#261: Bugonia

Release Date: October 24th, 2025

Format: DCP (Art Theatre of Long Beach in Long Beach, CA)

Written by: Will Tracy

Directed by: Yorgos Lanthimos

4 Stars

Yorgos Lanthimos’ Bugonia continues the recent trend of high-concept thrillers that are popular with audiences and critics alike. This may have started with Jordan Peele’s 2017 film, Get Out, a film that’s proving, as the years go by, to be one of the most influential films of the 21st century.  

It’s a niche genre that I think has been a net positive to the state of American cinema, but I can’t help but wonder when it will eventually run its course and fall out of favor with mainstream moviegoers. 

Not yet it seems, at least in the case of Bugonia. It’s a great thriller that almost sadistically forces the audience to shift their allegiance and loyalty between the two main characters as the story plays out.

The script, by Will Tracy, is a remake of a South Korean film called Save the Green Planet! (I haven’t seen it) from writer/director Jang Joon-hwan. In Tracy’s version, the story is about a big pharma CEO, Michelle Fuller (Emma Stone), who is kidnapped by a conspiracy theorist, Teddy (Jesse Plemons) and his cousin, Don (Aidan Delbis). Teddy and Don have a sort of George and Lennie-type of relationship, and Teddy convinces Don that Michelle Fuller is not only an evil capitalist who profits off of the sick, but that she is also, in fact, an alien. He even knows her alien race: Andromedan.

Teddy’s plan is to kidnap Michelle Fuller from her home, keep her in their basement, and force her to summon her alien brethren back to earth to remove her and any other Andromedans from the planet. Once the Andromedans are gone, Teddy says, the earth and the human race can begin healing. 

Kudos to Tracy’s script for making me second-guess my first instinct as to where his story was headed. I had the ending figured out soon after Teddy and Don kidnap Michelle Fuller, but Tracy had me doubting my assumption off and on for the rest of the film. 

I also doubted where my sympathies should lie between the down-and-out Teddy and the corporate lioness Michelle Fuller. Tracy and Lanthimos deftly address the ethics of violent activism, and they make the audience feel the complications of those ethics: Michelle Fuller is a corporate warlord, who puts shareholders ahead of patients, who pays for her G-Wagon and multimillion dollar mansion by preying on the desperation of the sick. Doesn’t she deserve a bit of her own medicine? Doesn’t she deserve to be tied down and shocked by Teddy and Don in their basement, so she can feel what pain is like? 

Or is that wrong, torturing her? She may be an evil capitalist, sure, but she’s still a human being with feelings.

Or is she? 

I won’t spoil the ending, but I liked it. The two past films that I’ve seen of Lanthimos’ were with him as writer/director, The Lobster and The Killing of a Sacred Deer. I liked both of those films, but I found them slightly esoteric. A little too artsy fartsy for the sake of being artsy fartsy. Bugonia has no such problem. 

Will Tracy builds this beautiful spaceship of a script and all Yorgos Lanthimos has to do is fly it. He gets wonderful performances from all three leads, Stone, Plemons, and Delbis, and his visual style and mastery of tone are on full display.

Maybe we will get to the artistic saturation point with these socially-conscious, reality-bending thrillers that have been en vogue since Get Out, but Bugonia proves that we haven’t reached that point yet.