Bugonia Movie Review

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.​

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.​

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.​

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.​

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.​

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.​

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.​​

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.​

Bugonia Movie Review Grade

Grade: B+