Yorgos Lanthimos Interrogates Humanity’s Selfishness Through Claustrophobic Satire 'Bugonia'

Yorgos Lanthimos presents a casually sardonic black comedy, Bugonia, which, despite its dark themes, may be his most immediately accessible film to date. The picture employs two blunt instruments to hasten the end of the dying world: a deeply paranoid beekeeper named Teddy (Jesse Plemons) and a craven biomedical CEO, Michelle Fuller (Emma Stone). Teddy, who is sweaty, dirty, and prone to salacious remarks, teams up with his impressionable cousin Donny (Aidan Delbis) to kidnap Michelle. They are convinced that she is an alien from the Andromeda species and is actively working to destroy humanity. Their elaborate, baseless theory is derived from conspiracy podcasts, unreliable online sources, and Teddy’s own strange pseudo-scientific experiments. To succeed, Teddy believes the pair must cleanse themselves of their "psychic compulsions," a sacrifice the audience is implicitly asked to make as well.

Bugonia begins with an atmosphere of intense, measured opposition. Lanthimos intercuts between Teddy and Donny training in their comfortable but dilapidated home and Michelle exercising in her starkly sterile modernist residence. Teddy and Donny perform stretches, high steps, and chemically self-castrate, while Michelle runs on a treadmill and consumes a handful of daily vitamins, slyly commenting on the superficial similarities of the rich and the poor. Their two worlds collide outside Michelle's home when Teddy and Donny, wearing cheap masks and filthy silver tracksuits, abduct her. The abduction is physically aggressive: they shave her head (believing long hair allows her to communicate with her kind), strip her, apply lotion to her body, and chain her to a bed in their basement. The core of the film hinges on Teddy’s subsequent, drawn-out interrogation of the captive CEO.

From the start, Lanthimos makes a visually fascinating choice regarding the framing of their interactions. When Teddy grills Michelle, the director captures Plemons from a low angle while shooting Stone from a high perspective. With her shaved head and wide eyes, Stone’s appearance often recalls Renée Jeanne Falconetti in Carl Theodor Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc. The use of the visual language traditionally associated with the persecuted to depict a major pharmaceutical CEO is deliberate. Lanthimos spends the majority of Bugonia, which is an unlikely adaptation of Jang Joon-hwan’s Save the Green Planet!, relentlessly questioning who the true tyrants and monsters are, and what constitutes the tangibly human versus the emotionally alien. The film, produced by Ari Aster, invites clear comparisons to Aster’s Eddington as a pointed critique of the pandemic and its enduring socioeconomic fallout. Despite this ready comparison, Lanthimos’s film feels comparatively safer than Aster’s, which, for all its structural flaws, dared to take larger risks and left more indelible impressions.

The verbal exchange between Teddy and Michelle is sustained by Lanthimos’s signature sly humor. The performances by Plemons and Stone are crucial, as both can sell a slight or a stinger with a mere facial twitch, amplified by cinematographer Robbie Ryan, who grants the actors the entirety of the frame to execute their brilliance. Michelle frequently speaks in cold corporate-speak, using a passive-aggressive tone that not only alienates Teddy but deliberately provokes him. Teddy’s demeanor slowly devolves from a self-confident judge and jury to a state of nervous agitation, brandishing a shotgun alongside Donny in a manner reminiscent of Pacino and Cazale in Dog Day Afternoon. Aidan Delbis, an autistic actor, provides well-paced changes to the ferocious volleys between Plemons and Stone, maintaining his character’s inner life and emotional sincerity through fast expressions or protective posture, often establishing a similar relationship with the camera. The spare ensemble cast includes few other moving parts, save for Casey (Stavros Halkias), a dim-witted local sheriff whose actions suggest he might have unwittingly destroyed a life before its natural conclusion.

Bugonia is an enraged picture, angry at the state of the world and humanity’s role in its decline. Yet, the revelation of this anger is surprisingly deliberate in its structuring. Teddy believes he and Donny must break Michelle before the upcoming lunar eclipse, only three days away, if they hope to beam up to her mothership and negotiate for her species to abandon Earth. Consequently, each day is structured as a single act, punctuated by a countdown card that visually depicts the Earth becoming progressively flatter. Through black-and-white flashbacks, the audience learns of Michelle's connection to Teddy’s mother, Sandy (Alicia Silverstone), who was involved in a drug trial that had devastating, unforeseen consequences. Teddy’s rants focus on the corporate class’s domination of global decision-making through technological enslavement and the poisoning of the environment, specifically citing the destruction of bees. .

Lanthimos’s visual style here is notably tamer than in his earlier works, relying primarily on evocative lighting to signal the hellish atmosphere of Teddy’s basement. This aesthetic restraint allows the booming score to take over the showier aspects, lending an abrasiveness to this class-based thriller. Furthermore, the use of physical spaces advances the film’s critique, capturing the glib modernist aesthetic of corporate architecture in frightening detail.

By the film’s conclusion, however, the picture's self-righteous ambiguity remains difficult to shake. Is Lanthimos mocking Teddy and Donny? If so, one particular scene stands out as potentially the cruellest of his career. Or are these class warriors meant to be the heroes? The mystery of whether Michelle is actually an alien is sustained long enough that Teddy’s zealotry and his indignant, understandable anger threaten to overwhelm the audience’s senses. There is also the distinct possibility that Lanthimos identifies with Michelle, the outsider, which complicates the film’s final statement on the role of Big Pharma.

The characters can be interpreted through multiple lenses, reflecting anxieties over anti-science attitudes regarding COVID-19, the erasure of rural communities, corporate greed, and ongoing culture war skirmishes. These moments of thematic slippage, however, feel safely controlled from Lanthimos’s own moral vantage point, leading to a wish that he had taken the same risk as Aster with Eddington by more fully playing the devil's advocate.

Ultimately, the film circles back to the necessity of cleansing oneself of "psychic compulsions," a phrase with Freudian psychosexual undertones that also demands that viewers resist easy impulsive judgments. It is telling that a film concerning aliens judging the rottenness of the human species is the work of a Greek filmmaker using America as its setting. That outsider perspective suggests an acknowledgment of all sides while simultaneously making the case that no force is as destructive as human selfishness. If the species cannot cast aside this fundamental egotism, Lanthimos seems to imply, then perhaps humanity deserves its slow, ignominious end.