Emma Stone as a kidnapped, shaven-headed pharmaceuticals CEO who might also be the ruler of an alien master race? It says a lot about director Yorgos Lanthimos that Bugonia was arguably his most straightforward film to date.
For this remake of the cult 2003 South Korean movie Save the Green Planet! we were invited into the unkempt home of beekeeper Teddy (Jesse Plemons), a paranoid conspiracy theorist whose internet research has led him to believe that aliens are poisoning his bees – and that only he can save life on Earth from extinction. He enlists his neurodivergent cousin Don (Aidan Delbis) to kidnap high-flying Michelle Fuller (Stone), whose company Auxolith seems to have caused Teddy’s mother some kind of irreversible harm in the past.
Stone enjoys pushing herself artistically for Lanthimos and Bugonia was no different: here we see her knocked unconscious in the back of a car while a panicking Don takes chunks out of her hair with a pair of clippers (Teddy insists that she can only communicate with her alien peers via her hair). By the time she’s been doused from head to toe in antihistamine cream she looks like, well, an alien.
Stone is superb as the cut-throat girl boss trying to turn her company’s rep around with performative empathy: feel free to leave at 5.30pm, she tells her staff, before reminding them that this isn’t compulsory, and that they really should make sure they have done all their tasks first. But hey, it’s up to them! Even when tied up in Teddy’s basement, she calmly deploys every trick she’s learned from top CEO-ing – reasoning, bargaining, even faking an admission of guilt. She truly believes she can get herself out of any sticky situation with the right corporate-speak. But Plemons’s stressed, sweating Teddy is her match: a man pushed so close to the edge that no amount of smooth-talk, or even hard evidence, can dissuade him from his mission. There is no reasoning with this type of person. Anyone who’s been on social media at any point in the last decade will recognise him only too well.
The film toys with our sympathies. A cold-hearted CEO is clearly not our friend but then we don’t like seeing her being subjected to Teddy’s increasingly unhinged tests either. The latter has clearly had his brain scrambled by grief and what is hinted to have been childhood sexual abuse, yet his sheer refusal to hear anything that won’t confirm his pre-existing beliefs is maddening. Only Don, who spends the movie being horribly manipulated by Teddy and Michelle, has any room for doubt in his life. Given that Lanthimos’s fantastical worlds are so often populated by stilted oddballs he seems like a real rarity: a genuine human being with a heart.
The twist was always coming. Teddy is revealed to have butchered several innocents in his hunt for Andromedans – but he’s right about Michelle. She really does belong to a distant alien race. In fact, she’s their empress. Human beings only came about because the Andromedans invented them, as a “sorry” for accidentally wiping out the dinosaurs (oops!). Something must have gone wrong with the design, though, because this species seems hellbent on the destruction of themselves and the planet.
Humans, concludes Alien Stone, are a busted flush. As she terminates us all with the flick of a switch we see the results back on Earth in a stunning montage set to Marlene Dietrich’s Where Have All the Flowers Gone: schoolchildren lie dead in their classroom, lovers have been extinguished mid-intercourse, a motorway of dead drivers slumped in their cars. And yet life – the flowers, the birds and, yes, the bees – seem to be thriving. Nature is healing.
Lanthimos’s films often leave you questioning what you’ve just seen and pondering a whole number of possible interpretations. Bugonia seems more direct. It addressed very modern ailments, from corporate ecocide to the people on society’s fringes being sucked down the worst wormholes of the internet. The only question you’re left wrestling with is not how to save humanity from itself, but whether human beings are really worth saving at all. In 2026, that seems a particularly poignant one.
