Bugonia (dir. Yorgos Lanthimos)

by Jack Martin | Oct 28, 2025

Certificate: 15

Running Time: 120 mins

UK Distributor: Universal Pictures

UK Release Date: 31 October 2025

WHO’S IN BUGONIA?

Emma Stone, Jesse Plemons, Aidan Delbis, Stavros Halkias, Alicia Silverstone

WHO’S BEHIND THE CAMERA?

Yorgos Lanthimos (director, producer), Will Tracy (writer), Ari Aster, Ed Guiney, Lars Knudsen, Jerry Kyoungboum Ko, Miky Lee, Andrew Lowe and Emma Stone (producers), Jerskin Fendrix (composer), Robbie Ryan (cinematographer), Yorgos Mavropsaridis (editor)

WHAT’S IT ABOUT?

A powerful CEO (Stone) is captured by a conspiracy theorist (Plemons) who’s convinced she’s an alien…

WHAT ARE MY THOUGHTS ON BUGONIA?

It doesn’t seem like a coincidence that Yorgos Lanthimos’s most acclaimed films to date are ones where he had no part in the screenplay. While there’s no doubt that the Greek filmmaker is a visionary director, his writing style leaves a bit to be desired, for there is an overwhelming dryness in how he presents his oddball story and overly blunt dialogue which, whether it’s Dogtooth or The Lobster or last year’s Kinds of Kindness, causes him to struggle when crafting a narrative designed to elicit some kind of emotion. Luckily for films like The Favourite and Poor Things, he brought Tony McNamara on board to do the writing for him, and in both cases, it landed him much wider acclaim.

With McNamara seemingly busy writing the script for The Roses, a film that itself could have benefited from Lanthimos’s much darker directorial style, has now recruited Will Tracy – a co-writer of The Menu, making this the far better solo-penned outing for that film’s writers than Seth Reiss’s A Big Bold Beautiful Journey – to adapt the South Korean film Save the Green Planet! into Bugonia, an ever-so-slightly more conventional remake that, once again, showcases the director’s visual talents much better than his writing skills. It is also, albeit in an absolutely bonkers way, a lot of fun, even if it’s not exactly among his best overall work.

Similar to the original film, Bugonia focuses on a young man named Teddy (Jesse Plemons), a hardcore conspiracy theorist who strongly believes that aliens from the neighbouring Andromeda galaxy are not only living among the human population but have assumed major roles in society that allow them to control minds and keep humanity in a state of submission. Along with his autistic cousin Don (played by Aidan Delbis who is actually neurodivergent, so points to Bugonia for the representation), Teddy puts into motion a plan that sees them kidnap Michelle Fuller (Emma Stone), the high-powered CEO of a giant pharmaceutical company that Teddy is convinced is a top-ranking member of the alien overlords that might be about to authorise the planet’s destruction. Coating her body in antihistamine lotion, to prevent unwanted contact with extraterrestrial pheromones, and shaving her hair off due to her assumed ability to contact her species with it, Teddy and Don imprison Michelle in their basement where they attempt to convince her not to destroy the planet… if, indeed, she is as alien as they so believe.

It’s a barmy premise, albeit not quite as wild as the ones that Lanthimos has brought into existence in the past, which the filmmaker is having a good amount of fun executing, even if it is on a much smaller scale than he’s used to working with. Much of Bugonia takes place among these three characters, to where it could almost be a chamber piece if there weren’t any other major locations, with Tracy’s enjoyably eccentric dialogue laying the foundations for an uneasy threesome, particularly among Teddy and Don whose familial bond is both endearing and also quite disturbing (one of their first scenes sees them undergoing chemical castration together, to help repress sexual urges toward their soon-to-be captive). Plemons, who excels as the utterly deranged lead conspiracist, has a calm and calculated way of convincing his impressionable sidekick of the insane theories he’s seemingly plucked from the ether, which makes it all the more frightening that such unbelievable concepts can be so easily mistaken for truth, particularly in today’s era of AI-generated misinformation.

Their twisted dynamic is constantly put to the test by Stone’s Michelle, whom the actor – now on her fourth collaboration with Lanthimos – is unsurprisingly great at leaning into her own brand of absurdity under the director’s vision. In scenes of her character attempting to negotiate with her kidnappers or, long before she’s abducted, delivering a cold video statement on company-wide diversity, Stone presents a firmly poised conviction that is so eerie and, dare I say it, alien-like that you’re never entirely sure until the last moment whether she’s being genuine or playing along just to save her own skin. Most times it’s clearly the latter, but the actor is by this point well-versed in Lanthimos’s irreverent style to a degree where her poker face has made it nearly impossible to immediately tell what’s truly going on in her mind.

There’s much less of the director’s overtly surrealist visuals in Bugonia, though regular cinematographer Robbie Ryan is still present to add some unnerving, almost Kubrickian imagery lathered in intentionally unappealing colours within numerous soulless environments. However, Lanthimos still retains a gleefully nihilistic tone that makes much of the movie grimly entertaining, including and especially what has to be a contender for the year’s gutsiest ending. The director is having fun playing around with certain genre tropes and expectations, while inserting plenty of his signature droll energy into Tracy’s dialogue that makes certain lines much funnier and sometimes extremely unnerving. Much of that fun rubs off on the viewer as they, too, enjoy stepping into a world that can turn gruesomely violent at the drop of a hat, yet is still weirdly compelling enough to make you want to see how certain things play out, even if it means occasionally sitting through a number of ill-advised decisions made by characters who, despite the faux-knowledge they possess, should know better by this point.

While it’s a bit more straightlaced than the director’s more inventive pieces, Bugonia is an entertainingly bleak dark comedy that may not be out of this world, but is certainly well within the orbit of planet Lanthimos.

SO, TO SUM UP…

Bugonia is a bonkers but entertaining new entry by Yorgos Lanthimos who brings his delightfully nihilistic style to Will Tracy’s enjoyable script and excellent central performances by Emma Stone and Jesse Plemons, though a more straightlaced manner than usual from this director doesn’t quite bring it to the top of his unique filmography.