Reviewed on 28th August at the 2025 Venice International Film Festival – In Competition, 118 Mins.
Cast: Emma Stone, Jesse Plemons, Aidan Delbis, Stavros Halkias, Alicia Silverstone
Genre: Comedy, Crime, Sci-Fi
Director: Yorgos Lanthimos
In Irish Cinemas: 31st October 2025
Is there any modern filmmaking duo as thrillingly unpredictable as Yorgos Lanthimos and Emma Stone? Over the last ten years, the Greek provocateur and his fearless collaborator have built a creative rapport that borders on the telepathic — a partnership that thrives on discomfort, absurdity, and the sublime. Together they’ve birthed a venomous court comedy (The Favourite), a Frankensteinian feminist fantasia (Poor Things), a triptych of existential despair (Kinds of Kindness), and even a wordless, black-and-white opera experiment (Bleat, 2022). Their newest venture, Bugonia, once again proves that when Lanthimos and Stone meet, the collision isn’t just sparks — it’s spontaneous combustion.
Stone plays Michelle Fuller, the icy CEO of Auxolith Biosciences — a corporate apex predator dressed in tailored armour. She weaponises charm and condescension in equal measure, the kind of executive who promotes “mental wellness weeks” while slyly praising the overworked for their “passion.” Imagine a pop star’s glittering self-empowerment anthem reinterpreted as a quarterly earnings call.
But Michelle’s kingdom is beginning to rot. Enter two reclusive brothers: Teddy (Jesse Plemons), an obsessive beekeeper nursing apocalyptic grievances, and Don (Aidan Delbis), his dim yet zealous accomplice. They’re convinced Michelle isn’t human — that she’s an extraterrestrial from the Andromeda system, sent to exterminate humanity (and, more urgently, the world’s bees). Their deranged plan? Abduct her, shave her head on camera — yes, Stone goes through with it — and force a confession from their captive alien queen.
Lanthimos wields this ludicrous premise as a scalpel, dissecting the sickness of contemporary life. Teddy’s mix of paranoia, self-loathing, and cosmic righteousness evokes the internet’s darkest corners — an unholy fusion of incel, conspiracy prophet, and ecological doomsayer. Yet he isn’t played for mockery; beneath his lunacy festers grief, metastasised into ideology. Robbie Ryan’s cinematography renders their worlds as clashing nightmares: the brothers’ home is all grime and suffocating shadows, while Michelle’s glass-and-steel offices gleam with antiseptic menace. Both are prisons, just decorated differently.
A loose adaptation of Joon-Hwan Jang’s 2003 cult gem Save the Green Planet!, Bugonia unfolds like Misery rewritten by a nihilist environmentalist. Jerskin Fendrix’s score veers between operatic splendour and discordant panic, underscoring a verbal cage match that shifts from satire to metaphysical showdown. As the power dynamic fractures, the film dares its audience — like Teddy himself — to ask an unnerving question: what if the lunatic has a point?
Beneath its grotesque humour and hostage-thriller framework, Bugonia thrums with allegory. Teddy’s dying beehives mirror a planet in decay — an elegy for collapsing ecosystems, for empathy corroded by fear. What begins as Lanthimos’s most approachable film in years mutates into something viciously unpredictable: funny, feral, and steeped in despair.
It may not reach the unhinged delirium of Poor Things or the suffocating dread of Kinds of Kindness. Still, Bugonia cements the Lanthimos–Stone collaboration as one of cinema’s boldest ongoing experiments — two artists pirouetting on the edge of madness and revelation. May their beautiful derangement continue to sting.
Overall: 8/10
Movie Reviewer
