Emma

Editor’s Note: This review was originally published during the 2025 Venice Film Festival. Focus Features releases “Bugonia” in select theaters on Friday, October 24 before a wide release October 31.

Imagine if Michael Haneke’s “Funny Games” were instead about a pair of lone-wolf, conservationist vigilantes trying to save the world instead of two sociopathic twinks wanting to tear it down, and you’ll have some idea of the hyper-contained, rigorously controlled torture chamber that is Yorgos Lanthimos’ “Bugonia.”

Jesse Plemons stars as a galaxy-brained conspiracist beekeeper who’s either severely mentally ill or the only prophet among us, hijacking his cousin (Aidan Delbis) into a scheme to kidnap a big pharma executive (Emma Stone) whom he believes to be a body-snatched alien sent to end the planet.

Lanthimos works from an on-the-nose-for-the-now feature screenplay by “Succession” and “The Menu” writer Will Tracy, diverting from the droll theater of cruelty present in scripts by Efthimis Filippou (“Kinds of Kindness”) or the florid repartee of Tony McNamara (“The Favourite,” “Poor Things”). “Bugonia” has all the streak of Tracy’s kill-the-rich brand of satire, but with the Greek Oscar-nominated filmmaker interrogating the potential performativity of such capitalist-fighting crusades.

That’s because Lanthimos brings to this film his signature stamp of perverse detachment, though without the fish-eyed lenses this harrowing time around depravity’s merry-go-round. Recall that the most unexpectedly mainstream-friendly film of his career, “Poor Things,” revealed a tender, even hopeful side to the “Killing of a Sacred Deer” and “Dogtooth” director known for his clinical stance on humankind’s worthiness; “Kinds of Kindness,” though, snapped us back into his grim worldview with a trio of nihilistic tales about mental manipulation.

“Bugonia” falls somewhere between that film, “The Killing of a Sacred Deer,” and “The Lobster” in terms of both its double-sided callousness toward and guarded optimism about our willingness or ability to reverse course.

It’s both a funny, fucked-up trifle — one that hurtles toward a hilariously unsubtle, “Burn After Reading”-esque note of we-learned-nothing existential futility — and an earnest message movie for our disintegrating present, a warning that we are probably too late to effect any real change on the world we so vaingloriously messed up. Accusations of Lanthimos veering toward the twee of late (or always) apply less to “Bugonia,” which has no shortage of onscreen entrails or a torture scene set to, of all songs, Green Day’s “Basket Case.”

Lanthimos’ tenth feature would have been more consistently engaging, a real home run, as a 90-minute movie as opposed to two hours that encroach on a tedious overplaying of their themes. But would it then seem important enough? “Bugonia” is either profound or profoundly silly. It’s also both.

This time, Lanthimos takes a stab at a remake, faithfully re-mounting, save for a few significant changes, Jang Joon-hwan’s 2003 Korean sci-fi movie “Save the Green Planet!” Ultimately, this film’s absurd existentialist deadpan aligns Lanthimos’ work here closer to Ruben Östlund than ever — himself a filmmaker likely drawing from Lanthimos these days — to mine the comedy of repetitious futility to disorienting effect.

Social burnout Teddy lives in the kind of paranoiac’s hovel where the windows are papered over by tinfoil, and where you can all but feel the bugs crawling over you, while not working as a factory lackey for biomedical company Auxolith in middle-of-depressing-nowhere U.S.A. He maintains multiple beehives in his backyard, obsessing over the colony collapse disorder that threatens not just his bees, but all of them everywhere. Is his property the control room of a hoped-for utopia, or an unkempt truther’s hell-hole bunker? You decide.

At the top of the Auxolith’s pyramid is decorated CEO Michelle Fuller. She keeps a picture with Michelle Obama in her office, but bristles at the language of DEI training while knowing well enough to put on a placid, phony smile and encourage her employees to, sure, head home by 5:30 p.m. — one of many requisite gestures of pity toward her underlings that, dear God no, should not be understood by them as compulsory. One of those “we care about our employees” little treats of false gratitude that always comes with an asterisk, a footnote, and then that other footnote.

Anyone who’s been a cog in the corporate world can resonate with the hollow ring of Michelle’s posturing, as if a gun was put to her head by a committee demanding she do better. In the boardroom, she’s all for socially conscious messaging around her company’s questionable medical advancements, but off the clock, when she’s not popping mystery pills and singing to Chappell Roan in her shiny SUV, she has no trouble sleeping at night despite her company having destroyed lives with a vanguard opioid-withdrawal medication that backfired.

Teddy is one such casualty of Auxolith’s pioneering biotechnology, with his mother (Alicia Silverstone) now in a coma bed with tubes attached after a drug trial gone wrong. So it makes sense that the chosen target of his master plan is Michelle herself. Jacked up on steroids, Teddy and his dutiful, clearly exploited cousin Don stage a home invasion, drugging and kidnapping Michelle to drag her back to Teddy’s disheveled outpost. Lanthimos and cinematographer Robbie Ryan stage and shoot said home invasion like a Jacques Tati sequence — that is to say, from an amused, ironic distance that watches humans squirm and scramble without intervention. Though, of course, Lanthimos not intervening or getting too close to the action is its own sort of intervention, doing by not doing.

But “Bugonia” will eventually rub your face much closer into viscera and shrapnel and other bodily horrors. Emma Stone actually shaved her head for the movie, appearing to do so on camera with commendable, unfazed dedication to the task, as Teddy and Don hold Michelle hostage, and she starts to play along with the idea that, yeah, sure, she might be an extraterrestrial sent to our Earth to wreak havoc. Anything to get her out of those damned chains, and convince Teddy to loosen his tightening grasp, hell-bent on Michelle withdrawing her supposed species from Earth before the next lunar eclipse. Is Teddy insane, or actually onto something? The film is clever in how it constantly shifts our allegiances, and its own.

“Bugonia” is fascinating in contrast to a film like “Kinds of Kindness,” which Lanthimos shot almost as a lark, a slice of escapism from the large-scale demands of “Poor Things,” with a minimalist crew and set. His latest film is even more scaled-down — until it isn’t — than “Kinds of Kindness,” serving almost as a stagelike chamber drama wrought on Super 35 and VistaVision. The canvas may be small, but Lanthimos colors inside the lines with grandeur, treating the deceptively walled-up material with the application of a bigger-budget studio project.

Stone is predictably great, but her Michelle Fuller is closer to her spiraling flip-anthropist in TV’s “The Curse” than the can’t-take-her-down feminist Bella Baxter of “Poor Things.” Lanthimos’ skepticism of humankind’s capacity to evolve is a welcome comfort, as always, in our politically miserable era, but it feels familiar. Some hot-button jokes land better than others, though “Bugonia” is always questioning the ideology on either side. Teddy confesses to having tried alt-right, “alt-lite,” Marxism, you name it, with no costume quite fitting his mentally collapsing outlook. There’s a great line in which Teddy calls college education a “credentialist scam for laundering privilege,” and it’s spoken so convincingly that it makes you wonder, well, isn’t it?

A superb and unvarnished Plemons, who played a cherub-faced corporate drone in one of three roles in “Kinds of Kindness,” slims down and goes gaunter and more manic, physically and emotionally, than ever to play a borderline-psychopathic conspiracy head with sadistic tendencies. And don’t count out Stavros Halkias in a Paul Walter Hauser-type performance as Teddy’s childhood babysitter who’s now the town cop. When cops show up at the door for a wellness check at an ongoing, in-the-basement hostage situation at any house in the movies, well, we know how that story ends.

The timely urgency of “Bugonia” could be identified from outer space unless you’ve been living under a celestial object these days, as rogue vigilantes taking down corporate bigwigs have, in a post-2020 world, turned into the folk heroes dominating headlines and activating internet warriors. That’s not to say “Bugonia” carries an empowering message: If anything, it’s distrusting in humanity’s ability to rise above our own failures, arguing that while it’s not too late to turn things around, we probably won’t anyway.

Grade: B

“Bugonia” premiered at the 2025 Venice Film Festival. Focus Features will release the film in select theaters on Friday, October 24 and widely on Friday, October 31. 

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