Venice: Yorgos Lanthimos Returns with "Bugonia"
Monday, September 1, 2025 at 12:00PM Elisa Giudici reporting from Venice
The cage match comes first: a ruthless CEO named Michelle (Emma Stone) wakes in a crumbling suburban house, bound and outmaneuvered by Teddy (Jesse Plemons), a low-wage packer with a ponytail, a backyard of beehives, and a head full of conspiracy podcasts. With help from his guileless cousin Don (Aidan Delbis), Teddy gives her three days to lead them to her spaceship before a looming lunar eclipse. Money won’t tempt him; sex won’t distract him—he and Don have even resorted to DIY chemical castration to blunt any “alien” manipulation. The stakes sound absurd, but the menace is real: in Lanthimos’s world, delusion can be methodical, rage can be lucid, and the invisible can prove terrifyingly effective...
Only afterward does the title click into place. In Virgil’s Georgics, “bugonia” names the miracle of bees rising from the carcass of a slaughtered ox. Lanthimos adopts the myth as diagnosis and dare: if the bees are dying, what, if anything, can still be born from the rotting body of a humanity unwilling—or unable—to take responsibility for itself?
After the polished triumphs of The Favourite and Poor Things, Bugonia feels like a homecoming. The film returns Lanthimos to a shabby, isolated house at the edge of civilization—literally commissioned on the outskirts of London—where he can do what he once did with tiny budgets and unknowns, now with Hollywood stars and maximal control. He shoots in VistaVision, luxuriating in a format as sumptuous as it is unwieldy, and folds the spectacle into a chamber piece that’s all nerves and pressure.
Jesse Plemons in "Bugonia". Photo by Atsushi Nishijima © Focus Features
The source is as pointed as the setup. Screenwriter Will Tracy (whose The Menu and Succession anatomize the deranged logics of the ultra-rich) reimagines the 2003 Korean dark comedy Save the Green Planet!, a story less about tinfoil-hat paranoia than about the social hive that breeds it. Ari Aster reportedly nudged Tracy toward the remake; you can feel the kinship in the film’s cosmic pessimism, its sense of being watched, managed, and quietly crushed. Conspiracy, here, is just the folk theology of inequality.
Michelle, all Louboutins and 4:30 a.m. yoga, carries a psychology degree and a predator’s instincts. She assumes her captors will fold under the pressure of money, status, or charm. Teddy, meticulous and sealed off in online echo chambers, refuses the offer; “nobody cares” about him or people like him, he says and the film takes that disappearance seriously. Their duel exposes her inhumanity: how she wears a corporate self the way others wear armor while his fury and damaged past keep the balance of power unnervingly fluid.
The filmmaking is both lush and brutal. Jerskin Fendrix’s orchestral score coils around the action, the images gleam even when the world on screen is decaying, and Lanthimos’s signature cruelty feels sharply earned. The paradox at the film’s heart is simple: Teddy’s extraterrestrial plot is nonsense, but the climate dread, economic precarity, and social contempt that feed it are painfully real. Against that, Michelle reads as the true alien: sterile, manipulative, icily detached from her own kidnapping.
Emma Stone in "Bugonia" Atsushi Nishijima ˚© 2025 Focus Feature LLC. All Rights Reserved
In the final movement, answers arrive and the Korean DNA of the original text shows more clearly. Lanthimos and Tracy bend the material toward their sensibilities without sanding off its edges. The result will split audiences, and rightly so: the film commits to a bold, uncompromising endgame, carrying the physical and psychological torments of captor and captive to a peak where both are chasing the same prize from opposite sides: she with the winner’s entitlement, he with the outcast’s invention.
If Bugonia feels of its time, it’s because it is: a child of the pandemic’s feverish self-scrutiny, when private grievances metastasized online and found shapes to hate. From that carcass, Lanthimos asks, can anything like bees still rise? Here, at least, something unnervingly alive - funny, vicious, and sorrowfully lucid - takes flight.
Reader Comments (2)
How were the performances,i've heard Emma is heading for nomination No 5,How was Alicia Silverstone,praying for her comeback,she was done dirty in the late 90's because she starred in a bad blockbuster and gained a little weight.
Elisa, I really appreciate the writing of this review. I think it's my favorite of all your pieces over the years.