Yorgos Lanthimos once again ushers us into the chambers of his peculiar mind, re-building that eccentric universe with its strict, Lanthimosian logic. The premise is wickedly simple, even childlike: two conspiracy diehards kidnap the CEO of a global pharmaceuticals company because they’re convinced she’s an alien intent on enslaving humanity. From this blunt hook, Lanthimos threads mordant gags, bleak parables, and flashes of disarming, lyrical grace.
The title reaches back to antiquity: in Bugonia, bees were thought to spring spontaneously from the carcass of a slain bull, a rite immortalised in Virgil’s Georgics. We now recognise it as myth, but the metaphor bites — life bred from rot, order from decay, a colony born out of a corpse.
Teddy (Jesse Plemons), a shambling zealot and the operation’s mastermind, is certain the aliens have already landed and that the only way to save humankind is to find an alien to contact their ship during the imminent eclipse. In his mind, Auxolith, a glossy pharma and biotech company, is poisoning the world while preaching sustainability; the aliens are merely using it as cover. He recognises an alien in Michelle (Emma Stone), Auxolith’s CEO — a sleek, hyper-competent executive whose cool poise he reads as not-quite-human. Teddy fixates on laughably trivial tells to prove she’s an alien: her too-young appearance or her thin ankles, seemingly gendered nonsense he elevates to proof within his paranoid cosmology.
Emma Stone plays Michelle as a cold, calculating predator; she’s a woman who knows what she wants and has trained every breath to get it. Disciplined to the bone, she boxes before breakfast, optimises her biomarkers, and maintains a meticulous skincare arsenal. Lanthimos needles the corporate religion of self-optimisation — the body as brand compliance, even as he continues his fascination with women’s agency.
Teddy ropes in his younger cousin Don (Aidan Delbis), a pliant sidekick. The two prepare for the kidnapping in earnest: they run physical drills, stock up on masks and other DIY abduction gear, and even resort to chemical castration so the alien can’t seduce them. Their training — high-knee drills on a creaking wooden porch — looks especially ridiculous beside Michelle’s sculpted workouts in her glass-walled modernist mansion.
Despite the buffoonery, the plan works. After fierce resistance, the men capture Michelle, and Teddy knows exactly how to neutralise an alien. He shaves her head so she can’t signal the mothership, slathers her skin with anti-histamine cream to block transmissions, and imposes a set of ad-hoc countermeasures that look like internet-fed pseudoscience and barely veiled fear of female power. The film’s satire leaks into real life: Auxolith’s LinkedIn and the “Human Resistance” site exist as live pages, extending the joke of corporate puffery pitched just plausibly enough to fool a few doom-scrollers.
Michelle wakes in the basement of her abductors’ house, clocks the situation, and, instead of pleading or hysteria, holds a calm, insistent line and forces a conversation. Her voice, honed by boardroom diplomacy, and the precision of her phrasing wrong-foot her kidnapper. It becomes a contest of persuasion: Teddy, bolstered by his cousin, pushes his alien narrative; Michelle methodically dismantles it. The collision of one character’s bafflement with another’s absurd certainty is Lanthimos’s signature device — the futile labour of explaining a worldview to someone who rejects it as nonsense. We’ve seen a version of this in Poor Things, in the warped push-and-pull between Bella and Duncan Wedderburn.
As billed in festival materials, Bugonia is an environmental comedy-thriller that fits the present: serious themes smuggled through engaging forms.
Viewers fluent in Lanthimos tricks may anticipate a few turns before the midpoint, but the film never loosens its grip. And despite the chamber-piece feel, Bugonia breaks into surreal episodes and, with Lanthimos, the real unglues from its representation.
For all the subjects in play — corporate satire, disinformation, ecological dread — he presses past the topical shell toward a darker verdict on humanity. We glimpsed a version of that verdict in Don’t Look Up, Adam McKay’s end-times satire where an incoming comet becomes a media spectacle. But where Don’t Look Up grants people a final moment of recognition in the face of impending catastrophe, Bugonia withholds even that grace. Here the punchline curdles into elegy, and what begins as a mischief ends as a judgement.
Thacker’s idea of the world-without-us is a useful lens for reading Bugonia’s last scene, and it cuts sharper than simple nihilism. The world continues in full texture once the human witness is executed. Thacker distinguishes the world-for-us (our meanings), the world-in-itself (what exists regardless of us), and the world-without-us (the speculative vantage where scenery persists but meaning goes dark because there is no one left to confer it). That’s the violence of Lanthimos’s finale: beaches, markets, and bright ordinary places remain perfectly legible to the camera, yet the reader of those scenes has been removed. It’s an apocalypse without witnesses, an elegant cruelty in which the film withholds the consolations of recognition and turns the non-human gaze back on us, exposing how fragile and local our sense-making really is.
The film is set for a UK theatrical release on 31 October 2025.
© perediza 2026
