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**½/**** starring Emma Stone, Jesse Plemons, Aidan Delbis, Alicia Silverstone screenplay by Will Tracy, based on the screenplay by Jang Joon-hwan directed by Yorgos Lanthimos
by Walter Chaw I don’t know what it’s like to come to Yorgos Lanthimos’s Bugonia fresh, given that it’s a remake of Jang Joon-hwan’s gonzo, lacerating Save the Green Planet!, a film about wild conspiracy theories and the people who drink deep from them that seemed considerably more novel in 2003 than it does in 2025. Now, some pathetic incel white supremacist dufus doing a terrorism is a weekly–soon to be daily–occurrence, making Bugonia a lot like Ari Aster’s Eddington: too late to be a warning and too directionless to offer solutions. What is it, then? Well, it’s sort of like Idiocracy, if Idiocracy came out today instead of 20 years ago, when it was a terrifying prophecy of unusual prescience. I guess the proper term for this exercise would be “past its sell-by date,” but what I think it is, mostly, is a very fine vehicle for Jessie Plemons and possibly a test of how close we are to Lanthimos and Emma Stone finally pushing their luck a little too far and launching themselves into the land of the terminally overexposed. I love that they continue to inspire each other and stuff, though their collaboration is starting to feel like a party where everyone else has left and I have to work in the morning, you guys, please.
Plemons is Teddy, a lonesome apiarist who, through exhaustive Internet scholarship, divines that Earth is under invasion by aliens from Andromeda. Spearheading this alleged invasion force is pharmaceutical CEO Michelle Fuller (Stone), whose immense greed and latent sociopathy indirectly caused the mortal incapacitation of Teddy’s mother at some point in the recent past. This has pushed Teddy over the edge, and so he and his confederate/cousin Don (Aidan Delbis) abduct Michelle, intent on torturing the truth out of her–and maybe, along the way, finding a cure for Teddy’s mom. This results in a few barbed exchanges in Will Tracy’s script that portray the essential futility of trying to talk a conspiracy theorist out of his theories: a battle of wits between a fucking idiot and a fucking monster, made interesting because the only unequivocally happy ending would be for both of them to die. There’s no real rooting interest, in other words; the film suggests a dialectical exercise assigned by a particularly perverse poli-sci professor who ran out of time to prepare a full lesson plan. The Trolley Problem, but you’re rooting for the Trolley.
For me, the pleasures of Bugonia lie mainly in the amount of punishment meted out and endured by Teddy and Michelle. Divorced from any real emotional investment, it’s fun to see how far Lanthimos will make Stone go this time. While the picture’s ripped-from-the-headlines concerns about climate disaster and Big Pharma are probably well-intentioned, at this point in our precipitous decline they’re tedious. The spectacle of our Frankensteins being mauled to death by their Monsters is the only spectacle left I can invest in, as pyrrhic as the outcome might be. Yes, another of you has died, and yes, you are the one who made the murderer. A shame that so many children who had nothing to do with any of this are counted as collateral damage necessary for the main event. Our civilization, too, reduced to the house-band squeezing out a waltz during Happy Hour at the Restaurant at the End of the Universe. Plemons is marvellous in a showy role, shaggy and unhinged in a completely lovable way as opposed to his shaggy and unhinged, cold-blooded assassin in El Camino or his buttoned-up and unhinged psychopath in Civil War. Stone is… Can I say the best thing about Stone is how she shut down Telluride Festival Executive Director Julie Huntsinger on stage during the introduction, in which Huntsinger, in her breathless every-person persona, marvelled at the amount of abuse taken by Stone in the film? Stone took the mic and said, sharply, “I didn’t get beat up. I’m a producer on this film. I have agency.” Rage on, Emma Stone.
Bugonia is a solid movie that wears its importance on its sleeve, which is what Lanthimos is often accused of doing though not by me, at least not until last year’s Kinds of Kindness. His latest is less weird and more accessible overall, making me worry that he’s losing his edge and possibly courting a wider audience. Or he might just be taking bad advice. There are many people who could have made Bugonia; there is only one person who could have made Dogtooth or The Lobster. I don’t know who Bugonia is for: I think it’ll disappoint fans of the original and of Lanthimos, and I think it’ll be as alien for neophytes and normies as a typically horrifying Lanthimos joint would have been. It’s not quirky enough to be novel and not tame enough to be popular. It’s almost a joke about itself. Consider the title, a fifth-grader’s idea of clever–“Monsteropolis” or “Cootieville,” applied to a freshman sociology major’s sense of moral outrage. Of all things, Bugonia reminded me of Barbie in terms of a movie that dumbs things down so much that it’s only useful as either a gateway drug for the very young or a brace for the very elderly. There’s a place for stuff like that, I guess. In a Ron Howard film, for instance. What a waste.
