Coming off last year’s disappointing anthology film Kinds of Kindness, the fifth teaming of director Yorgos Lanthimos and Emma Stone is a return to form, a dizzying, batshit-crazy story that ranks right up there with the filmmaker’s best films: Poor Things, The Favourite, Dogtooth and The Lobster. Each has a surreality in common with this one, Bugonia (the title referring to an ancient Greek belief in the birth of bees from dead cows), that also is insanely pertinent to the misinformation age of today and conspiracy-theorist nutjobs living in the deepest crevices of the internet and their own basements.
With bravura turns from both Stone, yet again pulling out all the stops, and a magnificently unhinged Jesse Plemons, who won the Cannes Best Actor prize for playing three different roles in Kinds of Kindness, this film lives on the edge of complete absurdity but with just enough credibility in its wildest moments to give it a place of honor in the paranoid thriller genre. But it’s one you might also call a very dark comedy because Lathimos’ works are never so easily defined.
Here Plemons plays Teddy, a disgruntled guy who blames the world for his own miserable life but seems ready to act on his belief that the ecological disasters of the modern world, the opioid experiment that put his mother into a permanent coma and his own failures are really the work of Michelle, the uber-slick corporate CEO of a pharmaceutical bioengineering company. Teddy, who also is a beekeeper, as we see at the beginning of the film, and his shy cousin Don (Aidan Delbis) set out to kidnap her, convinced she is really an alien sent to destroy Earth.
Their goal is to meet her ship and get her back to where she came from. They corner her in the driveway of her plush home, tie her up and take her back to Teddy’s remote childhood home, now a lonelier place with his mother permanently hospitalized. On Teddy’s orders, Don shaves off her hair as she lays flat on a slab, only to awaken to find she has been abducted.
What ensues is a dialogue-heavy relationship as Michelle slowly has to rely on her wits to stay alive, all the while trying to get on the same wavelength as this clearly disturbed person who is, as he says, now “the one in charge.” Teddy identifies with the dead-end bees he tends to, workers who are simply tossed aside by society. You could almost suspect Teddy is MAGA without that political persuasion ever named, largely because he spouts similar conspiracy theories that have put him in such an unstable state. Soon it is revealed he even has a menial job at Michelle’s company, making this crime all the more plausible. He’s a low-level employee with huge resentment of the big boss, believing she is causing all this damage to the environment because she really is from another planet. Why not?
In some ways similar to Stephen King’s Misery, the cat-and-mouse game that convenes between the two is fascinating, with Plemons going all in to put a sadly pathetic human face to this guy, almost to the point you feel for him, misguided though he is. And that goes for his cousin Don, who slowly starts to see that maybe they are in over their head, that absconding with this important executive who was even on the cover of Time magazine is not a good idea. Nothing, however, is going to convince Teddy that his theory is wrong or that he is just going down a rabbit hole to nowhere. Meanwhile, Michelle is toying with him, trying to convince him that very important people are out there right now looking for her and that it all won’t end well.
There is so much dialogue — all of it sharp and piercing — that this could work just as well as a stage play, but Lanthimos has infused it with a strong visual look using the virtually abandoned VistaVision cameras (also used last year in the Oscar-winning The Brutalist), and with his cinematographer Robbie Ryan creates pure cinematic magic. The spot-on production design by James Price also helps to make this fantastical premise rock.
Lanthimos and his screenwriter Will Tracy, inspired by the 2003 Korean film Save the Green Planet, unquestionably have tapped into the season of discontent for many who feel left behind and taken it to an elevated level with twists and turns that will keep you on the edge of your seat waiting to see what could possibly come next. Stone, who won her second Oscar in Lanthimos’ Poor Things , smartly creates a portrait of this brilliant woman whose company took a left turn but now claims she is righting the ship, something Teddy will never believe because, well, she’s a f*cking alien. Plemons is simply next level in this one, a balls-out performance of high wacko dimension that somehow manages to be grounded in humanity, even pathos for this poor thing. Newcomer Delbis is perfectly cast in his debut, quietly questioning what Teddy is doing but still realizing he is the only person in the world who is looking out for his welfare. Also turning up late in the game is Casey, a local cop nicely played by Stavros Halkios.
Bugonia may be way out there, but I haven’t seen a film this year that feels as much of the moment for a world spinning out of control. It is indeed pure entertainment, but we should pay attention to what it is trying to say.
Producers are Ed Guiney, Andrew Lowe, Lathimos, Stone, Ari Aster, Lars Knudsen, Miky Lee and Jerry Kyoungboum Ko.
Title: Bugonia
Festival: Venice (Competition)
Distributor: Focus Features
Release date: October 24, 2025
Director: Yorgos Lanthimos
Screenwriter: Will Tracy
Cast: Emma Stone, Jesse Plemons, Aidan Delbis, Stavros Halkios, Alicia Silverstone
Running time: 2 hr
