Review: Yorgos Lanthimos’s 'Bugonia' Is Bizarre, Brilliant, And Buzzing With Chaos

She drinks out of a Stanley, wears Louboutins to board meetings, and listens to Chappell Roan while speeding down a deserted highway. Emma Stone’s Michelle Fuller, the enigmatic CEO at the centre of Yorgos Lanthimos’s Bugonia, is not the kind of person you’d expect to get abducted by a beekeeper with a theory. But that’s the plot of a Lanthimos film, it never starts where you think, and it definitely never ends there.

The word bugonia comes from an ancient Greek superstition, the belief that bees could be born from the carcass of a dead ox. Derived from bous (ox) and gonē (progeny), the ritual imagined life emerging from decay, a strange alchemy of death and creation.

The Plot: Conspiracy and Honey

Meet Teddy (Jesse Plemons), a small-town beekeeper who’s convinced that aliens, specifically a superior race called Andromedans, secretly control Earth through its corporations. With his cousin Don (Aidan Delbis), makes his misson to catch them. His prime suspect? Michelle, the sleek, unnervingly calm CEO of a pharmaceutical company that’s probably on every “evil empire” Reddit thread.

Convinced he’s saving humanity (just like any man on the internet), Teddy kidnaps her, shaves her head (because apparently that’s how aliens communicate), and begins his interrogation-slash-exorcism.

What follows is a tense and often darkly funny back-and-forth between delusion and reason, with Michelle using every ounce of composure (and sarcasm) to survive. By the time the lunar eclipse rolls in, both captor and captive have lost more than just their grip on reality. And me my last two braincells, in a good way of course.

Capitalism???

Beneath all the talk of Andromedans and cosmic plots, Bugonia is really about the internet age’s favourite pastime, finding someone to blame. Lanthimos and writer Will Tracy take on the absurdity of modern paranoia, blending corporate doublespeak with online hysteria. Michelle’s jargon-filled monologues about “work-life balance” and “output efficiency” are almost funnier than the scenes of abduction, because they sound like every press release you’ve ever hated.

It’s not exactly a lecture on capitalism, but more a satire of the way people twist its chaos into something that makes sense. And in Teddy’s world, believing aliens run Big Pharma feels almost logical. 

The Performances: Sharp, Strange, Satisfying

Stone plays Michelle with the calm precision of someone who’s read too many self-help books and knows how to weaponise them. She’s composed, dryly funny, and unnervingly at ease in the face of insanity. Might be her career’s best.

Plemons, meanwhile, is the kind of unstable that’s more eerie than scary, a man trying to wrestle meaning out of a meaningless world. The two create an uneasy chemistry that’s less about connection and more about survival, and watching them trade control is the film’s most addictive element. Aidan Delbis is quite convincing for this part; you might just feel bad for him throughout the film. The Oscar season is going to be chaotic.

Conspiracy Theories on Film

From The X-Filesto Donnie Darko, films have long used paranoia as a way to explore belief and control. Bugonia adds a layer of absurd comedy; it’s less about proving the existence of aliens and more about what happens when people can’t accept the randomness of life.

Teddy’s obsession feels eerily familiar in an era of algorithm-driven “truth seekers,” and Lanthimos makes sure we feel that discomfort. 

Verdict: Weird, Wonderful, and a Little Too Real

Bugonia isn’t Lanthimos at his wildest (The Favouritestill holds that crown), but it’s one of his most grounded, if such a word can be used for a film involving aliens and chemical castration. It’s claustrophobic, funny in the most uncomfortable way, and just self-aware enough to keep you hooked.

Not every metaphor lands, but the film’s mix of absurdity and melancholy lingers long after the credits. You’ll leave questioning whether Michelle was really an alien — or if humanity’s madness is explanation enough.

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