The bees are dying. That’s bad news for all of us, but for Teddy (Jesse Plemons), the apiarist at the center of Yorgos Lanthimos’s Bugonia, it’s personal. He’s traced the die-off of his own small colony to Auxolith, a pharmaceutical megacorporation that’s made headlines for its controversial use of pesticides. Teddy’s grievances with Auxolith don’t stop there. He works for pennies packing boxes in one of the company’s warehouses, where he watches his colleagues work through injuries to keep their jobs. And, grievously, Teddy’s mother (Alicia Silverstone) ended up in a coma after participating in one of Auxolith’s clinical trials. It’s enough to drive him crazy.
Conspiracy is at the heart of Bugonia. That Auxolith is responsible for so much of Teddy’s strife seems clear enough, but the emotional impact of seeing both his mother and his passion project crippled by capitalism has bent the lines between A and B into an impossible knot. Teddy, along with his cousin, Don (Aidan Delbis), have plunged deep enough into a YouTube rabbit hole to come to believe that Michelle Fuller (Emma Stone) is not just the CEO of Auxolith, but an Andromedan alien sent to Earth to eliminate mankind. The cousins kidnap Michelle and lock her in their basement, where they shave her head and cover her in antihistamine cream — to prevent her from sending signals to the mothership, naturally — and demand to be taken to her leader.
Like Eddington earlier this year, Bugonia is a work of due anger and high farce, a satire so cloyingly of the moment that it risked dating itself before it reached theaters. A good deal of its ire is swung toward Michelle, a self-proclaimed “female CEO of high importance,” whose business acumen has woven so intricately into her personality that she can’t seem to drop corporate speak to (quite literally) save her life. Michelle is a paragon of the infuriating executive contradictions familiar to anyone who’s ever punched the clock in an office park. She leads companywide diversity efforts while berating her staff over her ghostwritten talking points, she encourages all employees to leave work by 5:30 (unless they have work to do, but no pressure), she approaches her own kidnapping as an opportunity to “reset with a dialogue.” If Michelle isn’t quite alien in form or execution, she’s at least representative of the sort of calculated, C-suite–forward poise that so often masks the economic brutalization of small American communities.
Bugonia handles Teddy with a bit more nuance, though his character is no less cutting. He’s sprung from the algorithmic byproducts that increasingly seem to knock modern men off their axes, and the movie doesn’t shy from the consequences of a terminally online education. Teddy is as assured as he is angry, having anted into a renegade dogma with such conviction that he doesn’t blink at the prospect of chemically castrating himself (or convincing Don, who lives with a developmental disability, to do the same). Lanthimos carved his name with stilted dialogue and Fabergé artifice, a muscled sterility to contrast the blood-blistered violence of his subjects. With Teddy, the leash is off. He speaks with the cadence of a burnout Craigslist roommate, as greasy and disaffected as anyone who’s ever talked your ear off about DMT.
Still, Bugonia offers Teddy enough understanding to keep its feet planted on his side of the class divide. For all his blackpilled extremism, there’s a tender undercurrent in Teddy that keeps you begging he’ll come to his senses. It’s difficult to ignore the lengths he takes to indoctrinate Don into his aspirational revolution, but his fraternal protection toward his cousin is undeniable — even when he’s gassing Don up to hold a woman at gunpoint. And, while it’s never leveraged as a mea culpa for his violence — little could while watching him electrocute Michelle for minutes on end — Teddy wrestles with a considerable amount of pain. His mother’s illness is revealed via a string of nightmarish vignettes as poignant and poetic as anything Lanthimos has shot, and when a local beat cop (Stavros Halkias) enters the picture, it’s all but insisted that he likely molested Teddy as a child. Lanthimos and writer Will Tracy (Succession, The Menu) don’t quite lean on trauma porn to excuse American men’s current ideological crises; instead, Teddy functions as an earnest complication of a man too far gone.
By now, Stone’s pedigree within Lanthimos’ think tank is well proven, and Plemons shows that his turn(s) in 2024’s Kinds of Kindness weren’t a fluke. Their combination is a thrilling bit of casting that sees two of this generation’s strongest performers beat each other to a pulp inside a bottle with shrinking walls. Michelle’s boardroom vocabulary inflames Teddy like yellowjacket venom; at a certain point, her insistence to “circle back” and “realign” reads as a deliberate provocation. For his part, Teddy proves that drinking the Kool-Aid hasn’t rendered him a fool — “I’ve read all the think-pieces,” he snarls at Michelle’s condescension toward his rank among 4chan detritus, a chilling nod to Plemons’ cameo in Civil War. Bugonia knows better than to attempt to solve for Trumpism, but Michelle and Teddy — the plutocratic neolib and the doomer accelerationist — feel like a sample slide of two plates grinding under an American faultline.
For the spoiler-averse, it may be good to stop reading here. Bugonia is a close adaptation of Jang Joon-hwan’s Save the Green Planet! (2003), and both films spend much of their runtime circling the same punchline: what if the kidnapper is right, what if the CEO really is an alien? Bugonia makes good on the threat, and, days removed from my screening, I’m struggling to decide whether the joke pays off. It’s deeply funny to watch Emma Stone ascend into space, to declare Earth a failed experiment and extinguish humanity with a pinprick. But the decision also sweeps the legs from the movie’s urgency, which burns like a cigarette under a bare heel for the 100 or so minutes beforehand. Charitably, ending the movie on a gag almost functions like a layer of metatextual nihilism. Bugonia finds humankind a few minutes past saving, a couple bickering about what to order for dinner on a sinking ship.
DIRECTOR: Yorgos Lanthimos; CAST: Emma Stone, Jesse Plemons, Aidan Delbis, Stavros Halkias, Alicia Silverstone; DISTRIBUTOR: Focus Features; IN THEATERS: October 24; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 58 min.
Originally published as part of London Film Festival 2025 — Dispatch 4.
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