Oct 28

Oct 28 Movie Review : Bugonia (2025)

After the overwhelming critical and popular success of his 2023 movie Poor Things, liking the movies of Yorgos Lanthimos have become a signifier of good taste. And why wouldn’t it be? He's a film director writing original and daring material, who seems committed to his creative vision more than he is to any film studio executive. Not unlike the late, great David Lynch was. I suspect Lanthimos really hates being a conversation topic at the wine bar and swanky dinner parties around the world, though.

His new film Bugonia feels like his way of rejecting this status. It's a return to nasty and conceptual storytelling like The Lobster and The Killing of a Sacred Deer, less a statement and more of an elaborate middle finger to a cultural discourse that has become has become both polarized and uninteresting. It’s a movie that refuses to make you feel smart for liking it and I mean this in the best possible way. Lanthimos is back and he dares you to hate him for making a splendid, challenging and thoroughly alien movie.

Bugonia tells the story of a lonely beekeeper named Teddy (Jesse Plemons) and his simple-minded cousin Donnie (Aidan Delbis), who abduct the CEO of a pharmaceutical company (Emma Stone) to prove she’s actually an alien from the Andromeda Galaxy conducting experiments on human beings. On paper, this sounds like another satire about disinformation and internet paranoia. The kind of film that pats you on the back for not being as dumb as the people in it.

But that’s not what’s happening here. There are two kinds of simpletons in Bugonia. The kind like Teddy and Donnie, and the other kind: you, the viewer.

Abandon All Platitudes, Ye Who Enter Here

About twenty minutes into Bugonia, the movie starts letting you make assumptions about it. You will think: okay, I get it , these two uneducated idiots kidnap a powerful, cold-hearted bitch, inflict horrible and unrepairable damage on her and we’re supposed to feel bad for everyone involved. It’s the kind of setup that practically begs for a hot take. But the moment you decide that’s what this movie is, Bugonia starts to quietly make fun of you for thinking it.

Because you will think it. You can’t help yourself. You’ve been trained by the last ten years of popular culture to find the political center of everything, to know which side of the moral divide you’re supposed to land on. But Bugonia isn’t interested in your moral compass. It’s not even interested in the map. It’s a Rorschach test disguised as a thriller, a film that keeps asking: do you actually know what the fuck is going on or are you just trying to retrofit a mainstream political narrative onto a Yorgos Lanthimos movie?

And just when you’re sure you’ve figured out the answer, the film reminds you, in ways that feel both hilarious and humiliating, that you haven’t.

It’s hard to go any deeper into this without spoiling the movie, but if you’re even mildly fluent in Lanthimos, you already know the shape of what’s coming. The real story isn’t about who’s right or wrong, it’s about how you decide who’s right or wrong. Bugonia keeps testing your instincts like a lab rat pressing the same lever, just to see how long it’ll take before you realize you’re the experiment.

The emotional core of the movie lives inside your own assumptions. Every time you think you’ve figured out who deserves sympathy, the film throws in some microscopic behavioral shift, a look that lingers too long, a tone that feels just off, that quietly rewires your understanding. You have to pay attention not just to what’s on screen, but to the judgments you’re making about it. That’s the real narrative.

Because it would’ve been too easy to make a movie about how conspiracy theorists are stupid or one on how pharmaceutical CEOs are evil. Bugonia lives in between in the most uncomfortable, most Lanthimesque way possible.

The Odd Genius of Emma Stone

I don’t usually talk about performances in my reviews because, honestly, that’s never what interests me about movies. Acting is like seasoning : it’s a powerful element, but you notice it most when the dish itself isn’t working. But is Emma Stone fucking awesome or what? She’s one of those rare actors who can play either the femme fatale or the girl next door and make you question whether those two archetypes were ever that different to begin with.

What makes her fascinating isn’t her range, it’s her weirdness. Stone is a captivating weirdo trapped inside a movie star’s body. The moment she plays someone slightly unhinged, everything about her suddenly makes sense. Whether it’s the neurotic, privileged social entrepreneur in The Curse or the lost lamb in Eddington, her soft, symmetrical beauty becomes a visual punchline against the chaos she radiates. It’s that dissonance, the collision between composure and madness, that turns her performances into little existential jokes about what it means to seem fine.

That said, I don’t think Bugonia needed more of Emma Stone. There’s exactly the right amount of her, just enough to flavor the whole dish without overpowering it. She’s the coriander of Bugonia : bright, unpredictable, and capable of hijacking the recipe even when she’s used sparingly. Jesse Plemons, meanwhile, once again plays the naive man in over his head , a role he’s turned into its own tragic art form.

The spaghetti dinner scene between them is a masterclass in misdirection and button-pushing, the kind of moment where Lanthimos seems to be toying with the audience’s emotional circuitry just to see which fuse blows first.

Stone isn’t just a kidnapping victim here; she’s a catalyst. There’s something about her presence, that poised, off-putting calm that unlatches something feral in her two co-stars. You start to wonder whether they’re reacting to her character or to Emma Stone herself, and by that point, Lanthimos has already folded that question into the film’s design.

I enjoyed the hell out of Bugonia. Watching it felt like reconnecting with an old friend you used to go on wild, slightly dangerous benders with, the kind of friend who calls you at 2 AM on the night of his divorce just to say he’s got a new philosophy about life and a half-empty bottle to prove it.

Lanthimos hasn’t given up on making political cinema after Poor Things; he’s just stopped pretending to play the same game as everyone else. While we’re all sitting around moving our little checker pieces, he’s out there playing drunken Parcheesi with weirdos and local criminals. It’s messy, unpredictable, occasionally abstract and completely alive.

Fuck, it feels good to have him back.