"Bugonia"

☆☆☆☆☆

A word of warning for those about to watch Bugonia: Afterward, expect to find yourself falling down a rabbit hole of inquiry about the latest Yorgos Lanthimos movie, which is, in every sense of the word, a Yorgos Lanthimos movie.

He is the director who made Poor Things, The Favourite, The Lobster and The Killing of a Sacred Deer, among others, all of which are movies that developed fervent admirers and bemused detractors in equal measure, and Bugonia is like those movies only — and here's the real kicker — more so.

While I'd never advise doing too much research into a movie before seeing it, in the case of Bugonia even the most spoiler-filled description of the movie is going to be insufficient to prepare you for the experience of watching it, which is glorious, bewildering, offensive, hilarious, gory, off-putting and thought-provoking, sometimes in the same scene. It's also blessed with one of the best scores of the year, by Jerskin Fendrix, and reading about the creation of the music is like finding a rabbit hole that branches off into another rabbit hole that leads to its own set of rabbit holes.

There is a simple way to explain the basic plot of Bugonia: A pair of conspiracy theorists kidnap a wealthy CEO believing her to be an alien who wants to destroy Earth. Astonishingly, this is not the first time that story has been told on film. Bugonia (caution: this is the first step into the hole) is based on a 2003 South Korean film called Save the Green Planet. Lanthimos may seem the ideal director for Bugonia, but he wasn't originally going to make the film — the original director, Jang Joon-hwan, was going to remake it, but bowed out, in what may be one of the most fortuitous moments in moviemaking history.

Emma Stone plays the CEO, a woman named Michelle Fuller, who is one of the world's worst practitioners of faux empathy. Jesse Plemons, in his best screen performance to date, is Teddy, a man who has spent far too much time on the Internet, which is ironic because that's what watching Bugonia makes you do. He doesn't just believe Fuller is an alien emissary from Andromeda, he has staked his entire identity on it. He's also convinced his autistic cousin Don (an astonishing Aidan Delbis), and together they redefine the idea of focused commitment, as the CEO might say.

To try to explain anything more about Bugonia would largely be impossible, except that it's worth noting that the movie opens on a closeup of a honeybee, and Teddy is an amateur apiarist. He knows how to keep things. He believes it is his mission.

Remember, please, that this is a film by Yorgos Lanthimos, which means that a description of the plot is only an approximation of the experience. As the film progresses, it muddies and confuses — with all intention — what it's trying to say, and hides its true intentions, until we're as mixed up as Don professes to be. Who are we supposed to be siding with here? Is the film really making the bold, angry, unexpected pronouncements that it seems to be making, or is that all for show?

Lanthimos is a master at bringing the audience along on stories that by all accounts should be unwatchable. (More than a few people claim they are unwatchable, though I'm not among those.) The things Lanthimos shows us, the things he gets us willing to believe, are often outrageous and offensive to delicate sensibilities. Bugonia goes even farther than he's gone before, in many respects, and Stone, Plemons and Delbis are right there with him, doing things that should, and do, shock us, even while they get us to think, laugh and avert our eyes at things that other, less daring directors wouldn't even think about putting up there on the screen.

When it's over, you'll want to know what it all means. Just be careful in that rabbit hole. It's a long, long way down.

Viewed November 18, 2025 — AMC Century City

1935