Review: Bugonia

It takes a certain kind of filmmaker to look at the crumbling state of humanity and think, “We could be doing this faster.” Yorgos Lanthimos, patron saint of cinematic misanthropy, would like to help. His new film Bugonia, a deranged black comedy about conspiracy, corporate rot, and the human urge to dominate, feels at once like his most accessible work and his most venomous. It’s the kind of movie that smiles sweetly while the world burns down in the background.

Adapted (loosely, chaotically) from Jang Joon-hwan’s 2003 cult oddity Save the Green Planet!, Bugonia relocates its fable of paranoia and class warfare to rural America. There, Jesse Plemons’s Teddy, a grubby, anxious beekeeper who believes the global elite are aliens in disguise, hatches a plan with his cousin Donny (Aidan Delbis, quietly heartbreaking) to kidnap one such invader: Michelle Fuller (Emma Stone), the CEO of a biomedical empire. Teddy’s theory, derived from fringe podcasts and half-digested science, insists that Michelle hails from Andromeda and intends to eradicate mankind. Naturally, this requires a basement interrogation.

Lanthimos stages the abduction as slapstick farce, a shambolic ballet of duct tape, chloroform, and moral collapse. It’s funny until it isn’t, and then funny again in ways that make you feel bad about laughing. The first act alternates between Teddy’s rustic clutter, honey jars, broken radios, half-dead bees, and Michelle’s antiseptic McMansion, a portrait of capitalist detachment so pristine it practically squeaks. When these worlds collide, the film’s rhythm snaps into Lanthimos’s trademark register: slow, deliberate absurdity punctuated by bursts of hysteria.

Once Michelle is chained in the basement, Bugonia becomes a two-hander about delusion and complicity. Teddy interrogates her like a prophet trying to convert an unbeliever, while Michelle parries with the dead-eyed confidence of someone who’s never been told no. The power dynamics shift by the minute. Is Teddy the villain, or a righteous truth-teller driven mad by late capitalism? Is Michelle a victim, or just a different kind of monster? Lanthimos, true to form, refuses to decide.

Plemons is sensational here, sweaty, childlike, and terrifying all at once. His nervous tics and strangled mutterings evoke Travis Bickle by way of The Lobster. Stone gives Michelle an alien coolness that almost validates Teddy’s suspicions. Her wide, unblinking stare carries echoes of Dreyer’s Joan of Arc, a saint or a martyr, depending on your angle. The two actors play off each other with hypnotic precision, their exchanges ping-ponging between menace and mirth.

Cinematographer Robbie Ryan frames their war of words in stark, geometric compositions, Teddy shot from below, Michelle from above, underscoring both the class divide and the absurd theater of their standoff. The lighting shifts from bile-green to honey-gold, mirroring Teddy’s deteriorating psyche. Lanthimos’s usual visual excess is toned down here; he trades stylized perversity for something grimier, more tactile. The result is a film that feels almost uncomfortably plausible.

And yet Bugonia is never content to stay literal. Beneath the grime and giggles, it’s a film about faith, about what happens when the desire to believe in something righteous curdles into fanaticism. Teddy’s rants about poisoned bees, mind control, and government collusion sound laughable until they don’t. Michelle, meanwhile, weaponizes corporate jargon to deny her humanity, speaking in euphemisms so polished they might as well be lies. The two of them locked in their separate delusions, seem like perfect reflections of one another.

That mirroring extends to Lanthimos himself. Like his characters, he’s furious at the world but unsure what salvation looks like. The film’s structure, a three-day countdown to an apocalyptic lunar eclipse, suggests purpose, but the ending dissolves into ambiguity. Is the director mocking the conspiracists or vindicating them? Is he condemning Big Pharma or laughing at our need to assign blame at all? The answer, frustratingly, is yes.

For all its bile, Bugonia remains bleakly funny. Co-writer Will Tracy (The Menu) laces the script with deadpan exchanges that cut like razor wire, while the score hums like an electric fence. But there’s also fatigue in Lanthimos’s cruelty, a sense that his once-exhilarating cynicism has calcified into reflex. Every punchline is another wound. Every revelation circles back to the same point: humanity is hopeless.

Still, few filmmakers turn despair into such a precise instrument. Bugonia may not sting as sharply as The Favourite or soar as high as Poor Things, but its buzzing nihilism lingers. In Lanthimos’s hive, everyone is both beekeeper and drone, trapped in the same doomed colony, waiting for the smoke to clear.

3.5/5