Bugonia
Yorgos Lanthimos (2025)
It’s true the critical and commercial success of The Favourite (2018) and Poor Things (2023) set the bar high, but Yorgos Lanthimos’ latest isn’t going down quite as well as they did. I don’t like Bugonia but prefer it to those predecessors, whose fantastical décor and imagery – for many admirers – helped cushion Lanthimos’ misanthropy (aka ‘dark humour’). According to Wikipedia, this new film (at $45m-$55m) was substantially more expensive to make than Poor Things ($35m) or The Favourite ($15m). The black comedy sci-fi label attached to Poor Things has been attached to Bugonia, too. Yet much of its action takes place, in the present day, in the basement of a dismal house in Fayette County, Georgia, where one of the two main characters holds the other hostage. The setting, the sustained tense dialogue and the fine lead performances make Bugonia – until the closing stages – gripping. But uncomfortably gripping.
Teddy Gatz (Jesse Plemons) is a beekeeper and conspiracy theorist. He believes that aliens from the Andromeda galaxy are assuming human form to invade and destroy life on Earth. He compares the impending fate of homo sapiens to the decline of bee colonies; if the Andromedans have their way, humankind will soon be ‘a dead colony, atomised in a trillion different directions with no way home again’. Teddy, as you’d expect, has an active social life online, but he explains all this to a face-to-face audience of one, Don (Aidan Delbis), his neurodivergent younger cousin and only friend. The disguised Andromedans include, according to Teddy, Michelle Fuller (Emma Stone), CEO of Auxolith, a major pharmaceutical company. Assisted by Don, he kidnaps her. The abduction is a repeatedly botched, brutally prolonged job, thanks partly to the kidnappers’ ineptitude and partly to Michelle’s martial arts training (a key element of this primed-for-action business leader’s daily exercise). Michelle is eventually subdued when Teddy manages to jab her with a sedative hypodermic. When she comes to, she’s a prisoner in his home. He tells Michelle who she really is and, honouring a venerable sci-fi tradition, demands that she take him to her leader. Also according to tradition, this will be a race against time: Michelle has four days in which to arrange a meeting with the emperor of Andromeda. The deadline is an imminent lunar eclipse that, Teddy knows, will allow the Andromedan mothership undetected access to Earth.
Bugonia‘s screenplay, by Will Tracy, is inspired by the 2003 Korean film Save the Green Planet!, written and directed by Jang Joon-hwan. (Jang was signed up to direct this remake, too. He stepped down for health reasons but stayed with Bugonia as an executive producer.) The abductee was male in Save the Green Planet! but the gender change here works well. Emma Stone’s Michelle is alarmingly self-possessed – in her few screen minutes when power-dressed-to-kill in the office (or the gym), in her much longer stint as a physically helpless prisoner. When Teddy and Don shave Michelle’s head – because Andromedans in human form communicate through hair follicles that are really antennae – she looks even more intimidating. Jesse Plemons has lost three-and-a-half stone since I last saw him (in Killers of the Flower Moon (2023)). The bulky Plemons was a reliably excellent actor; the slimmed-down version is even better. His remarkable weight loss seems to intensify Plemons’ presence and sharpen his emotional dexterity.
The immovable force vs irresistible object confrontation lasts only so long. Michelle’s verbal artillery is too much for Teddy. Refuting his theories and playing psychological games with him, she causes increasing flickers of doubt to cross her captor’s face, and he keeps losing his temper. As he becomes more violently desperate, Plemons’ Teddy becomes all the more human. Stone’s Michelle is always so together that you’re soon wondering if what Teddy claims could be true – and it’s not long before you twig to the whole set-up. Teddy is crazy but his apprehensions chime with the climate-change dread that scares plenty of sane people, as well as with perceptions of social contempt that do much to fuel incel thinking. (Early on, Teddy persuades Don to join him in ‘chemical castration’ – to enable them to concentrate more fully on their mission to save the world.) Michelle Fuller is eventually revealed to be the empress of Andromeda; well before that happens, though, she imposes herself on the story as a different kind of alien, a corporate organism that ought to fail every we-need-to-verify-you’re-human test going.
The news that Teddy’s mother, Sandy (Alicia Silverstone), participated in an Auxolith clinical trial that left her in a coma, from which she has never emerged, is a turning point in Bugonia. Personal vendettas of this kind (an individual driven to take revenge for a wrong inflicted on a loved family member) are more than familiar from TV crime dramas. Lanthimos delivers typically grotesque variations on the theme – Michelle persuades Teddy to believe that antifreeze in her car is an Andromedan antidote that will cure Sandy; he dashes to his mother’s hospital bedside, injects antifreeze into her IV bag and kills her – but the story’s paranoid conspiracy dimension is nevertheless obscured and sidelined. It never quite returns to centre stage.
From the abduction scenes onwards, there’s a regular supply of mayhem. The local police sheriff, Casey Boyd (Stavros Halkias), who decades back used to babysit Teddy (and offers a brief, cryptic apology for what he did then – sexually abused Teddy?), is investigating Michelle’s disappearance. He’s suspicious enough to return to the house a second time. While Teddy distracts Boyd outside at the apiary, Michelle tries to get Don to betray Teddy to the sheriff. Don says that all he wants is to go to outer space with Michelle; when she agrees, Don puts a bullet through his brain. Boyd hears the gunshot and heads indoors; before he can get there, Teddy bashes him to death with a shovel. Teddy, who has already tortured Michelle with electric shocks (her Andromedan pain threshold limits their impact), then dislocates her kneecap. Despite all this, Lanthimos shows uncharacteristic self-discipline in staging the Teddy-Michelle dialogues: he concentrates on getting the best out of his lead actors, and the result is compelling. In the last part of Bugonia, though, he reverts to something closer to his usual self-indulgence.
Michelle tells Teddy she’s fixed the meeting with the emperor, via her office at Auxolith HQ. There, she instructs Teddy to enter a cupboard which, she says, is a teleporter to her mothership. Teddy obeys instructions; the cupboard door closes and the suicide vest he’s wearing detonates. Lanthimos has fun showing Teddy’s decapitated head propelled across the office floor. Good as her word, Michelle subsequently teleports via the cupboard and discusses with Andromedan colleagues what to do about life on Earth. Lanthimos has more fun, with the mothership’s interior design and, especially, the Andromedans’ enormous heads of hair, which apparently vindicate Teddy’s theory about their means of communication.
Before they left his house for Auxolith, Michelle had brought tears to Teddy’s eyes in explaining that, aeons ago, the Andromedans created humanity by way of apology for accidentally bringing about the dinosaurs’ extinction. Ever since, the Andromedans have tried to wean humans away from their natural appetite for viciousness and violence but without success. They agree it’s now time to call it a day. Michelle punctures a transparent dome that covers a model of Earth. All human life is instantly extinguished. The following montage of images of humanity stopped dead around the globe makes for a remarkable climax that’s further strengthened by the choice of accompanying music, Marlene Dietrich singing Pete Seeger’s ‘Where Have All the Flowers Gone?’ (Jerskin Fendrix’s original music for the film is very effective, but it’s finally upstaged by this.) Dogs and cats wander about in some of the shots of dead humans. Finally, we see bees starting to return to Teddy’s apiary.
Watching Bugonia, I completely misunderstood the title. Associating words ending ‘-onia’ with an absence of something (anhedonia, catatonia, etc), I’d assumed ‘Bugonia’ was a jokey alternative name for planet Earth – a place, that is, where insect life could no longer survive (even if ‘bug’ seemed an odd synonym for ‘bee’!) According to Google’s AI overview, ‘the title refers to an ancient Greek belief that bees could be spontaneously generated from the carcass of a cow, a process the film’s writer, Will Tracy, says can be a metaphor for new life emerging from something corrupt’. Does this mean that Bugonia, after nearly two hours of bleak outlook, ends hopefully? If that’s the intention, there’s an echo of the ending of Poor Things, a repeatedly misogynist film that concludes in a glow of feminist empowerment. This time, the closing visuals and the musical commentary on them combine to render Lanthimos’ tone more ambiguous (and, for me, more appealing by virtue of that). Yet the change of mood, whatever it signifies, comes too late to counteract the acrid desolation in which Bugonia has majored.
13 November 2025