Bugonia
As we have come to expect from Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos, Bugonia is wonderfully weird, this time exploring the realms of sci-fi and conspiracy theory. The movie is an English-language remake of the 2003 South Korean film Save the Green Planet!, which sees a man kidnap the CEO of a large pharmaceutical company because he is under the impression that they are an alien. In this version, rewritten with the assistance of screenwriter Will Tracy, we see Jesse Plemons (Teddy) and Emma Stone (Michelle) take on the leading roles and transport us on a humorous journey from reality to the realm of the bizarre.
Stone works with Lanthimos for the fifth time in her career, following her roles in The Favourite, Poor Things, Kinds of Kindness and the short film Bleat, and once again shows why she and the director go together like two peas in a pod. It takes a special type of actor to deliver the type of art that Lanthimos’s pictures demand, but Stone consistently shows she is up to the task of playing such unusual yet endearing caricatures. Plemons also delivers a performance of the quality we have come to know him for as Teddy, driven to the edge of insanity by his own conspiracies, but at the same time remaining relatable to the viewer courtesy of his innocent and autistic cousin Don (Aidan Delbis).
Excitingly, the story itself keeps you guessing as to where your own allegiances align, with every character slowly revealed to be as awful as each other. Tracy and Lanthimos have adapted the original screenplay to fit with the present world we live in, with distrust of mainstream media and anti-capitalist sentiment, creating an unnerving dose of realism to the social satire. The tone shifts between comedic and utterly horrifying, never letting you fully settle down and making the movie difficult to pigeonhole, thus successfully delivering something that feels new, refreshing and exciting. This said, you do wonder if any other director had made a feature such as this, it would be laughed at and branded totally absurd.
Jerskin Fendrix reprises his now-established position as Lanthimos’s composer, having previously worked on Poor Things and Kinds of Kindness, and what he has done with Bugonia is produce a sci-fi soundscape that has so much depth and emotion to it it wouldn’t feel out of place in 2001: A Space Odyssey. It doesn’t particularly match the drama unfolding on screen that well, but you can be sure it fits perfectly with what Teddy believes is going on in his own head. It is very cunningly crafted.
Bugonia isn’t Lanthimos’s finest work by a long way, but it is without a doubt one of the most twisted and surreal movies of the year and will be in with a shout come awards season.
Guy Lambert
Bugonia is released nationwide on 31st October 2025.
Watch the trailer for Bugonia here:
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