Bugonia (2025)
2025’s Most Audacious Sci-Fi Thriller
Genre fans, we need to talk about Bugonia. Not because it's perfect—no Lanthimos film ever aims for something as pedestrian as perfection—but because it's the kind of gloriously deranged science fiction that reminds you why you fell in love with weird cinema in the first place.
This is a film that opens with Jesse Plemons preparing for an alien kidnapping by chemically castrating himself while Emma Stone does yoga in a sterile modernist mansion, and only gets stranger from there. It's Misery meets The Day the Earth Stood Still filtered through Kubrickian paranoia and wrapped in the darkest comedy you'll see all year. In other words: it's exactly what genre cinema should be doing in 2025.
The Setup: Conspiracy Theory Meets Corporate Evil
The premise sounds like something cooked up in the depths of a particularly unhinged Reddit thread. Teddy Gatz (Plemons) is a beekeeper and low-level warehouse employee convinced that pharmaceutical giant Auxolith is secretly run by aliens from Andromeda who are systematically destroying Earth. When the company's experimental drugs left his mother (Alicia Silverstone) in a vegetative state and their chemicals started killing his bee colonies, Teddy did what any reasonable conspiracy theorist would do: he recruited his autistic cousin Don (Aidan Delbis) to help kidnap the company's CEO, Michelle Fuller (Stone), shave her head to prevent communication with the mothership, and interrogate her in his basement until she orders the alien withdrawal from Earth.
What follows is 118 minutes of psychological warfare, shifting power dynamics, brutal violence, and the kind of tonal whiplash that would give lesser films vertigo. Lanthimos, working from Will Tracy's razor-sharp script (adapting the 2003 Korean cult classic Save the Green Planet!), turns what could be a simple thriller into a funhouse mirror reflection of our current moment's descent into conspiracy-addled madness.
Why Genre Fans Will Love This
Let me be clear upfront: Bugonia earns its audacity. This isn't some indie director cosplaying as genre while keeping one foot safely in prestige drama territory. Lanthimos commits fully to the science fiction premise while maintaining his signature absurdist style, and the result is intoxicating.
The film works on multiple levels simultaneously. On the surface, it's a tense kidnapping thriller with genuine surprises. Cinematographer Robbie Ryan shot the film in VistaVision—using the format more extensively than any film since 1961's One-Eyed Jacks—giving every frame a gorgeous, eerie clarity that makes the basement interrogation scenes feel both claustrophobic and uncomfortably intimate. When Teddy tortures Michelle with electricity that should kill her but doesn't, the visual language shifts into full Twilight Zone territory, and you realize Lanthimos has been playing a longer game all along.
But it's also a darkly funny satire of corporate doublespeak, internet echo chambers, and our inability to distinguish between legitimate grievances and unhinged paranoia. Teddy isn't entirely wrong—Auxolith really did hurt his mother, their chemicals really are killing the bees, pharmaceutical companies really do prioritize profit over people. He's just spectacularly, catastrophically wrong about why.
The Performances: Career-Best Work
Jesse Plemons has never been better. His Teddy is simultaneously threatening and pathetic, a man whose genuine pain and legitimate anger at corporate malfeasance has curdled into something monstrous. Plemons plays him with sweaty, unwashed intensity—the kind of conspiracy theorist who's pieced together a horrifying worldview from podcasts, fringe websites, and his own experiments, and whose absolute certainty in his own correctness makes him capable of unspeakable acts.
But it's the moments when that certainty cracks that Plemons truly shines. When Michelle (in a scene of psychological manipulation so exquisite it should be studied) convinces him that the "Andromedan cure" for his mother is antifreeze, watching Teddy rush to inject it into her IV is devastating. He's a man destroyed by his own belief system, and Plemons makes you feel every ounce of that tragedy even as you recoil from his actions.
Emma Stone, sporting a shaved head and steely corporate affect, is equally magnificent. Her Michelle starts as the archetypal girlboss CEO, all passive-aggressive corporate-speak and dead-eyed efficiency. But Stone reveals layers with surgical precision—the predatory satisfaction when she manipulates Don into suicide, the cold calculation as she weighs her options, and finally, in the film's shocking third act, something far stranger and more terrifying.
Special praise must be reserved for Aidan Delbis as Don, an autistic actor bringing genuine emotional intelligence to what could have been a thankless role. Don is the film's conscience, the one character capable of seeing both Teddy's pain and Michelle's humanity. His final scene is the film's emotional gut-punch, and Delbis plays it with heartbreaking honesty.
The Deeper Science Fiction
What makes Bugonia work as science fiction isn't just the alien reveal—it's what Lanthimos does with that reveal. This is a film about failed experiments, both literal and metaphorical. The title itself refers to an ancient Greek ritual where bees were believed to spontaneously generate from sacrificed ox carcasses—creation born from corruption.
The Andromedans created humanity in their own image, then watched in horror as their creation developed warfare, climate change, and the capacity for casual cruelty. Michelle's decision to flip the switch isn't just alien judgment—it's the logical endpoint of humanity's trajectory. We're the failed experiment, and the bees' survival suggests Earth will be fine without us.
This is science fiction operating at its highest level: using the fantastic to ask uncomfortable questions about our present moment. Are we destroying the planet we were given? Have we become so addicted to conspiracy and polarization that we can't see the actual harm we're causing? Is our experiment in civilization ultimately sustainable, or are we just waiting for someone to flip the switch?
The Satire Cuts Deep
But Bugonia is also wickedly, brutally funny in ways that sneak up on you. Stone singing along to Chappell Roan's "Good Luck, Babe!" while driving her Range Rover to commit corporate atrocities is an indelible image of our current moment. The film's portrayal of corporate doublespeak—the way Michelle weaponizes passive-aggressive boardroom language even while chained in a basement—is so pitch-perfect it hurts.
And Lanthimos understands that conspiracy theorists often identify real problems while arriving at spectacularly wrong conclusions. Big Pharma really does put profit over people. Chemicals really are killing bee populations. Corporate executives really do operate with alien indifference to human suffering. Teddy's not crazy for being angry—he's crazy for thinking aliens are to blame rather than good old-fashioned human greed.
Minor Quibbles
If I have any criticism, it's that Bugonia occasionally feels too controlled, too calculated in its provocations. Lanthimos's earlier work like Dogtooth felt genuinely anarchic and dangerous. Here, for all its shocking violence and bleak worldview, there's a sense that every disturbing moment has been carefully calibrated for maximum impact. The film is playing with you, and sometimes you can see the strings.
Some may also find the middle section's basement-bound chamber drama too static, though I'd argue the claustrophobia is intentional. This is a film about people trapped by their own worldviews—literally and metaphorically—and the confined setting reinforces that theme.
Why This Matters for Genre Cinema
Bugonia is the kind of science fiction we need more of in 2025. Not safe, comforting genre exercises that deliver expected beats, but films willing to use the fantastic to say something genuinely uncomfortable about who we are and what we're becoming.
It's a film that respects its audience enough to not provide easy answers or comfortable resolutions. The ending is deliberately ambiguous—writer Will Tracy has said he and Lanthimos want viewers to leave with questions, not certainties. Is Michelle's decision justified? Would the world really be better without us? Are we the monsters or the victims of this story? The film invites debate rather than providing answers.
With its nominations at the Golden Globes for Best Drama and acting nods for both Stone and Plemons, Bugonia has a shot at breaking through the awards barrier that typically excludes genre films. But honestly? Who cares about awards when you're making cinema this bold, this strange, this uncompromising?
The Verdict
Bugonia is essential viewing for anyone who loves science fiction that takes risks. It's beautifully shot, brilliantly acted, darkly hilarious, and deeply unsettling. It's a film that will make you laugh, cringe, and stare at the ceiling at 3 AM wondering if maybe, just maybe, we had it coming.
This is Lanthimos at his most accessible and his most misanthropic—a combination that somehow works because the filmmaking is so assured and the performances so committed. It's not for everyone. If you need your sci-fi with clear heroes and villains, look elsewhere. But if you want a film that uses the genre to hold up a funhouse mirror to our current moment and asks whether we deserve to survive our own experiment in civilization, Bugoniadelivers in spades.
Genre fans have been eating well in 2025, but Bugonia stands out as something special—a film that proves science fiction can be weird, wonderful, and willing to burn everything down in service of its vision. That it does so while also being darkly funny and featuring career-best work from two of our finest actors is just the honey-soaked cherry on top.
See it in theaters while you can. See it on the biggest screen possible, shot as it was in glorious VistaVision. And then grab drinks with friends afterward, because you're going to need to talk this one through. That's what great science fiction should do: lodge itself in your brain like a conspiracy theory you can't quite shake, uncomfortable and fascinating in equal measure.
Now streaming on Peacock
★★★★½ (4.5/5 stars)
Genre: Science Fiction / Psychological Thriller / Dark Comedy
Runtime: 118 minutes
Director: Yorgos Lanthimos
Writer: Will Tracy
Starring: Emma Stone, Jesse Plemons, Aidan Delbis, Alicia Silverstone, Stavros Halkias