Bugonia: A Film Review.

Bugonia comes from ancient mythology. “Bugonia” refers to the supposed generation of bees from the carcass of a dead ox. It is a myth about spontaneous creation. Just as bees were thought to emerge from decay, conspiracy theories in the internet age seem to “spawn” endlessly from dead ideas recycled by new podcasters in new words.

Bugonia resists every genre label you try to pin on it. Part black comedy, part psychological thriller, part satire, part fever dream. It is too ambitious to be any one thing, and just self-aware enough to know it. That ambition is both its greatest strength and for some its most visible flaw.

The film follows Teddy and Donny, two persons who became paranoid in search of occupation of mind. Obsessed with conspiracy theories these men kidnap Michelle Fuller, a powerful biotech CEO and played by Emma Stone. They are convinced she is an alien from Andromeda planet, plotting humanity’s destruction. Their belief is not born of evidence. It is born of loops on internet echo chambers, podcasts, and the relentless self-confirming logic of obsession. Logic the mind convinces itself is uniquely its own.

That is the quiet achievement of Bugonia. A complicated idea about belief, rationality, and the limits of human perception is told through a simple, almost absurd story.

The Details:

• Director: Yorgos Lanthimos (The Favourite, Poor Things)
• Screenplay: Will Tracy, based on Jang Joon-hwan’s cult Korean film Save the Green Planet!
• Cast: Emma Stone, Jesse Plemons, Aidan Delbis, Alicia Silverstone
• Genre: Black comedy, psychological thriller, sci-fi satire, Drama or an undetermined Genre.
• Release: Premiered at Venice in August 2025, U.S. release October 2025
• Runtime: 118 minutes
• Budget/Box Office: ~$45–55 million budget, ~$42.8 million box office

Rating★★★★☆

The Slog Endurance

The opening act is, bluntly, a test of patience. Teddy and Donny’s circular dialogue feels like listening to two men dig a hole and then climb back out of it, endlessly. It is boring by design. Lanthimos traps the viewer inside the suffocating rhythm of obsessive thinking. Similar ideas are repeated and the same logic bent and re-bent. It mirrors the monotony of an internet echo chamber with uncomfortable accuracy.

Sit through it. The film earns its payoff precisely because of this slog. Lanthimos wanted us to feel trapped in that basement with two demented men, looping nonsense until we’re desperate for escape until the shift finally arrives. Once Emma Stone (Michelle) takes control, the tension sharpens and the narrative pivots into something far more alive. Then there is a climax followed by another.

The climax does not reward patience with answers. It rewards it with the right question.

Blood Without Glory

The violence in Bugonia is not stylized. It is raw, awkward, and often genuinely disgusting. Lanthimos frames it off the expected cinematic axis, refusing to let it become spectacle. You cannot enjoy it. That is the point. Obsession, when it turns physical, is ugly and graceless. The film insists you see it that way.

Emma Stone shaved her head for the film. Stone chose to go through the real tonsure rather than rely on prosthetics or CGI, because Lanthimos wanted the scene to feel raw and authentic. It lands as real. It is one of the most unsettling and quietly powerful moments in recent cinema. It is an act of stripping away that feels earned within the film’s logic of exposure and vulnerability. To keep the look under wraps before the film’s release, Stone wore wigs in public appearances.

The Philosophical Sting

Bugonia is not merely a satire of conspiracy culture. Its deeper provocation is sharper than that. The film demonstrates that rationality itself is a perspective, not a truth. Human beings believe what they want to believe. When logic no longer serves that belief, they bend the logic. Teddy and Donny are extreme examples of a very ordinary tendency.

The climax leaves no resolution. Bugonia offers no replacement truth for the myths it dismantles. Instead, it suggests that the healthiest response to a world of competing perspectives might simply be to observe. To not force meaning. To resist the very obsession the film has just dramatized for two hours.

That conclusion lands with real weight, but only if you have done the work of the film’s first hour. You have to earn the climax to absorb it.

Artistic Choices

Lanthimos’s filmography is not for every taste. If you prefer the classical elegance of a film like Hal Ashby’s ‘Being There’, Bugonia will feel abrasive or funky. Ashby delivered a radical idea inside a polished, old-fashioned dramatic shell. Bugonia’s strangeness is worn on the outside, not hidden within. The disorientation is the delivery, not just the message.

That is a legitimate artistic choice. It just means the film demands a particular kind of willingness from its viewer. Go in knowing you will be made uncomfortable. Go in knowing the genre will keep shifting under your feet. The reward, when it arrives, is original and worth it.

A movie worth watching.