Yorgos Lanthimos is back in cinemas with Bugonia, a grisly but frequently revolting conspiracy comedy that world premiered at Venice.
Anchored by an unsettling and authoritative performance from Emma Stone, the film dances among slapstick brutality, corporate satire, and web paranoia before resolving into a hauntingly tragic conclusion.
Collaborating with screenwriter Will Tracy, Lanthimos reworks the 2003 Korean cult hit Save the Green Planet!, shifting its corporate antagonist into a powerful female executive. Stone plays Michelle, a ruthless CEO of a pharmaceutical and retail giant whose company is accused of devastating the environment and injuring Teddy’s (Jesse Plemons) mother with its experimental drugs.
For Teddy, a beekeeper obsessed with dwindling honeybee populations, Michelle is more than just corporate greed personified, he believes she’s an alien sent to destroy humanity.
Pursuaded by his all-night web research into capitalism and elitist plots, Teddy kidnaps Michelle with the assistance of his credulous cousin (Aidan Delbis). In his basement, he tortures her in a last-ditch effort to extract an admission of extraterrestrial origin. Stone acts Michelle with chilling precision, moving through denial, threats, bargaining, and gallows humor before finally humoring Teddy’s fantasies.
Plemons gives a dynamic performance as the deranged antihero, with unexpected depth in exchanges with a local cop (Stavros Halkias), whose history with Teddy makes him increasingly conflicted. Alicia Silverstone has a quiet but affecting cameo as Teddy’s traumatized mother.
The movie is crammed with Lanthimos’s characteristic absurdist flourishes: chapter titles paying homage to Lars von Trier, slapstick grotesque moments, and a disturbing orchestral score by Jerskin Fendrix. And for all its black humor, the film later shifts into a heavy tragic conclusion, leaving one wondering if it truly deserves its emotional payoff after so much strange comedy.
Whereas Bugonia is officially flawless, there is a possibility that some viewers will find its path uneven. In contrast to Lanthimos’s latest Kinds of Kindness or the daring Poor Things, this is more jagged, spiky, and innovative. Nevertheless, its bracing final montage remains, making it an incendiary contribution to Lanthimos’s oeuvre, even though the journey feels too long. In the end, Bugonia presents a captivating mix of paranoia, dark humor, and tragic emotion, heightened by Stone’s entrancing performance. It is not Lanthimos in his most refined, but it is Lanthimos in his most combative.
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