Bugonia (2025)
by Yorgos Lanthimos
A scatterbrained man and his half-wit cousin kidnap the powerful CEO of a multinational, convinced she is an alien plotting against humanity.
* * *
The Last Generation
After the Golden Lion for Poor Things, Yorgos Lanthimos returns to the Venice Competition with Bugonia, alongside “his” Emma Stone. Grotesque, unhinged, perhaps even science fiction, the film conceals a bitter reflection on the disappearance of the political dimension in our society. Bizarre, ironic, yet also sober and straightforward, Lanthimos’ most “simple” film marks a less ponderous, less solemn course in the Greek director’s career, without for that reason ceasing to converse with the present.
Presented in Competition at the 82nd Venice Film Festival, just two years after his Golden Lion for Poor Things, Lanthimos’ new work feels like it could have been spun off from Kinds of Kindness, as if it were a fourth expanded episode. In truth, Bugonia has been in development for some years: it is a remake of the South Korean Save the Green Planet! (2003) by Jang Joon-hwan. At first, Jang himself was to direct the American version, written by Will Tracy (The Menu). Later, with production also involving Ari Aster, the project passed to the Greek filmmaker, marking his fourth collaboration with Emma Stone (also co-producer here, and by coincidence star of Aster’s recent Eddington) and his second with Jesse Plemons, after Kinds of Kindness.
If that Cannes 2024 entry carried a whiff of paranoid science fiction, Bugonia takes it to completion: the conspiracy theorist Teddy (Plemons) is convinced that powerful aliens are moving among us, planning the worst for humanity. After careful research on the Internet and in sources not sanctioned by official science—Teddy avoids mainstream information, which he believes manipulated by elites—and after meticulous reasoning, he identifies the dazzling, fabulously wealthy Michelle Fuller (Stone), CEO of the company where he works as a lowly deliveryman, as the representative of the dreadful Andromedans. Together with his foolish cousin Don (Aidan Delbis), Teddy kidnaps her to force her to admit her extraterrestrial origin and stop her destructive mission.
Bugonia opens with bees—the Greek word “bugonia” refers to an ancient belief about their birth—their disappearance caused by pollution, their ordered society, and the idea that pollination is a kind of clean, aggression-free sexuality. It closes, strikingly, with the protest standard Where Have All the Flowers Gone?, written by Pete Seeger in 1955 and later sung across the world. Between these poles, beneath the surface of science fiction and grotesque comedy, lies a bitter reflection—far sharper than the muddled work of Aster (akin in some respects, but far less focused)—on the end of political and collective life, on the drift of the entire world and especially of the United States. Accompanying the beautiful finale (the peak of the film), the refrain “Where have all the flowers gone?” stands as a metaphor for the darkness into which Western humanity has fallen, for the closure—irreversible except through a death-borne regeneration, as “bugonia” itself suggests—of an era in which politics was structured around clear, shared concepts. A time when thought, less polluted, could still convey something just and positive (the film’s very first line points out how, at the beginning of a destructive process, there is something magnificent). That season of political doctrines and social classes is behind us; what remains is the individual retreat, verging on madness and autism, into unprovable theories, easily dismissed as “conspiracy.”
In his most linear, stripped-down film, Lanthimos once again—thankfully—plays with irony, gags, and a few bloody excesses, distancing himself from the ponderousness and hieratic tone of the past. Though tinged with levity, Bugonia does not always move with grace or conviction. After the initial dichotomy between Teddy and Don—white-trash losers redeemed only by their love of beekeeping—and the beautiful Michelle in her luxurious villa, the kidnapping sets off a series of confrontations between captors and captive, with twists and growing disorientation for everyone. Reality, fiction, masks, fantasy, and madness mingle for the viewer as well, though the tension is not always consistent (some subplots feel overbalanced) and the message, while clear, risks repetition. At two hours long, the film could use a trim, but it livens up in the second half, building steadily toward the finale. Stylistically, Lanthimos deploys tracking shots and cold, austere spaces—Michelle’s villa, her office, the antiseptic poolside compound during the captivity—but more than ever pares things down, putting himself at the service of a story that is, at its core, a direct political parable.
Bugonia thus succeeds where Eddington fails: despite its flaws, it goes straight to the heart of the matter, cutting away almost all the superfluous and recognizing in the despair of characters like Teddy and Don the final, flailing attempt of a decomposed social body—isolated singularities in total collapse, yet embodying the last flicker of dissent. Misplaced, misguided, destructive, idiotic—worthy of a slap. And yet, if one thinks of Trump’s America, or of the total abandonment of the masses in Europe’s post-democracies, Lanthimos’ target is clear. Continuing a Fassbinder parallel (underscored by citations and Hanna Schygulla in Poor Things; hinted at by the initials in Kinds of Kindness), one could even say the Athenian director is now, in his own way, looking toward Fassbinder’s The Third Generation (1979). Only here, decomposition has advanced so far that this is truly the last possible generation before collapse.
More intelligent than fully achieved, Bugonia nonetheless confirms a “new course” in Lanthimos’ filmography, clearly defined by his partnership with “his” Emma Stone—once again exceptional, once again persuasive, but increasingly confined either to weirdo roles (Eddington being one example) or to work with the Greek director. After two Oscars and with nothing left to prove, will the American actress continue her collaboration with the brilliant Yorgos Lanthimos? Perhaps a secondary question—but one worth keeping an eye on.
Elisa Battistini, Quinlan, August 28, 2025
Bugonia, review of Lanthimos’s film: a grotesque, contemporary frenzy about system manipulation and our alien selves
At the 2025 Venice Film Festival comes Bugonia, the new film by Yorgos Lanthimos: a dark fable about paranoia, control, and the fragility of human thought
After The Favourite (2018), Poor Things (2023), and Kinds of Kindness (2024), visionary Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos reunites with Emma Stone for an ambitious, surreal, and deeply unsettling project: Bugonia, the English-language remake of the 2003 South Korean cult Save the Green Planet! directed by Jang Joon-hwan. While we await its release—in Italian cinemas on October 23 via Universal Pictures—the director’s new work screened in Competition on the evening of Thursday, August 28, at the 2025 Venice Film Festival.
The film signals a return to sci-fi roots with the authorial stamp that defines Lanthimos: warped irony, grotesque dynamics, and probing reflections on power, madness, and truth. The first teaser trailer, released last June, struck a nerve with its provocative, surreal tone. Set to Green Day’s “Basket Case,” it features interrogation scenes, night shots, claustrophobic atmospheres, and lighting tricks that feed the suspicion that nothing is what it seems. The visual style—4:3 aspect ratio and striking celluloid cinematography—swings between formal chill and sudden visual excess, with a jagged edit that nods to Kubrick. And, above all, Emma Stone dominates the frame, even fashion-wise: a businesswoman carrying a Saint Laurent Sac de Jour.
At the center of Bugonia are two eccentric, paranoid protagonists (Jesse Plemons and Aidan Delbis), obsessed with conspiracy theories and convinced that aliens are secretly invading Earth. Their chosen target is Michelle Fuller (played by Emma Stone), the powerful CEO of a pharmaceutical multinational, whom they firmly believe to be an extraterrestrial poised to orchestrate the planet’s annihilation.
The film walks a tightrope between paranoid delusion and the real possibility of an alien invasion, in an ever more ambiguous spiral that throws the perceptions of both characters and audience into doubt. In pure Lanthimos style, the narrative is studded with plot twists, flips in perspective, and a grotesque meditation on power, media manipulation, and mental fragility.
One of the film’s big draws is its cast, blending longtime collaborators with new faces entering the Lanthimos universe. The headline return is Emma Stone, increasingly the director’s muse and fetish performer. Here she plays Michelle Fuller, a magnetic figure as alluring as she is potentially menacing: a charismatic, imperturbable CEO of a pharmaceutical giant, suspected of being an alien bent on wiping out humanity. It’s a role that again lets her explore an enigmatic, ambivalent character, suspended between the rational and the unsettling, between allure and threat.
Also back after Poor Things and Kinds of Kindness is Jesse Plemons as Teddy, a solitary beekeeper, paranoid and utterly convinced of the imminent alien catastrophe. Among the newcomers are Stavros Halkias, Aidan Delbis, and—above all—Alicia Silverstone, returning to the big screen as a cynical, manipulative conspiracy-monger journalist.
Science fiction with echoes of The Lobster, in a surreal, breathless comedy: we’ve finally seen Bugonia. Yorgos Lanthimos, the 51-year-old Greek director long “adopted” by Hollywood and its marquee performers, has by now become one of the most esteemed and sought-after auteurs, thanks to a singular cinematic language. For better and worse, his films stand apart for the kinds of stories and characters they pursue, for a narrative gamble that’s anything but common—one that makes him a festival favorite while stoking expectation, fascination, and division. After a burst of work across 2023 and 2024—Poor Things, winner of the Golden Lion in Venice, and Kinds of Kindness, which premiered at Cannes—Lanthimos now brings Bugonia to the competition (opening in Italian theaters on November 13 via Universal Pictures Italia, ed.). An anarchic, rebellious, funny, and wild film, it’s an adaptation-remake of Jang Joon-hwan’s South Korean Save the Green Planet!.
Let’s start with the title: a nod to the myth of bugonia in Virgil’s Georgics, where it takes on a special meaning tied above all to social order and reproduction. The bees—emblems of Roman society with their hierarchy, dedication to work and community, and intricate moral-social structure—are beautiful workers who are dying out, as in the myth of Aristaeus, who sees them vanish through his own fault, only for them to be reborn and regenerated from the carcasses of oxen. In that distant allegory lies a path of redemption and rebirth, both modern and divine.
And it is precisely with images of nature—and bees—that Lanthimos opens (and closes) the film, depicting “something magnificent”: insects called to gather pollen for their queen, yet perhaps doomed. A bit like us humans. Intervention is needed, foresight, a reclaiming of control—but who takes that on? The two protagonists (cousins and beekeepers) Teddy (played by Jesse Plemons) and Don (the surprisingly strong debut of Aidan Delbis) are the New Millennium’s conspiracy-activists, ready to act. The plan is clear: kidnap the CEO of a pharmaceutical company, Michelle—an impeccably poised, elegant Emma Stone—who presides over the luxe of her rituals, an unassailable woman-manager. She’s the target (and we’ll come to understand why).
Teddy and Don believe she’s an Andromedan alien; they’ve done their “research” (and then some), painting a horrible ring around themselves, intent on destroying Earth. The only way to reach the Emperor during the imminent eclipse is through her. Sedated, bound, and shaved bald, she faces a surreal situation and struggles to understand—though she slowly starts to play along with her captors, bunglers in both ideals and deeds (including violent ones), keeping her confined and torturing her with Green Day’s “Basket Case” blasted at deafening volume, a sort of revamped Kubrickian Ludovico “cure.” It’s the delirium of two childlike lunatics whose mother is hospitalized (they keep fighting for her), bumbling “heroes” going up against a system and a society likely stripped of scruples and empathy.
A film about our being “alien”—can we really pass as human all the way down?—and our inability to tell truth from reality: irrational, toxic, raw, and overflowing with humor and giddy laughter. It’s Lanthimos through and through, with Emma Stone, as usual, incredible (how many actresses would let their hair be shaved like that?) and a terrific Jesse Plemons as a paranoiac without limits, who never stops chasing what he believes in until the final frame. And maybe he isn’t wrong—maybe he’s right on the money. Is the future sealed—will humanity endure or collapse?
Scripted by Will Tracy (known for Succession and The Menu, both already steeped in cynicism, power, and psychological tension), who also handled production design, the film is produced by Emma Stone, Ari Aster (director of Hereditary and Midsommar), Ed Guiney, Andrew Lowe, Lars Knudsen, Miky Lee, and Jerry K. Ko. Principal photography took place mainly in the United Kingdom, especially in High Wycombe (England), with a crucial post-production phase between London and Athens. A request to shoot some scenes at the Acropolis in Athens was denied by Greek authorities as incompatible with the site’s sacred nature. As an alternative, the final sequences were filmed among the lunar cliffs of Sarakiniko, on the island of Milos, chosen for its suggestive, alien landscape. Lanthimos shot entirely on 35mm, giving the film a deliberately grimy, grainy, disorienting texture that suits the story’s disturbing tone. Cinematography is by Robbie Ryan, a previous Lanthimos collaborator on The Favourite, known for his sensitivity with film stock.
The title has roots in Greek mythology. “Bugonia” (or “bougonia”) was a ritual that posited the spontaneous generation of bees from the body of a dead bull. Popularized by Virgil in the Georgics, the myth has been read as a meditation on life and death’s cycle, on regeneration, and on life’s mysterious origins. In the film, bugonia seems to become a metaphor for human madness that generates alternative truths and violent ideologies, continually reborn in new forms—like bees emerging from dead flesh.
The film will be released in Italian theaters on November 13 by Universal Pictures. Bugonia will be distributed by Focus Features in the United States, by CJ ENM in South Korea and, as noted above, by Universal Pictures in the rest of the world.
Giacomo Aricò e Andrea Giordano, Vogue Italia, August 28, 2025
Emma Stone shines in Bugonia, Lanthimos’s most orderly film
It screened in competition at the 2025 Venice Film Festival, it’s a remake of a Korean film, and the performances are excellent.
The subtle unease one feels when reading the stories, beliefs, and absurdities of conspiracy theorists stems from the fact that some people truly believe them. Fear sets in at the thought that someone might believe them so deeply as to act on them. Because lurking in every conspiracy tale is something so unacceptable, unjust, and petty that it would seem to warrant an uprising. In Yorgos Lanthimos’s Bugonia, in competition at the 2025 Venice Film Festival, that’s exactly what happens: a conspiracist, who’s recruited a less-sharp friend as his partner, has a plan—he wants to kidnap the executive at the company where he works, convinced she’s actually an alien, part of a race that has blended in with humans but comes from space and has a secret agenda.
It’s all paradoxical: the plan makes no sense and the “evidence” he has is a jumble of fake news, discredited books, and his own arbitrary deductions. As often happens, though, he’s built an elaborate construct: he thinks he understands alien biology and communication, believes he knows what they can do, how their hierarchy works, and has even made a computer model of their spaceship. So when he kidnaps the executive, the first thing he does is shave her head, because hair is how they communicate; then he imprisons, wounds, and tortures her, and begins the interrogation. It will fall to her—by playing along or not—to free herself.
Bugonia is an intellectual battle, built on conversation, but also a real battle of action: between Jesse Plemons, the conspiracist, and Emma Stone, the executive; between the working class and the wealthy; between those who are snobbish, indifferent, and treat underlings terribly, and those who harbor resentment for good reasons (which we discover as the story unfolds). If this sounds like a typical South Korean plot, it’s because this is a remake of a South Korean film: Jang Joon-hwan’s 2003 Save the Green Planet!. And it’s fairly identical. Will Tracy, the screenwriter of The Menu, adapted it, changing very little in transplanting it to the United States (for those who’ve seen it: the whole ending is the same).
If anything, it’s Lanthimos who’s done admirable work—purely in direction—to make it his own. This story of injustice, conspiracy, violence, and pettiness is above all a tale of double-dealing (is the conspiracist serious or not? Is the executive sincere when she admits to being an alien, or is she trying to get free?), and that’s perfect territory for Lanthimos. In his films, very often, formal language, good manners, and the social conventions of behavior are the ridiculous part—the mask for people who are, in truth, something else. And in Bugonia, compared with Save the Green Planet!, it’s precisely corporate language and the vile, petty attitude of big companies that dominate. Emma Stone embodies the phony policies of tolerance and inclusion of a major corporation and speaks like a press release; she’s limber, shaven-headed, and acts with a meanness in her eyes that isn’t usually hers—but here it’s perfect.
In a formidable dinner-table scene, all fake courtesy and good manners, she and Jesse Plemons stage a superb back-and-forth performed on two levels of depth: each has an objective to achieve through conversation, but to do so must hide intentions behind etiquette; however—and here’s the second level—they do it badly, and we in the audience see the artifice of the social rules. They perform one thing, its opposite, and in a way that lets both layers show. Already in Kinds of Kindness, the previous film—where, after the Oscar for Poor Things, Lanthimos allowed himself to return to the cinema he made in Greece, personal and not at all commercial—the tastiest moment was of two couples overturning every rule of etiquette. Here that mechanism serves a tightly woven, tense plot.
There isn’t the usual political tension of Lanthimos’s best-known, most-loved films, nor his formal swagger; in fact, this commissioned work may be one of his most orderly and least wild. It’s the one that best highlights how, despite excelling at dismantling (more or less radically depending on the film) traditional storytelling, Lanthimos is also a director who masters that conventional storytelling and can use it superbly. If Save the Green Planet!—despite nearly the same script—is the crazier film (no Western country can out-crazy the Koreans or Japanese), Bugonia is the more orderly one: better told, leaner, and much clearer about what it cares to say with this story.
Gabriele Niola, Wired, August 28, 2025
Bugonia
A jab at conspiracists and one at conspiracy itself: bees, aliens, corporate culture, and mass control. Lanthimos has fun remaking a 2003 Korean film. With Jesse Plemons and the ever-present Emma Stone, in Competition at Venice 82.
Two years after winning the Golden Lion with Poor Things, Yorgos Lanthimos is back in competition in Venice (and in theaters from October 23) with Bugonia, a remake of Jang Joon-hwan’s 2003 Korean film Save the Green Planet!.
In the Greek director’s hands (working from a script by Will Tracy), now in full creative overdrive (the forgettable Kinds of Kindness was in competition at Cannes 2024), the original pattern remains almost untouched. What changes inevitably is the form, bent into a stylistic code so recognizable it has become his “brand.”
Bugonia—its title drawn from the myth of spontaneous generation, later inscribed in Virgil’s Georgics, with a swarm of bees born from the carcass of a dead ox—takes aim at both conspiracy theorists and conspiracy itself, turning caustic humor into dark comedy. Lanthimos, director of The Favourite and The Lobster, once again directs Emma Stone (for the fourth time in a row) and brings back Jesse Plemons (after Kinds of Kindness). She plays Michelle, the all-powerful CEO of a scientific research conglomerate; he is Teddy, a conspiracy-obsessed beekeeper who lives with his half-witted cousin.
Haunted for years by his mother’s health problems, Teddy is convinced the company is behind Colony Collapse Disorder—and that Michelle is in fact an Andromedan alien in disguise, come to Earth to wipe out humankind. After persuading his cousin of this madness, the two set out to kidnap her.
© 2025 Focus Features, LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Jesse Plemons stars as Teddy Gatz in director Yorgos Lanthimos’ Bugonia, a Focus Features release. Courtesy of Focus Features © 2025.
An absurdist comedy filtered through Lanthimos’s trademark clinical gaze, Bugonia is less off-putting (and dull) than Kinds of Kindness, equally verbose but on the whole entertaining. The nerve-jangling battle between captor and captive (Emma Stone sacrifices her hair and even a knee…) becomes a manifesto of two worldviews clashing, a paradoxical dystopia that morphs into a hallucinatory, disorienting hyperbole. Once again Lanthimos leans on Jerskin Fendrix’s menacing strings, sharpening his irreverent critique of paranoid subcultures and corporate culture (the “privilege” of leaving the office at 5:30, but really, come on, show a little conscience…), while weaving in ecological concerns, mass control, and mental health.
There’s nothing radically new here (see also Ari Aster’s recent Eddington, where he’s director and here producer—premiered at Cannes and, curiously, opening just days before this on October 17), except for another totalizing performance by Emma Stone. Yes, she was in Eddington too, as Joaquin Phoenix’s apathetic wife… Since Poor Things, she’s continued to let Lanthimos put her through the wringer—always certain that she’ll find a way to break free from the chains (and tortures) he inflicts. And this time, we’re left silent, floored by a reversal that—while fairly predictable—leads to a climax that is first, literally, explosive, and finally, apocalyptic.
Valerio Sammarco, Cinematografo, August 28, 2025
‘Bugonia’, Lanthimos and the tragicomedy of a ridiculous humanity
After the punk liberation (and Golden Lion) of Poor Things, the Greek director returns to Venice with Emma Stone and a wonderfully claustrophobic film: a caustic satire of our hyperconnected, hyperfragile present
“Beautiful, sure, but I wouldn’t want to live there,” a colleague quipped as we left the screening. And yet—we do live in Bugonia, all of us, neck-deep in this tragicomedy of grotesquely ridiculous humanity. Forget Poor Things (sorry): maybe we really do deserve extinction by now. “The bees are dying, it’s all been planned: they want us to end up like the bees,” says Teddy, a small-town conspiracist with a beekeeping hobby, who, together with cousin Donnie, kidnaps Michelle Fuller, the CEO of a major pharmaceutical company—convinced she’s an alien set on wiping us all out.
You’ll have read it already: Bugonia is a remake of the South Korean cult sci-fi comedy Save the Green Planet! (2003), a mix of torture, slapstick, and eco-paranoia. A master of the über-weird within the weird, Lanthimos doesn’t soften its edges—he strips away the pulp and sharpens the icy unease. Even the title is a statement of intent: bugonia is the Virgilian myth (from the fourth book of the Georgics) in which a swarm of bees rises from the carcass of a decaying ox. Passed down from the classics to pop culture, it became a hardcore image of spontaneous regeneration. Perfect for Lanthimos, who takes “high” cinema and lets it sprout again from a grotesque imagination—painfully comic, cruel, embalmed in caustic satire, a ritual of obsession and bitter laughter.
The adaptation remains true to the jagged tone of the original, but shifts the satire onto our hyperconnected, hyperfragile present. And this is where the notion of “dystopia” flips. Lanthimos suggests that much of what we call dystopian today isn’t dystopia at all—it’s news. Technology running amok, climate collapse, wars everywhere, endless chains of denialism. If art still has a purpose, he says, it’s to make us stumble: to impose that half-second in which you realize the gag has stained your shoes. This is his best cinema: when he kneads together ethics and slapstick, pain and deadpan, asking you to laugh with your mouth shut.
And the high priestess of that cinema is Emma Stone. Now at her fourth film with the Greek director, she’s more than a muse: nearly a creative double, a conspirator. At the press conference, when asked how she handles success without becoming alien herself, she laughed: “First of all, how do you know I’m not already?” That’s the tone—wry and threatening—of her character. But the real officiant here is Jesse Plemons, already awarded at Cannes for Kinds of Kindness, who embodies everyday fanaticism: a man both meek and merciless, who has turned paranoia into religion, with the sweet psychopathy of a country boy who offers you water while tightening the rope. Lanthimos locks them in a cage and leaves the audience to decide whom to trust. Spoiler: no one.
“I dreamed of working with Yorgos,” says screenwriter Will Tracy (Succession, The Menu), a specialist in enclosed settings and corrupt power structures, now transplanted into Lanthimos territory. “He seemed to know from the start what this film was about: he wanted to preserve the ambiguity, and that’s why it hits so hard.” That’s the key: never knowing if you’re watching a ridiculous kidnapping or a live apocalypse. Ambiguity isn’t a flourish—it’s a weapon.
Aesthetically, Bugonia is tighter, dirtier than his recent work. No surrealist postcard sets like in Poor Things, no baroque flourishes: the staging is bare, claustrophobic, mostly interiors, with Teddy forever rushing somewhere. The camera lingers on paranoid faces and bodies (Robbie Ryan’s hyperreal VistaVision cinematography dazzles, sharp and blinding), intensifying the sense of a closed, diseased world. The editing alternates frenzied bursts with long silences where quiet itself becomes a threat. This is Lanthimos again glancing back at his spiritual fathers—Haneke, Kubrick, Buñuel—rather than at the mainstream cinema that recently embraced him. And it’s true: you either love Lanthimos or you hate him (count me in the first camp). But there are two Yorgoses: the broader one, and the most Lanthimos of Lanthimos. This is a return to the harsher, purer roots after two Hollywood punk period pieces.
If Poor Things was a film about opening doors and minds, Bugonia slams them shut, contracting the imagination. It locks characters in windowless rooms, traps the audience alongside them. In Venice, it plays as counterpoint to the 2023 Golden Lion: there, Bella’s scientific Disneyland; here, the basement of faith. There, liberation; here, confinement of meaning. Venice took Lanthimos the “weird” auteur and delivered him to the world as Author: capable of being popular without becoming banal, and of turning dark again without becoming opaque.
And while Save the Green Planet! softened its delirium with black comedy, Lanthimos instead pushes it to the edge of the unbearable. There’s a moral ferocity that speaks straight to our time: paranoia as collective condition, violence as truth, fear of the Other—alien, industrial, capitalist, human—as fuel for survival.
If Poor Things was a liberating spectacle, a carnival of difference, Bugonia is its claustrophobic counterweight: no expansion, no color, no release. Only the locked room, suspicion, obsession. And yet—it’s where we all live, every day: amid online conspiracies, denied climate apocalypses, leaders who seem alien because maybe they are. “Beautiful, sure, but I wouldn’t want to live there.” The truth is, you don’t get out of Bugonia. Because you’re already inside it.
Benedetta Bragadini, Rolling Stone Italia, August 29, 2025
Bugonia, Lanthimos’s film in competition at Venice 82
The Greek director returns to Venice with a black comedy two years after the magnificent Poor Things!, with Emma Stone and Jesse Plemons
Two years ago in Venice, Yorgos Lanthimos scored a victory that paved the way to Academy triumph. Poor Things! won the Golden Lion and was widely hailed as the defining film of the 2023 festival. At Cannes last year, where he presented Kinds of Kindness, he wasn’t so lucky, but now he’s back in Competition at the 82nd Venice Film Festival with Bugonia, his latest creation.
Of course, it’s not entirely his own invention: Bugonia is in fact a remake of Jang Joon-hwan’s early-2000s Korean film Save the Green Planet! But the screenplay has been reshaped by Will Tracy to suit the themes, style, and intentions of Lanthimos—one of the most original, radical, and surprising filmmakers of his generation. The film also carries the imprimatur of producer Ari Aster, another heavyweight of this era of directors, in which the Greek filmmaker is without question one of the leading figures. Initially tipped for Cannes, the project ultimately landed at the Lido for its world premiere.
The title is strange, telling in itself. Bugonia refers to an ancient belief explaining the birth of bees: they were thought to arise from the carcasses of dead animals, especially oxen and cows. Which already tells you (if you know Lanthimos) to expect another radical, unpredictable work fully in step with an artist who refuses mediation of any kind.
For Bugonia, Lanthimos draws on Joon-hwan’s original, a hybrid of sci-fi, dystopia, and comedy. The story structure is almost identical, with one notable change: Emma Stone plays Michelle, a gender-swapped version of the original’s character. She’s no ordinary woman, but the CEO of a powerful pharmaceutical multinational—living for career, money, and power. Unfortunately for her, she becomes the target of Teddy (Jesse Plemons) and Don (Aidan Delbis), two dyed-in-the-wool conspiracy theorists. Convinced Michelle belongs to an alien race bent on invading Earth and enslaving humanity, they set out to kidnap her.
For Michelle, it’s the beginning of an ordeal that Lanthimos—as usual—renders as a fascinating blend of black humor, social critique, and violence. No surprise for anyone who’s followed him since My Best Friend nearly 25 years ago. His name has long been synonymous with postmodernism, particularly the so-called Greek Weird Wave, a movement that fuses satire and social commentary while constantly mixing genres. Lanthimos is its undisputed high point. Bugonia is fully consistent with his eccentric, extreme vision of cinema—one that breaks down and exposes taboos and collective fears, showing just how far we’re willing to go out of selfishness or refusal to accept mistakes and change.
Bugonia marks a return for Lanthimos to a more scathing, universally critical stance—ferocious, but cloaked in a farcical atmosphere. Nobody, literally nobody, emerges unscathed from this strange tale of abduction, torture, conspiracy nonsense, and the overturning of logic. Emma Stone becomes the very symbol of runaway turbo-capitalism, so detached from empathy and real life that she truly is an alien in every sense. Opposite her, Jesse Plemons—noticeably slimmed down—brings unnerving credibility to a conspiracist who is strange, infantile, and menacing.
Once upon a time, such figures would have found refuge in a bar or basement; Bugonia makes clear how the internet has handed flat-earthers, anti-vaxxers, reptilian believers and the like a gold mine. If the first act feels overly expository, Lanthimos makes up for it in the second, deepening the characters, their motivations, and the reasons we’ve reached this point.
The film speaks to the crisis of civilization we’re dragging along, to our destructiveness toward the planet—and more. Yet it does so with playfulness, shifting between survival-thriller tension, black comedy, and even moments that veer into horror. It doesn’t quite reach the heights of Poor Things!, but this is unquestionably Lanthimos working at a very high level.
Giulio Zoppello, Esquire, August 28, 2025
