EMMA STONE IN BUGONIA

Yorgos Lanthimos' new sci-fi horror comedy actioner is full of ideas

This isn't as visually rich as Lanthimos' previous Poor Things but it is a minute-to-minute suspenseful zinger and features another brilliant performance by Emma Stone. She does not undergo the Frankenstein-creature style transformations of Poor Things, but she sure does go through a lot as a fiendish but airtight CEO of chemical company Auxolith, producer of drugs and pesticides, who is kidnapped and tortured by Jesse Plemons' passionate conspiracy theory paranoiac rube. The standout performance is by Plemons, ably backed up the actual young neurodivergent first-time actor Aidan Delbis and contrasted with the cold hard resistance of Stone's superwoman corporate exec.

Teddy (Plemons) and his sidekick Don (Delbis) whom he calls "cuz," grab Michelle Fuller (Stone), the CEO whom we've seen performing her fluent and utterly cold-blooded facade of concern for "diversity" and a comfortable schedule for her factory drones. Speaking of drones, Teddy is an apiarist as well as an environmentalist. As for conspiracy theories, he has "done the research," which is to say his head is packed full of insane interlocking ideas: total nut cases are, thanks to the internet now more highly informed than formerly. Michelle's company produces insecticides that are among other things contributing to the catastrophic collapse of the bee populations.

The title Bugonia in Lanthimos's film refers to an ancient Greek belief that bees spontaneously generated from a sacrificed bull's decaying flesh, symbolizing new life from corruption. This, the screenplay author Will Tracy informs us, also ties into the film's themes of societal decay and bizarre new beginnings. And Tracy liked the word's strange, bug-like sound, fitting its insect/infestation feel and the film's absurd, alien world. An arresting, senseless title, then, that also makes quite a lot of screenplay-illuminating sense. Is Will Tracy getting a little to clever for his own good? Not when he's writing for Yorgos Lanthimos, I reckon.

This is a remake of the 2003 South Korean thriller Save the Green Planet! which was a box-office failure at home but became a cult film through festival showings. The environmental angle perhaps was not brought home as well or as appreciated by the local audience.

Bugonia is still a pretty conventional kidnapping flick, but one that's smarter and more tied into serious issues than usual. Its wrongdoing crazies are also rather more informed than in the past. Their victim is a lady who, besides being a hotshot exec who's appeared on the covers of Time and Forbes, has been relentless in her personal pursuit of martial arts: hence her survival skills and ability to fight make her unusually hard to capture and hold. Maybe this is one of the places Bugonia gets funny, with its woman throwing men around, though some think the film is really a little too tense and exciting to let you laugh much. It's also where Stone exhibits some of the physicality she showed in Poor Things,a film that traveled all over the globe, while Bugonia covers a sufficiently small land area so Teddy and Don can traverse it by bicycle. The story alternates quiet (bike travel) with violent (brutal hand-to-hand combat, bomb explosions) to good effect.

When Teddy and Don capture Michelle, stabbing her with a neddle full of sedative, they first of all shave her head and laver her whole body with anti-itch cream, conscious as they are, that she is an alien from Andromeda. The hair removal is to eliminate her main way of communicating to her galaxy. Michelle ardently denies that she is what Teddy says she is. Then she relents and affirms "I am an alien." Justin Chang in the New Yorker, who calls this film "an uncommonly pleasurable descent into hell," points out the line between human and alien in all Lanthimos' films has always been "porous" and so what Michelle says hardly matters. But, Chang notes, fish-eye lenses would have been redundant here. In fact the marvel of Bugonia is how simply it creates its web of strangeness. And this enables the fantastic acting of Plemons and the diamond-hard resistance of Stone to be more highlighted and to do all the work that needs to be done to craft this sci-fi horror action film. It may be less impressive in the eyes of critics and less a tour-de-force, but it packs an concentrated energy and intensity not achieved by the director before. In that respect, he e keeps getting better.

Bugonia, 118 minns., premiered at Venice Aug. 28, 2025, played at dozens of other festivals starting with Telluride, Deauville, San Sebastien, and Zurich. Metacritic rating: 72%.

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©Chris Knipp. Blog: http://chrisknipp.blogspot.com/.