Yorgos Lanthimos’ films are either something you love or you leave the theater asking WTF did you just watch. But for me, I love his work. It’s delightfully original and unpredictable (though I did predict the ending in this one—as there are some easter eggs for you to pay attention to throughout). With “Bugonia,” Lanthimos delivers a wonderfully weird film that does a superb job of conveying a powerful cultural message about corporate greed, environmental collapse, and the dangerous allure of conspiracy thinking.
This is Lanthimos at his most provocative, crafting a darkly comedic thriller that feels uncomfortably timely in our current age of misinformation and ecological crisis (not to mention all the talk and conspiracy around 3I Atlas this week and the question of whether or not we’re alone in the universe). The film asks thorny questions about power, exploitation, and whether humanity is worth saving at all… questions that linger long after the credits roll.
Bugonia Movie Review
So, What’s Bugonia About?
Bugonia follows Teddy Gatz (Jesse Plemons), a sweaty, paranoid beekeeper and conspiracy theorist who believes Earth is under the control of aliens from the Andromeda galaxy. Working a menial job at a pharmaceutical warehouse while tending to his backyard bee farm, Teddy has fallen deep into the rabbit hole of online conspiracy theories. He’s convinced that Michelle Fuller (Emma Stone), the ruthless CEO of the company he works for, is actually an alien intent on destroying humanity through colony collapse disorder… the mysterious phenomenon killing off bee populations worldwide.
Enlisting his impressionable teenage cousin Don (Aidan Delbis), who is on the autism spectrum, Teddy kidnaps Michelle and confines her in their dilapidated basement. What follows is a claustrophobic psychological battle as Teddy attempts to torture a confession out of Michelle. At the same time, Michelle is using every manipulation tactic in her corporate playbook to try to escape. The film is loosely based on the 2003 South Korean cult classic Save the Green Planet! by Jang Joon-hwan, but screenwriter Will Tracy (Succession, The Menu) reimagines it for our current moment of conspiracy culture and corporate malfeasance.
The setup sounds bonkers… and it absolutely is… but Lanthimos grounds the absurdity in real anxieties about class exploitation, environmental destruction, and the sense that ordinary people have been abandoned by a system that doesn’t care about them. Teddy may be unhinged, but his rage isn’t entirely misplaced.
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Bugonia Movie Trailer
Bugonia Movie Review: What I Liked and Didn’t Like
What I found most thrilling about Bugonia is how expertly Lanthimos keeps you off-balance throughout. For most of the runtime, we’re led to believe that Teddy is simply a dangerous, paranoid individual losing his grip on reality. Michelle’s denials seem entirely reasonable. However, Lanthimos plants subtle clues that prompt you to question everything. Is she playing him? Is she actually an alien? The film walks this tightrope with remarkable dexterity, and that ambiguity becomes the source of tremendous tension.
While Bugonia is largely successful, there are moments where it doesn’t quite work. Some of the supporting characters feel underdeveloped, particularly Stavros Halkias as a bumbling, inappropriately sexual cop investigating Teddy’s home. The character provides occasional comic relief but feels like a vestige from an earlier draft that doesn’t quite fit the film’s increasingly dark trajectory.
The film’s structure, which is divided into three acts marking the days until the lunar eclipse when Teddy believes Michelle’s mothership will arrive, sometimes makes the pacing feel uneven. Certain sequences in the basement drag on, though the psychological warfare between Stone and Plemons remains compelling throughout. There are also several plot threads that feel frustratingly unresolved, including aspects of the pharmaceutical company’s broader operations and some of the conspiracy theories Teddy references, but the film never fully explores.
Photo Credit: Focus Features
The Script
Will Tracy’s screenplay is wickedly sharp, filled with darkly comic dialogue that cuts to the bone. The conversations between Teddy and Michelle function as ideological sparring matches. He’s convinced she represents alien overlords destroying the planet, while she insists she’s just a businesswoman making difficult decisions. What makes these exchanges so effective is that both characters have valid points buried beneath their rhetoric.
Tracy, whose work on Succession and The Menu demonstrated his talent for skewering the ultra-wealthy, brings that same satirical edge to this project. Michelle’s corporate doublespeak, offering employees the “option” to leave work at 5:30 pm while making it clear no one should actually take that option, rings painfully true. The script doesn’t let her off the hook for the exploitation her company engages in, even as it acknowledges Teddy’s response is unhinged.
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The title itself carries layers of meaning that deepen the film’s themes. “Bugonia” refers to an ancient Greek belief that bees could spontaneously generate from the corpses of cattle… a ritual of death creating new life. It’s a perfect metaphor for the film’s central question: can something good emerge from something rotten? Can humanity be redeemed, or must it be sacrificed for Earth to survive?
Tracy’s script is most effective when exploring how conspiracy thinking emerges from legitimate grievances. Teddy isn’t wrong that pharmaceutical companies have caused immense harm, that wealth inequality has skyrocketed, or that bee populations are collapsing. Where he goes wrong is misidentifying the source… blaming aliens rather than recognizing the systemic forces actually responsible. It’s a pointed commentary on how conspiracy theories often start with real problems before spiraling into fantasy.
The dialogue crackles with tension and dark humor. When the chained-up Michelle pleads, “Can we have a dialogue, please?” and Teddy shoots back, “Don’t call it a dialogue. This isn’t Death of a Salesman,” it’s both genuinely funny and revealing about how each character views their predicament. Tracy’s ear for how people talk past each other, each trapped in their own worldview, gives the film much of its unsettling power.
Photo Credit: Focus Features
The Acting
The performances are nothing short of extraordinary. Stone and Plemons, reuniting after they collaborated on last year’s Kinds of Kindness, create an electric dynamic that feels like watching two master chess players trying to outmaneuver each other. Stone turns in what might be a career-best performance, which is saying something for a two-time Oscar winner. Even with her head shaved and covered in antihistamine cream (Teddy believes this prevents her from communicating with other aliens), she commands every frame with fierce intelligence. Her take on Michelle alternates between haughty corporate speak, desperate bargaining, and calculating manipulation, and Stone makes each shift feel completely authentic.
Plemons delivers an absolutely towering performance as Teddy, making him simultaneously terrifying and heartbreakingly pitiable. He embodies the sweaty paranoia of someone who has lost themselves in conspiracy theories, yet Plemons never lets us forget the wounded soul underneath. When we eventually learn the personal tragedy that fuels Teddy’s vendetta – his mother (Alicia Silverstone in a brief but haunting appearance) fell into a coma after participating in one of Michelle’s company’s disastrous drug trials – his actions take on a devastating new dimension.
But the real heart of the film belongs to Aidan Delbis as Don, making his feature film debut at age 19. Playing a character who, like himself, is autistic, Delbis brings an understated innocence that serves as the film’s emotional anchor. Don loves his cousin Teddy. He’s the only family he has, but he’s deeply uncomfortable with the violence and increasingly questions whether what they’re doing is right. Delbis holds his own against two powerhouse actors, and his performance is so moving that Lanthimos reportedly teared up on set for the first time in his career.
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The Visuals
The film’s visual approach, captured by cinematographer Robbie Ryan using the high-resolution VistaVision format, creates an intensity that perfectly matches the material. The stark contrast between Michelle’s sterile corporate world and the ramshackle decay of Teddy and Don’s home becomes a visual metaphor for the class divide at the film’s core. The basement torture sequences are lit with harsh, unforgiving brightness, making everything feel uncomfortably exposed, while the flashback sequences adopt a dreamlike black-and-white aesthetic.
Photo Credit: Focus Features
Overall Thoughts
Bugonia is Lanthimos’ most accessible film, which is saying something for a movie about conspiracy theorists kidnapping a CEO they believe is an alien. Unlike the baroque excess of Poor Things or the anthology structure of Kinds of Kindness, this is a relatively straightforward three-character chamber piece. But don’t mistake accessibility for simplicity. This is still deeply weird, frequently disturbing, and builds to one of the boldest endings I’ve seen in recent cinema.
The film’s final act delivers the kind of gut-punch twist that recontextualizes everything that came before. Without spoiling specifics, I’ll say that if you’ve been paying attention to the clues Lanthimos plants… you might see the ending coming. I certainly did, and it made the ending land even harder because of how meticulously it’s been set up.
What makes the conclusion so effective is that it doesn’t offer easy answers or comfort. This isn’t a film about heroes triumphing over evil. It’s about systems of power, cycles of violence, and the question of whether humanity has become too corrupted to save. The final images, which I won’t describe here, are haunting and deeply pessimistic about our collective future. Some viewers will find it nihilistic; I found it bracingly honest about the state of the world.
Bugonia isn’t perfect. Some subplots feel underdeveloped, the pacing occasionally drags, and not every tonal shift lands perfectly. But when it works, which is most of the time, it’s thrilling, thought-provoking, and genuinely unpredictable. The performances are career-defining, the visual approach is striking, and the themes feel urgently relevant.
For longtime Lanthimos fans, this is a return to the harsher, more uncompromising style of his earlier Greek films after the relative accessibility of The Favourite and Poor Things. For newcomers, it’s probably his most approachable work, even if “approachable” is a relative term. Either way, it’s essential viewing for anyone interested in cinema that challenges and provokes rather than simply entertains.
SHAKA: A STORY OF ALOHA is shared with the audience by investigator Steve Sue in a calm and charming manner, but this documentary tells a powerful, positive and fascinating story. The “hang loose” thumb, pinky sign that originated in Hawaii and carries many meanings is the focus of this film. I just learned this gesture is called a “Shaka” and has a worldwide impact. And, there are Shaka Contests. Who knew? And how do you throw a Shaka? For me, […]
Just when you think that you’ve seen and heard all sides of the human migration debate, and long after you fear that the cruel, the ignorant and the scapegoaters have won that shouting match, a film comes along and defies ignorance and prejudice by both embracing and upending the conventional “immigrant” narrative.
“I Was a Strranger” is the first great film of 2026. It’s cleverly written, carefully crafted and beautifully-acted with characters who humanize many facets of the “migration” and “illegal immigration” debate. The debut feature of writer-director Brandt Andersen, “Stranger” is emotional and logical, blunt and heroic. It challenges viewers to rethink their preconceptions and prejudices and the very definition of “heroic.”
The fact that this film — which takes its title from the Book of Matthew, chapter 25, verse 35 — is from the same faith-based film distributor that made millions by feeding the discredited human trafficking wish fulfillment fantasy “Sound of Freedom” to an eager conservative Christian audience makes this film something of a minor miracle in its own right.
But as Angel Studios has also urged churchgoers not just to animated Nativity stories (“The King of Kings”) and “David” musicals, but Christian resistence to fascism (“Truth & Treason” and “Bonheoffer”) , their atonement is almost complete.
Andersen deftly weaves five compact but saga-sized stories about immigrants escaping from civil-war-torn Syria into a sort of interwoven, overlapping “Babel” or “Crash” about migration.
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“The Doctor” is about a Chicago hospital employee (Yasmine Al Massri of “Palestine 36” and TV’s “Quantico”) whose flashback takes us to the hospital in Aleppo, Syria, bombed and terrorized by the Assad regime’s forces, and what she and her tween daughter (Massa Daoud) went through to escape — from literally crawling out of a bombed building to dodging death at the border to the harrowing small boat voyage from Turkey to Greece.
“The Soldier” follows loyal Assad trooper Mustafa (Yahya Mahayni was John the Baptist in Martin Scorsese Presents: The Saints”) through his murderous work in Aleppo, and the crisis of conscience that finally hits him as he sees the cruel and repressive regime he works for at its most desperate.
“The Smuggler” is Marwan, a refugee-camp savvy African — played by the terrific French actor Omar Sy of “The Intouchables” and “The Book of Clarence” — who cynically makes his money buying disposable inflatable boats, disposable outboards and not-enough-life-jackets in Turkey to smuggle refugees to Greece.
“The Poet” (Ziad Bakri of “Screwdriver”) just wants to get his Syrian family of five out of Turkey and into Europe on Marwan’s boat.
And “The Captain” (Constantine Markoulakis of “The Telemachy”) commands a Hellenic Coast Guard vessel, a man haunted by the harrowing rescues he must carry out daily and visions of the bodies of those he doesn’t.
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Andersen, a Tampa native who made his mark producing Tom Cruise spectacles (“American Made”), Mel Gibson B-movies (“Panama”) and the occasional “Everest” blockbuster, expands his short film “Refugee” to feature length for “I Was a Stranger.” He doesn’t so much alter the formula or reinvent this genre of film as find points of view that we seldom see that force us to reconsider what we believe through their eyes.
Sy’s Smuggler has a sickly little boy that he longs to take to Chicago. He runs his ill-gotten-gains operation, profiting off human misery, to realize that dream. We see glimpses of what might be compassion, but also bullying “customers” and his new North African assistant (Ayman Samman). Keeping up the hard front he shows one and all, we see him callously buy life jackets in the bazaar — never enough for every customer to have one in any given voyage.
The Captain sits for dinner with family and friends and has to listen to Greek prejudices and complaints about this human life and human rights crisis, which is how the worlds sees Greece reacting to this “invasion.” But as he and his first mate recount lives saved and the horrors of lives lost, that quibbling is silenced.
Here and there we see and hear (in Arabic and Greek with subtitles, and English) little moments of “rising above” human pettiness and cruelty and the simple blessings of kindness.
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“I Was a Stranger” was finished in 2024 and arrives in cinemas at one of the bleakest moments in recent history. Cruelty is running amok, unchecked and unpunished. Countries are being destabilized, with the fans of alleged “strong man” rule cheering it on.
Andersen carefully avoids politics — Middle Eastern, Israeli, European and American — save for the opening scene’s zoom in on that Chicago hospital, passing a gaudily named “Trump” hotel in the process, and a general condemnation of Syria’s Assad mob family regime.
But Andersen’s bold movie, with its message so against the grain of current events, compromised media coverage and the mostly conservative audience that has become this film distributor’s base, plays like a wet slap back to reality.
And as any revival preacher will tell you, putting a positive message out there in front of millions is the only way to convert hundreds among the millions who have lost their way.
Rating: PG-13, violence, smoking, racial slurs
Cast: Yasmine Al Massri, Yahya Mahayni, Ziad Bakri, Omar Sy, Ayman Samman, Massa Daoud, Jason Beghe and Constantine Markoulakis
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Credits: Scripted and directed by Brandt Andersen. An Angel Studios release.
Running time: 1:43
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About Roger Moore
Movie Critic, formerly with McClatchy-Tribune News Service, Orlando Sentinel, published in Spin Magazine, The World and now published here, Orlando Magazine, Autoweek Magazine
The Tiger Is the Tank. Or rather, the type of German tank that gives the film its international title—just in case anyone might confuse this war story with an adventure movie involving wild animals. The tank itself is the film’s container, much as The Boat was in the legendary 1981 film it openly seeks to emulate in more than one respect, or as the more recent tank was in the Israeli film Lebanon (2009). Yes, much of Dennis Gansel’s movie unfolds inside a tank called Tiger, but what it is ultimately trying to tell goes well beyond its cramped metal walls.
This large-scale Prime Video war production has been described by many as the platform’s answer to Netflix’s success with All Quiet on the Western Front, the highly decorated German film released in 2022. In practice, it is a very different proposition. Despite the fanfare surrounding its release—Amazon even gave it a theatrical run a few months ago, something it rarely does—the film made a far more modest impact. Watching it, the reasons become clear. This is a darker, stranger movie, one that flirts as much with horror as with monotony, and that positions itself less as a traditional war film than as an ethical and philosophical meditation on warfare.
The first section—an intense and technically impressive combat sequence—takes place during what would later be known as the Battle of the Dnieper, which unfolded over several months in 1943 on the Eastern Front, as Soviet forces pushed back the Nazi advance. Der Tiger is the type of tank carrying a compact platoon—played by David Schütter, Laurence Rupp, Leonard Kunz, Sebastian Urzendowsky, and Yoran Leicher—that miraculously survives the aerial destruction of a bridge over the river.
Soon afterward—or so it seems—the group is assigned a mission that, at least in its initial setup, recalls Saving Private Ryan. Lieutenant Gerkens (Schütter) is ordered to rescue Colonel Von Harnenburg, stranded behind enemy lines. From there, the film becomes a journey through an infernal landscape of ruined cities, corpses, forests, and fog—a setting that, thanks to the way it is shot, feels more fantastical than realistic.
That choice is no accident. As the journey begins to echo Apocalypse Now, it becomes clear that the film is less interested in conventional suspense—mines on the road, the threat of ambush—than in the strangeness of its situations and environments. When the tank plunges into the water and briefly operates like a submarine, one may reasonably wonder whether such technology actually existed in the 1940s, or whether the film has deliberately drifted into a more extravagant, symbolic territory.
This is the kind of film whose ending is likely to inspire more frustration than affection. Though heavily foreshadowed, it is the sort of conclusion that tends to irritate audiences: cryptic, somewhat open-ended, and more suggestive than explicit. That makes sense, given that the film is less concerned with depicting the daily mechanics of war than with grappling with its aftermath—ethical, moral, psychological, and physical.
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In its own way, The Tank functions as a kind of mea culpa. The platoon becomes a microcosm of a nation that “followed orders” and committed—or allowed to be committed—horrific acts in its name. The flashbacks scattered throughout the film make this point unmistakably clear. The problem is that, while these ideas may sound compelling when summarized in a few sentences (or in a review), the film never manages to turn them into something fully alive—narratively, visually, or dramatically.
Only in brief moments—largely thanks to Gerkens’s perpetually worried, anguished expression—do those ideas achieve genuine cinematic weight. They are not enough, however, to sustain a two-hour runtime that increasingly feels repetitive and inert. Unlike the films by Steven Spielberg, Wolfgang Petersen, Francis Ford Coppola, and others it so clearly references, The Tank remains closer to a concept than to a drama, more an intriguing reflection than a truly effective film.
