There’s something eerily familiar about Bugonia. You walk into it expecting aliens, government secrets, maybe a few tinfoil hats. What you get instead is a slow, surgical dissection of human desperation. Yorgos Lanthimos isn’t really interested in outer space here. He’s far more fascinated by the space between people — the invisible distance where fear festers and empathy quietly dies.
The film reimagines the 2003 Korean cult favourite Save the Green Planet! for our paranoid age. Jesse Plemons plays Teddy, a lonely man who spends far too much time online, convinced he’s discovered a terrible truth: that a biotech CEO, Michelle Fuller (Emma Stone), isn’t human. He and his equally unhinged partner decide to kidnap her. The plan is ridiculous. The conviction is not.
From the moment Michelle wakes tied to a chair in a fluorescent-lit basement, Bugonia starts turning the screws. We’re never sure what’s real. Maybe she is an alien. Or maybe the monsters are already human.
Faith Without Proof
Plemons has rarely been better. His performance is a slow bleed — full of nervous pauses, half-finished sentences, and the dull panic of someone who’s convinced the world has lied to him. He’s not a villain, just a man who’s lost the ability to tell faith from madness. Stone meets him head-on, radiating both arrogance and fragility. Her calm is hypnotic; every line lands like a test she knows she’ll pass. Watching them circle each other feels like watching a fever dream unravel in real time.
Lanthimos films their exchanges as if he’s documenting a ritual. He doesn’t rush, doesn’t blink. The silences are the story. When the words finally come, they sound like echoes from some other world.
A Cold, Controlled Nightmare
Visually, the film is exquisite in a way that’s hard to enjoy. Robbie Ryan’s cinematography makes everything feel too clean, too perfect. The colour palette — silver, ash, milk white — drains the blood out of the frame. It’s corporate horror: sleek, symmetrical, suffocating. You start to feel that if the camera moved even slightly, the whole fragile illusion would collapse.
There’s almost no music, just a low industrial hum that sits under the dialogue like tinnitus. The effect is maddening. It’s the sound of a society running on empty.
Lanthimos’ Sharpest Edge Yet
Fans of The Favourite or Poor Things might be startled by how restrained this is. Bugonia doesn’t wink or smirk. It doesn’t need to. Lanthimos has stripped away every trace of irony, leaving only the raw mechanics of belief and control. The humour — and there is humour, dark and sour — comes from recognition. We’ve all met people like Teddy. Some of us are Teddy, scrolling endlessly through an apocalypse of our own making.
What makes the film so unsettling is how plausible it feels. The absurd premise folds into a world that looks disturbingly like ours: a planet powered by algorithms, paranoia, and private delusions. By the final act, you stop asking whether Michelle is an alien. The more pressing question is why you ever needed her to be.
The Alien Is Us
There’s a legend hidden in the title — bugonia, the ancient belief that bees could be born from the carcass of a dead bull. Lanthimos uses it as metaphor: life crawling out of decay, truth growing from rot. It’s grotesque and beautiful all at once, like the film itself.
Watch the Bugonia (2025) movie clips
The last ten minutes are almost silent. No grand revelations, no moral speeches. Just a slow, aching realization that the real invasion already happened. It’s us. We did it. We colonized our own humanity until nothing felt real anymore.
So What Are We Left With?
Bugonia isn’t a film you “like.” It’s a film you wrestle with. It doesn’t want to entertain you; it wants to infect you. Lanthimos has made something hypnotic and cruel and strangely moving — a study of belief turned toxic, of empathy buried beneath logic. It’s bleak, yes, but it’s also weirdly cathartic. You walk out of it shaken but awake.
