Bugonia

Emma Stone and Yorgos Lanthimos have a good, solid working relationship that has brought some great success to both of them. At present, they have collaborated on four films, three of which have been nominated for Best Picture at the Academy Awards. Those same three have also netted Emma Stone with her own nominations as an actress, winning in 2023 for Poor Things. While that film hit some people the wrong way and left viewers polarized, most could agree that her daring and seemingly unselfconscious portrayal was a key factor in her getting the win that year. Their work together in The Favourite was also critically acclaimed, though it didn’t resonate much either way with the general audience. 

Lesser known is Kinds of Kindness, a black comedy anthology film from 2024 that has a tremendous cast but barely saw a release in theaters and went ignored by the Academy. That film got good reviews at the time but has mostly dropped out of the cultural consciousness since. For a follow-up, Yorgos has shifted focus again, this time towards a 2003 Korean psychological horror comedy entitled Save the Green Planet! Jang Joon-hwan’s film was revolutionary for its time, combining lots of manic humor with some truly dark horror moments all wrapped up in an environmental message and a twist at the end that many didn’t see coming. Jang was set to remake his film for American audiences when health concerns caused him to step back, remaining on as an executive producer. 

When Jang Joon-hwan made Save the Green Planet!, he was lampooning a certain type of conspiracy-obsessed person, the tin-foil hat-wearing males who think the world is flat and that there are government spies and aliens hiding in plain sight, just looking for an excuse to probe us and use mind control on everyone. What he couldn’t have seen at the time is that this kind of extreme obsession has started to permeate our culture everywhere. You can’t scroll through social media without coming across some person who rambles on and on about flat-Earth or moon landing conspiracies and how we are all sheep for believing what we do. We also are drowning in all sorts of debunking material aimed right at these people with equal fervor, dedicated to making their views seem foolish. The world is even more crazy now than it was when Jang was making his movie more than twenty years ago.

With Bugonia, we are introduced to just such a guy in Teddy Gatz (Jesse Plemons), a working-class beekeeper who has become obsessed with the idea that a wealthy CEO of a pharmaceutical company, Michelle Fuller (Emma Stone), is a space alien responsible for the poisoning and terminal illness of his mother. Together with his autistic brother Don (Aidan Delbis), they kidnap Michelle, shave her head (because her alien race uses hair to communicate with the mother ship, of course), and torture her with the intent of getting a confession as well as an invite to the mother ship during the upcoming lunar eclipse. Teddy is convinced that the aliens are planning on killing all the humans and wants to plead with their leaders for a reprieve. Don is along for the ride because he thinks the plan is to leave Earth behind and travel forever with the aliens.

After torturing Michelle with electricity, Teddy comes to the conclusion that she is not just any alien but is in the royal family. This changes everything, and for a short while, he shows her respect and cordiality. But that evaporates quickly when she begins to speak about his mother (Alicia Silverstone), who is lying in a hospital bed dying from a terminal condition, a disease he blames on Michelle’s pharmaceutical company, though he claims this didn’t have anything to do with his decision to kidnap her. Meanwhile, police officer Casey Boyd (Stavros Halkias), who has a dark connection to Teddy’s past, has shown up at the house because Michelle’s cellphone pinged a tower, and her vehicle was caught on a speed camera in the neighborhood. 

The problem with conspiracy nuts is that often their arguments make perfect sense to themselves, no matter how outlandish they may seem to everyone else, making it impossible to convince them otherwise. There is so much proof about the Earth being a globe, and yet so many still believe it is flat. So much evidence exists that man has walked on the moon, yet many still claim it was all faked. Teddy has a crazy obsession with the idea of aliens existing among us who have the intent to kill us all. He has captured several people and tortured and killed them, insisting that two of them really were aliens, meaning some were not. He also has notebooks full of his rhetoric, notebooks that Michelle finds late in the film. When she confronts him, admitting to being an alien, we are not sure if it really is true or if she has read through his writings and is telling him what she thinks he wants to hear so that he will take her out of her prison. In this way, seeing Bugonia fresh and without the foreknowledge of Save the Green Planet! is best. It allows you to speculate which way it will go rather than being certain from the start. 

Yorgos Lanthimos is the kind of director who knows how to get a performance out of his actors. This is one of the reasons Emma Stone trusts him so much and is willing to bear it all, sometimes literally, for his pictures. While his films are often out there in the stratosphere when it comes to tone and visuals, that doesn’t mean that is the only thing he can bring to the table. After all, he is the director of The Favourite, which may be a little quirky, but is still a period piece drama. Lately, though, people associate him with some really outlandish concept films like Poor Things or The Lobster, which is a fair assessment, and he has leaned into that as a filmmaker. 

Those impulses are not as prevalent in Bugonia, which is set, more or less, in the real world. There are elements that embrace the hyper-realism of a Yorgos film, but they are tamped down significantly compared to something like Poor Things with its heavy steampunk vibes. Still, there is no denying that this is a Yorgos film; his stamp is found everywhere in this project, especially in the final act. 

How you feel about the final reveal and the finale of the picture will largely depend on your personal sensibilities. It is a dark look at humanity, but it is also filled with a lot of gallows humor. It’s also very gory, and the way some of that is set up can be genuinely shocking. The final scene, which I will not spoil here, is bordering on being too much on the nose, with the only thing keeping it from being too much is not overlaying it with Louis Armstrong’s What a Wonderful World. That trick was already utilized in 12 Monkeys and would have been a step too far here. 

This is a dark comedy with a strong emphasis on the dark. This is made even more so if you are going into it not knowing the ending. That is how I experienced Save the Green Planet! back in the early 2000s, and it’s how I wish I could have gone into Bugonia. The mystery of whether Michelle is or is not an alien can be interpreted either way right up until the film shows its cards, and it’s best to experience it that way. Some scenes can be very disturbing, and the ending can hardly be considered a happy one. But if you have the right sense of humor and can appreciate what this film’s themes are, there is a lot of fun that can be had with it. Does it have legs to get it across the finish line at this year’s Oscars? Probably not. But it does deserve to be in the running.

Academy Award Nominations: 

Best Picture: Ed Guiney & Andrew Lowe, Yorgos Lanthimos, Emma Stone, and Lars Knudsen

Best Actress: Emma Stone

Best Adapted Screenplay: Will Tracy

Best Original Score: Jerskin Fendrix

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Release Date: October 24, 2025

Running Time: 118 Minutes

Rated R

Starring: Emma Stone, Jesse Plemons, Aidan Delbis, Stavros Halkias, and Alicia Silverstone

Directed by: Yorgos Lanthimos