Entertaining “Bugonia” Spoils Premise

Bugonia (Yorgos Lanthimos, 2025) 3 out of 5 stars

Yorgos Lanthimos (Kinds of Kindness) is back with another tale of obsessives navigating the world through arcane rules that make sense only within their hermetic universe. Here, the protagonists are Teddy (Jesse Plemons, Antlers), Don (Aidan Delbis), and Michelle (Emma Stone, Poor Things), the first two cousins down on their luck and the third the CEO of a pharmaceutical company. A remake of the 2003 South Korean film Save the Green Planet!, Bugonia chronicles what happens when Teddy and Don kidnap Michelle, convinced she is an alien from the Andromeda Galaxy sent to Earth to wipe out life as we know it.

Written by Will Tracy (The Menu), the movie takes its title from the ancient Greek belief in bees emerging from the rotting corpses of cattle. A meditation on the role of the divine in evolution and the ability (or lack thereof) of our species to avoid its own destruction, Bugonia is also, for a time, a sharp critique of late-stage capitalism. Until, that is, it swallows its own tale, becoming an intriguing, if sometimes silly, ouroboros of a narrative where Lanthimos caters to his most sophomoric of impulses. Bugonia remains almost always engaging but loses depth the further it goes along.

Teddy and Don are at the lowest point of their lives as the story begins, while Michelle is at the top. Teddy’s mom is in a coma, perhaps the victim of pesticides or drugs (it’s never explicitly stated, though much is implied), and Don is the only family he has left. The latter is on the autism spectrum and takes his cues from his cousin. Teddy has done a lot of his own online research and is convinced that everything that has gone wrong for him, whether related to his mother or to the dying bees of his apiary, is the fault of Michelle’s company, Auxolith.

In a scene both chilling and funny, Teddy and Don abduct Michelle from outside her home, suffering some serious damage as they do (she’s pretty fit and well-trained). When she comes to, they have shaved her head (believing that her hair allows her to communicate with the “mother ship”) and chained her to a bed in their basement. Teddy demands she record a message that will allow them to communicate directly with the Andromedan emperor in four days, on the lunar eclipse.

If all this sounds nutty, it’s actually par for the course in a Lanthimos work. The question always becomes one of what he will do with the material: lean too far into the absurdity or leaven the strangeness just enough to facilitate larger meaning. For much of Bugonia’s runtime, Lanthimos succeeds in superb fashion, his movie a clever sendup of corporate evil and the potential revenge of the have-nots (we see you, America of today). Not content to stop there, director and screenwriter insist on one fantastical leap too many.

It’s good fun, if a little too puerile at the end. A perfect metaphor for what goes wrong is a severed head flying through the air. Sure, we laugh, but to what larger purpose? Still, Stone and Plemons are riveting, and maybe that’s all we need.