Jesse Plemons) and his cousin Don (Aidan Delbis) who believe Michelle is an alien from Andromeda, bent on humanity’s ruin. Based loosely on the 2003 Korean film Save the Green Planet!, the remake channels Lanthimos’s trademark surrealism into a domestic nightmare, set in a run-down house, surrounded by beehives, paranoia, and the relentless buzz of impending doom.
What makes the film compelling is how it plays its dueling lead performances like a game of existential checkers. Stone’s Michelle begins as the archetype of corporate success: sleek, confident, cut-throat. Then Teddy shaves her head, locks her in his basement, and the transformation begins – not merely of hair, but of perspective. Stone fills the role with a cool, smoldering resilience, shifting gradually from self-assured executive to captive philosopher. Her icy detachment becomes a weapon. Meanwhile, Plemons gives Teddy a strange, sympathetic humanity even as he spirals deeper into his delusions. His rage is grounded in a lived injury: bees dying, pills consumed, a mother lost. Teddy is not just a madman – he’s a symptom.
Bolstered by cinematographer Robbie Ryan’s use of VistaVision, Lanthimos stages the confrontation with the precision of a chess-game in slow-motion. The script by Will Tracy privileges long-take interrogations, ideological duels, and dark humor over conventional plot momentum.
At its best, Bugonia draws you into two parallel collapses: that of a world-weary executive accustomed to control, and that of a man convinced the world has stolen his control. When Teddy shouts about “Andromedan code all over your Instagram,” the absurdity lands like a punch – and the film invites you to laugh, then recoil.
Thematically, the film indicts the mechanics of modern life: corporations that speak of transparency while profiting on pills, internet conspiracies spun like entertainment, environmental collapse framed as nuisance. The beehive imagery bleeds into the metaphoric: humanity busy, blind-eyed, complicit.
The film’s relentlessness – its refusal to let us lean comfortably into character or comfort – will appeal to some, exhaust others. The humor is dark, often brutal. Still, if Lanthimos is playing out his own fascination with control, power, disaffection and absurdity, then Bugonia stands as one of his most politically incisive films. And while it may not reach the heights of The Favourite or Poor Things, it remains a work of singular vision. Stone and Plemons elevate the material and the aesthetic is deeply felt, while the questions it asks linger long after the credits roll. Bugonia is a film that refuses to let you off the hook. It is unsettling, at times infuriating, but never forgettable.