Bugonia — The Cosmic Snatch

Bugonia: full review

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Yorgos Lanthimos has spent a decade proving that cruelty can be a film genre with its own grammar: cold shots, dialogue recited like instructions for a household appliance, and characters who tear each other apart with the politeness of someone asking for the time. With Bugonia (2025), the Greek director takes a curious step: for the first time he remakes someone else’s film, Save the Green Planet! (2003), Jang Joon-hwan’s Korean fever dream, and moves it to a rural America of conspiracy theories, dying bees and pharmaceutical companies with emotional-wellness departments. The result is his most direct and, at times, angriest film.

The premise fits in a paranoid tweet: Teddy Gatz (Jesse Plemons), a beekeeper and warehouse worker, is convinced that Michelle Fuller (Emma Stone), CEO of the pharmaceutical giant Auxolith, is an alien from Andromeda sent to destroy humanity. With the help of his cousin Don (Aidan Delbis), he kidnaps her, shaves her head “to cut off communication with the mothership” and chains her in his basement. His goal: to extract a confession and a meeting with her emperor. And Teddy has a very earthly reason to hate her: his mother (Alicia Silverstone) is in a coma after taking part in one of the company’s clinical trials.

Direction and mise-en-scène: the basement as a boardroom

Lanthimos shoots the kidnapping like a business negotiation. Teddy’s basement, with its tube lighting and flea-market furniture, becomes a boardroom where hostage and captor trade arguments, threats and emotional blackmail with a courtesy scarier than any blow. Robbie Ryan’s cinematography, shot in VistaVision, uses the format to give the miserable interiors an almost monumental breadth: Teddy’s house looks like both a temple and a landfill, and the shots of the apiary have the sick beauty of a documentary about the end of the world.

Compared with the baroque excess of Poor Things or the frayed triptych of Kinds of Kindness, Lanthimos is more restrained and faster here. Will Tracy’s script (The Menu, Succession) forces him to tell a story with a beginning, middle and end, and the director responds with a thriller pace that only slackens in the second act, when the cat-and-mouse game starts going round in circles. Jerskin Fendrix’s score, with its hysterical strings and choirs, once again works as a parallel nervous system.

Performances: two polite monsters

Emma Stone, in yet another collaboration with Lanthimos, builds Michelle as a crisis-management machine: even shaved, chained and humiliated, she speaks in the tone of someone presenting quarterly results. Stone is brilliant in her shifts of register, moving from corporate condescension to panic and from panic to a coldness that starts to sound suspiciously inhuman. It’s the kind of performance that turns every shot into a question.

But the film belongs to Jesse Plemons. His Teddy is a man whom precarity, internet forums and grief have turned into a fanatic, and Plemons plays him without a single wink to the audience: his conviction is so total that it is as moving as it is terrifying. Newcomer Aidan Delbis, as cousin Don, is the vulnerable heart of the show, and Stavros Halkias, as local cop Casey, brings a grotesque menace that speeds up the third act.

Script: paranoia as social diagnosis

The most interesting thing about Bugonia is that it doesn’t laugh at Teddy. The script spreads the blame with cruel even-handedness: the pharmaceutical company that experiments on the poor and sells them as data, the executive who has learned to talk like an HR manual, the man nobody listened to until he bought some chains. The title, which alludes to the ancient belief that bees were born from the carcass of an ox, anticipates the thesis: something is born from rot, but not necessarily something better.

The problem is that Lanthimos and Tracy, so sure of the diagnosis, stumble over the treatment. The middle section drags on with interrogations that repeat the same idea in different costumes, and the ending, which we won’t reveal here, is so radical it will split audiences between those who celebrate it as a perfect cosmic joke and those who see it as a nihilistic tantrum. We are, with reservations, in the first group.

The best

• Jesse Plemons: A fanatic built from the inside, with no caricature, who makes paranoia hurt.
• Emma Stone: Her executive is a marvel of ambiguity; every answer sounds like both a lie and a confession.
• Robbie Ryan’s cinematography: VistaVision turns a suburban basement and an apiary into end-of-days landscapes.
• The ending: One of the boldest conclusions in recent auteur cinema.

The worst

• The second act: The basement interrogations go round in circles once the film has already shown its hand.
• An unnecessary remake for those who know the original: Lanthimos polishes and Americanizes Jang Joon-hwan’s film, but loses some of its unhinged madness.

The Claqueta Ácida Verdict (7.5/10)

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