Director: Yorgos Lanthimos
Cast: Emma Stone, Jesse Plemons, Stavros Halkias, Alicia Silverstone
Where: In theatres.
Rating: ***1/2
Yorgos Lanthimos's Bugonia is a bizarrely elegant cocktail of corporate satire, eco-horror, and cosmic paranoia, shaken with his trademark deadpan and served cold. A reimagining of the 2003 Korean cult film Save the Green Planet!, it transports the original’s feverish energy into our age of internet-fuelled delusion. The premise is both absurd and eerily plausible: a deluded beekeeper, Teddy (Jesse Plemons), kidnaps Michelle Fuller (Emma Stone), the sleek CEO of a pesticide empire he believes is an alien plot to annihilate humankind. What unfolds is part torture thriller, part philosophical chess match, and part tragicomic fable about who’s really destroying the planet, and why we insist on believing in aliens rather than accountability.
Lanthimos’s lens, always fascinated by the grotesque beauty of human folly, glides between menace and mirth. The film is structured like a fever dream in a boardroom. It is clinical, stylized, yet uncomfortably intimate. It’s the kind of film that makes you laugh, then wince at your laughter. The satire is unmistakable, but the emotional undercurrent which is rooted in grief, guilt, and desperation, gives Bugonia its haunting sting. This film feels like an autopsy of modern paranoia.
Actors' Performance
Emma Stone, Lanthimos's long-time muse, delivers another high-wire act; commanding, cruel, and impossible to look away from. Her Michelle is a creature of glass and steel, a corporate goddess masquerading as a moralist. Even chained in a dingy basement with her head shaved, she radiates authority, as if every word she utters were an HR memo from hell. Stone never reaches for sympathy, only precision; she weaponizes stillness like a boardroom dagger.
Jesse Plemons, meanwhile, is the film’s quietly imploding conscience. His Teddy is pitiable yet terrifying, a man undone by grief, hubris, and the algorithmic echo chamber. Plemons gives him the trembling righteousness of a true believer, making his madness oddly tender. Aidan Delbis as Don, Teddy’s neurodivergent cousin, brings heartbreaking innocence to the chaos, while Alicia Silverstone haunts the margins as a dying mother and moral ghost. Together, the cast builds a world where delusion feels like destiny.
Music and Aesthetics
Jerskin Fendrix’s score is a delirious assault where strings shriek, percussion trembles, and the silences ring with menace. It’s a sonic panic attack that mirrors the film’s emotional topography. Visually, cinematographer Robbie Ryan trades Lanthimos’s fish-eye distortion for saturated grandeur: every frame gleams with the poisoned beauty of a world on the brink. The production design swings between antiseptic corporate minimalism and farmhouse decay, a visual tug-of-war between power and rot. The camera occasionally lingers on bees that are fragile, frantic, and luminous, always reminding us that beauty and extinction share the same frame.
Final Verdict
Overall, Bugonia is flawed yet fascinating. Watch it for its audacious satire, striking visuals, and fierce performances. Imperfect, yes, but too provocative and imaginative to skip.
