Yorgos Lanthimos' Bugonia Makes Absurd Mockery of the American Psyche

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An English-language remake of a South Korean film is almost never a good idea. For those still recovering from Spike Lee’s misguided 2013 reimagining of Park Chan-wook’s Oldboy, rest assured that Yorgos Lanthimos’ Bugonia does not make the same mistakes. Instead, Lanthimos offers us an absurd anti-capitalist fable that takes the best elements of Jang Joon-hwan’s 2003 film Save the Green Planet! and transforms it into a wackier, more enjoyable mockery of the modern American psyche.

The film opens with our antihero Teddy (Jesse Plemons) explaining the process of pollination to his cousin Don (Aidan Delbis). “It’s like sex,” he asserts, “but cleaner, because nobody gets hurt.” Teddy is a beekeeper whose many hours spent down internet rabbit holes has convinced him that the destruction of the planet, and consequently the crisis of colony collapse disorder affecting his bees, is all at the hands of pharmaceutical conglomerates like the one owned by CEO Michelle Fuller (Emma Stone), for whom Teddy works. As he discusses the myriad ways in which worker bees are exploited like humans, we’re given a montage showcasing Fuller’s frankly psychotic morning routine. Every day she wakes up at 4:30 am and trains like an athlete in her secluded mansion; she does yoga on the balcony, martial arts training in the garden, VO2 max tests on a treadmill. It feels like a visual representation of the kind of doomsday-prepping we hear tech billionaires are doing (it doesn’t feel like a stretch of the imagination to picture an oddity like Mark Zuckerberg in his California compound following this exact same routine).

Teddy’s answer to a rapidly deteriorating planet is simple: Kidnap Fuller and torture her for the suffering her company has brought upon the world. Admittedly, it’s an insane (but, dare I say, tempting?) solution to the problems of our time. This clash of the rich vs. the poor composes much of the film’s runtime, and as a commentary on the destruction of the planet at the hands of the uber wealthy, Bugonia favors absurd comedy over biting satire. Case in point: After conducting the abduction with all the grace of two bulls somersaulting through a china shop, Teddy and Don shave Fuller’s head to prevent her from communicating with her alien overlords. Then, they lather her in antihistamine cream to block any signals being emitted from her pores. According to Teddy, Fuller is a soldier of the extraterrestrial Andromedan species sent to destroy the Earth, and he must do everything in his power to put a stop to it.

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At any other point in time, Teddy’s character might have seemed more like a whackjob and this film might have seemed more ridiculous. But after the ushering in of a President who favors conspiracy over scientific fact and the rise of questionable internet subcultures, Bugonia feels less bizarre and more like a warning.

Simultaneously, despite trailers marketing the film as a raucous, bloody affair, Bugonia might actually be Lanthimos’ most digestible film to date. Teddy speaks of YouTube “researchers” who inspired his own research into colony collapse disorder and bristles at Fuller’s no-nonsense corporate speak — “I’ve read all the think pieces,” he assures her. Fuller, in turn, attempts to negotiate her release by reciting the kind of well-rehearsed, empty phrases characteristic of heartless bosses; she asks Teddy for a “dialogue” and claims that she “would love to keep the conversation going.” She bears all the hallmarks of an archetypical girlboss, with her power suit and a framed picture of her shaking hands with Michelle Obama. Above all, she’s a female capitalist who’s unafraid of leveraging her social identifiers as a means of elevating herself above her peers. When she monotonously recites lines about the ethos of her company, you get the feeling that you might actually be listening to an android speak. It’s all very familiar for anyone who has spent any amount of time in a corporate setting.

That someone like Teddy would turn to the recesses of the internet for an easy answer to life’s hardships is no surprise. Radicalised by a lifetime of suffering at the hands of a system designed to prioritise profit over humanity, Teddy desperately reaches for conspiracy to make sense of personal tragedy—and is encouraged to do so by his sickly mother. He dedicates his life to research and revenge, convinced that he can erase the horrors of his past by enacting punishment on the person he holds responsible for it all. He remains steadfast against Fuller’s attempts at negotiation, in comparison to Don, who seems much more likely to be swayed by her words. There’s an obvious Of Mice and Men comparison to be made here, but where Steinbeck’s novella examines the limitations of the American Dream, Bugonia presents its (il)logical endpoint. Here lies a fractured empire on a planet ravaged by the consequences of unfettered capitalism, which has produced a man so desperate as to concoct a reality where the suffering of the world is caused by extraterrestrial beings and not simple human failure.

The film is everything we’ve come to expect of a Lanthimos picture. The director employs jarring black and white sequences interspersed throughout the story to provide context and offer some breathtakingly horrific images. Stone, for her part, gives a predictably amusing performance as the unfeeling she-EO, but it is Plemons who particularly compels as a man so transformed by trauma, so lost to his own fanaticism that he cannot decipher delusions from reality. It’s a madcap role that sees him climbing out of windows and cycling furiously through New York in a blood-stained bee suit while Jerskin Fendrix’s striking orchestral score punctuates his every frantic decision.

Bugonia is ripe with tension and oftentimes hilarious, but its comedy is derived in an easy way. It picks apart the rise of conspiracy in modern America without ever delving too deeply into the socioeconomic factors that have allowed such a culture to thrive. The screenplay, penned by Succession and The Menu writer Will Tracy, feels tight in a way that is necessary for this story to work—it’s impossible not to feel as trapped as Fuller is in this web of conspiracy—but also suffers from its restraint. As we descend further into violent chaos, the film vibrates with an impending crescendo that is reached, and then almost immediately diluted by the film’s final moments. As a result, the semi-serious discussion of class exploitation in the first 90 minutes is rendered hollow by the savage grotesquerie of its final half hour, which feels somewhat unearned.

Lanthimos isn’t quite back in freak mode (one yearns for the unsettling atmosphere of Dogtooth or The Killing of a Sacred Deer), but he continues his streak of perfectly enjoyable, kooky pictures. Bugonia aims high with its cacophony of violence and darkly comedic take on a society that is becoming increasingly reliant on conspiracy over critical thinking, but down here on Earth, where the billionaires continue to bleed our reserves dry without consequence, the notion of a world run by cold-hearted aliens doesn’t seem so far-fetched after all.

Director: Yorgos Lanthimos
Writer: Will Tracy
Stars: Emma Stone, Jesse Plemons, Aidan Delbis, Stavros Halkias, Alicia Silverstone
Release date: Oct. 24, 2025

Nadira Begum is a freelance film critic and culture writer based in the UK. To see her talk endlessly about film, TV, and her love of vampires, you can follow her on Twitter (@nadirawrites) or Instagram (@iamnadirabegum).

Yorgos Lanthimos’ Bugonia Makes Absurd Mockery of the American Psyche