Directed by: Yorgos Lanthimos.
Written by: Will Tracy.
Starring: Emma Stone, Jesse Plemons, Aidan Delbis.
Runtime: 118 minutes.
‘Bugonia’ Is the Pitch-Black Comedy We Deserve in 2025
Oh, Yorgos Lanthimos. May you never get a diagnosis for whatever’s wrong with you.
“Bugonia” is another dark jewel in the director’s demented crown, an arch-black comedy about humanity’s demise that right now, playing in a U.S. theater in 2025, feels cathartically bleak, a bloodletting for the myriad socio-political humors that ail us.
The Greek filmmaker teams up again with Emma Stone, his muse for his past four films (“Poor Things,” “The Favorite” and “Kinds of Kindness” before this) in an English-language remake of the 2003 South Korean film “Save the Green Planet!” by Jang Joon-hwan. Lanthimos’ take twists the story into a satire of contemporary internet conspiracies, pharmaceutical malpractice and the rapacious greed of the 1%, offering little in the way of redemption we perhaps don’t deserve.
It starts with a plan. Teddy (Jesse Plemons) hatches an unlikely scheme with his loyal gentle giant of a cousin, Don (Aidan Delbis): They are going to kidnap Michelle Fuller (Emma Stone), star CEO of pharmaceutical company Auxolith. It’s an unlikely scheme for many, many reasons, not least of which is that Teddy and Don don’t have the air of criminal masterminds. The two live in a rundown home in quiet obscurity, Teddy working a thankless job in an Amazon-like warehouse to care for Don, who’s played with a sympathetic air of impending tragedy by Delbis, who is autistic (if the movie could be said to have a heart, however small and twisted, it’s Don).
What makes the scenario even more unlikely is Teddy’s motivation: He believes Michelle to be an “Andromedan,” one of an invasive alien species that has infiltrated earth and is threatening humanity’s survival. When he does manage to kidnap Michelle and shackle her in his basement, he shaves her head and slathers her in antihistamine cream (so she can’t communicate with the mothership, naturally) and demands an audience with her emperor at the next lunar eclipse in four days.
Stone, of course, is great. The two-time Oscar winner and frequent Lanthimos collaborator leans all in with a kind of savagery. CEO Michelle is no wilting flower, and even shaved, slick with ointment and chained to a bolt in the basement floor, she’s a force to be reckoned with.
But it’s Plemons who dominates every frame he’s in. Sweaty, twitchy, disheveled, soft-spoken but prone to terrifying outbursts, Teddy is a mess of distinctly American neuroses. “Bugonia” gives us hints of a deeper motivating pain: a mother who struggled with addiction, now comatose from the experimental pharmaceutical “cure”; some childhood trauma inflicted by an older boy who’s now a cop; bone-deep poverty and thankless, body-wrecking labor. In his basement is a conspiracy bunker where he’s diagrammed out the internet “research” that’s led him to kidnap a CEO he believes is an alien. “I don’t get the news from the news,” he says without irony. All you can do is laugh. (If the script had been written just a year later, perhaps Teddy would be suffering from AI-induced psychosis after too many late-night conversations with ChatGPT.)
Emmy Award-winning screenwriter Will Tracy’s work, including 2022 horror-satire “The Menu” and television’s “Succession” and “Last Week Tonight with John Oliver,” has over his career reliably skewered the wealthy and rapacious forces wreaking havoc on daily American life. His astute cultural commentary paired with Lanthimos’ swing-for-the-fences tonal and stylistic excess makes for a blistering and bleak experience.
There is one line from “Bugonia” that rang through my head long through the night after the screening ended. Engaged in a fervent discussion of colony collapse disorder among bees, one of Teddy’s pieces of evidence of Andromedan interference on earth, Michelle counters, “Sometimes a species just winds down.”
Teddy, with his unaddressed childhood trauma and his pain inflicted by the ravages of the American healthcare system and his thankless job and his crushing poverty and his internet-addled brain, feels like just that: a species winding down.
I walked out of the theater, but it didn’t feel like the movie had ended.
Barbara’s ranking
3.5/4 stars
