This review was originally published out of the Venice International Film Festival on August 28, 2025. Bugonia is now in theaters.
Yorgos Lanthimos’s Bugonia began life as a remake of the 2003 South Korean film Save the Green Planet!, and it retains the broad outlines of that strange classic. But it also feels like Lanthimos through and through, albeit with the strangest of twists: It’s the first picture of his populated by characters who feel like they exist in the real world, people you could run into if you walked out the door. The power of Lanthimos’s work has always come from his ability to provide surreal but dead-on metaphors that take on lives of their own: a futuristic resort where one must debase oneself to find a mate, in The Lobster; or a family where the parents have trained their kids to accept absurdities as reality, in Dogtooth. With Bugonia, it feels like he’s entered our world at last, at least for a while. Which also makes it maybe the saddest film he’s ever made.
Bugonia, which premieres at the Venice Film Festival and will release in theaters in October, is basically a two-hander, albeit with three central characters. Teddy (Jesse Plemons) and his neurodivergent cousin Donald (played by newcomer Aiden Delbis) live in a ramshackle house in the woods where they keep bees and are methodically preparing for a shocking act: They will kidnap high-powered, slick-suited pharmaceutical-company executive Michelle (Emma Stone) and hold her hostage until she confesses that she’s an alien who has been sent to experiment on humans. “Welcome to the headquarters of the human resistance,” they declare after shaving her head and taking off her blindfold. Teddy wants Michelle to contact her mothership and take them to her queen, with whom he intends to negotiate for the aliens’ withdrawal from Earth.
Teddy has done his research. He’s studied all the YouTube videos and photos and he’s gathered all the necessary information, and he knows exactly what these aliens are and what their ships look like; the good-natured though not entirely convinced Donald goes along with him out of loyalty and love, and also because Teddy seems like the one person who treats him as an equal. Michelle, meanwhile, is at a loss to how to react: She’s a tough, wealthy power player, the kind of person who does martial arts in the morning and doesn’t take any shit from anyone. And she has no idea how she’s going to convince these kooks to let her go.
Lanthimos has guided multiple actors, including these, to some of the best performances of their careers (Stone won an Oscar for 2023’s Poor Things, and Plemons won the Best Actor award at Cannes for Kinds of Kindness last year), so it seems weird to say that Bugonia is also his first film to feel like a true showcase for his stars. But it is: The movie unfolds as a series of confrontations between Teddy and Michelle, her increasingly insistent desperation crashing against the rocks of his languorous immovability. Stone is remarkable (when is she not?), emotionally wriggling like a bug pinned to a wall, trying different tactics with this psycho. First, she’s calm and controlled and confident; then, she tries kindness and pliancy. Plemons’s laid-back confidence is bone-chilling initially. But he also has to fuel our ire, earn our pathos, and maybe even provoke some twinges of solidarity. The characters in Lanthimos’s films don’t really go on traditional emotional journeys. We, the audience, do.
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The director’s work has always turned on humiliation and power trips. (Think of The Favourite and how beyond all its ornate rituals and ironclad hierarchies, the line between power and disgrace remained so tenuous.) Bugonia is no different. If what Teddy is saying is true, Michelle would be a more powerful being than he could ever dream of. And yet, he needs it to be true. He needs to explain his own powerlessness, even as he seemingly holds her life in his hands. If she is, in fact, an emissary from an alien race, then the degradations of his life will finally make sense. “We are not steering the ship, Don,” he tells his cousin. “They are.” It’s hard not to sense the slightest bit of hope amid all that outrage.
Gradually, we learn what lies at the root of all this. Surreal flashbacks show us how Teddy’s ill mom (Alicia Silverstone) suffered at the hands of Michelle’s company, how the empty corporate platitudes offered in exchange for his family’s horror merely confirmed his belief that there was more to what was being said and what had been done. Bugonia’s narrative trajectory is, on one level, a predictable but resonant one, as we slowly learn to accept Teddy’s irrational actions as a response to a fundamentally irrational world. But we also see that the only thing that will lead to resolution and a way out of this mess is, well, more humiliation.
So, that describes most of the movie. Bugonia heads in, let’s say, a different direction as it reaches its conclusion. (If you’ve seen Save the Green Planet!, you’ll know where it’s going.) While these developments aren’t exactly new or shocking — some viewers will probably find them predictable — they actually bring the world of this film further into Lanthimos-land. His style is Olympian on the surface, the ironic detachment of his pictures casting a cold, curious eye at humanity’s follies and derangements. But this coolness is a ruse, and he always lets the sadness peek through, making it clear that he is, after all, one of us. By the time Bugonia is over, with a series of beautiful and haunting images that seem to come out of nowhere, we understand that beneath its bemused dispassion lies a deep longing for connection. Early in the film, Teddy looks at his dying bees and sees similarities with humanity: “A dead colony atomized in a trillion directions with no way home again.” By the end, it’s clear the director has seen the same thing.
