‘Bugonia’ review: Emma Stone and Jesse Plemons are dynamite in explosive Yorgos Lanthimos thriller

Dir: Yorgos Lanthimos. UK. 2025. 118mins

In a world of fake news, just what can — and should — you believe? Filmmaker Yorgos Lanthimos takes that simple, painfully resonant idea and runs with it in a film that proves by turns hilarious, grotesque and sharply satirical. Lanthimos regulars Emma Stone and Jesse Plemons are terrific as two individuals on opposite sides of an ideological chasm, and there’s a great deal of the macabre playfulness of previous Lanthimos works. But the film’s grounding in a nightmarish reality gives it a directness which propels the narrative, and makes its wickedly leftfield denouement all the more satisfying.

  A serious message delivered in typical Lanthimos style

Premiering in Venice competition, Bugonia comes hot on the heels of Kinds Of Kindness, which debuted at Cannes in 2024 (winning Plemons Best Actor), and Poor Things, which won the Venice Golden Lion in 2023 before taking home four Oscars, including Best Actress for Stone. (Lanthimos’s 2018 feature The Favourite also won star Olivia Colman an Oscar in 2018.) This latest work is a more straightforward, scaled-down Lanthimos – it’s essentially a chamber piece with three players – but retains the director’s absurdist outlook and long-standing fascination with power, isolation and control. (It also shares something of a thematic sensibility with the recent Eddington, whose director, Ari Aster, produces here.) Lanthimos’ growing legion of fans certainly won’t be disappointed when Bugonia rolls out globally through Universal from October 31, and Stone and Plemons could find themselves in another awards conversation.

The film opens with a disorienting blend of dischordant tones and the buzzing of bees, foreshadowing the themes of paranoia and natural balance (or imbalance) which concern Lanthimos and screenwriter Will Tracy – who was inspired by 2023 South Korean feature Save The Green Planet and wrote the script during the Covid19 pandemic. Indeed, the film takes its name from the ancient Mediterranean belief that bees were generated from a cow’s carcass.

Deep in the rural American heartland (actually shot on an estate in the English countryside), Teddy (Plemons) is an amateur apiarist at the run-down home he shares with his cousin Don (Aidan Delbis). The local area has the air of a once vibrant community fallen on hard times. An immediate connection is made with this ailing town and the plight of the bees who, as Teddy explains in voice over, are vital to our environmental health, and are dying out in record numbers.

Teddy believes that the responsibility for this natural genocide lays squarely at the feet of big pharmaceutical companies and their harmful chemicals. Determined to redress the balance, Teddy convinces Don to help him kidnap Michelle (Emma Stone), the high-profile CEO of local pharma corporation Anxolith. After securing Jennifer Aniston face masks to conceal their identity and indulging in some half-hearted physical training, they somehow manage to grab Michelle and lock her in their basement with the intent of making her confess “the truth”.

Unfortunately for Michelle, the truth that Teddy wants to hear is that she is, in fact, an alien from Andromeda, whose race is intent on overthrowing humanity. Hours spent watching YouTube videos and listening to podcasts have intensified Teddy’s conspiracy theories to a violent degree. He insists that Don shave Michelle’s head – these aliens use their locks to communicate with the mothership, he explains – and slather her in antihistamine cream that will block her ability to emotionally control them.

A woman trapped in a basement with two deluded, aggressive men is an uncomfortable set-up familiar to many horror movies, and Lanthimos take delight in playing with this trope. In her fifth collaboration with Lanthimos, Stone (who also produces) ensures that Michelle is no helpless victim. She is ferocious as a poised, meticulous woman, who has total confidence in her own intelligence. The fact that the character is intended as an embodiment of the traditional ideals of logic and reason (and, of course, comfortable consumerism) may be obvious, but there’s an elegance to the way in which Stone mines vulnerability and then desperation as Michelle realises these tenets are completely null and void in this outlandish scenario.

For all his ranting and raving, Plemons brings plenty of depth to Teddy, a man who has locked himself down in the wake of past traumas – hinted at in off-kilter flashbacks of an ill mother (Alicia Silverstone) and a visit from a creepy former babysitter-turned-local cop – but has finally found the answers he has been looking for. Teddy is also a victim, isolated, overlooked by society and forced into action that, he believes, will save the human race – and himself. Lanthimos is careful, though, not to give Teddy an easy out for his behaviour. Here, Don acts as something of a bellwether, his interactions with Michelle making him doubt Teddy’s assertions of who she is. He simply does not know what to think.

Lanthimos wants his audiences to feel the same uncertainty, and the film sustains a delicious tension throughout. In this battle of wits between this well-dressed, carefully-controlled woman and this pony-tailed, irrational bumpkin, we know who we are supposed to believe. But can we? Should we? The score from composer Jerskin Fendrix (returning from Poor Things and Kinds Of Kindness) amps up this unease. Working with the London Symphony Orchestra, he melds traditional swelling strings with grittier, edgier tones, speaking both to Teddy’s heroic ambitions and the dirty truths that lie underneath.

Shooting in immersive VistaVision, cinematographer Robbie Ryan (who also lensed The Favourite and Poor Things) captures the messy isolation of Teddy and Don’s home, in which textured ’90s-inspired production design from James Price gives the sense of a life on pause. It’s a stark contract with the faceless, futuristic monolith of the Anxolith headquarters and the gleaming modernity of Michelle’s palacial pad. The gulf here is clearly not just one of ideology; the film also speaks to social fractures caused by class, privilege and economic opportunity.

Ultimately, though, Bugonia is about the impending apocalypse and the fact that, whether it comes through environmental catastrophe or civil war, it is likely entirely avoidable. It’s a serious message delivered in typically entertaining Lanthimos style and hammered home via a bravura climax which manages to be both gonzo and gut-wrenching in equal measure.