Bugonia (A PopEntertainment.com Movie Review)

PopEntertainment
Oct 28
2 min read

BUGONIA (2025)

Starring Emma Stone, Jesse Plemons, Aidan Delbis, Stavros Halkias, Alicia Silverstone, J. Carmen Galindez Barrera, Marc T. Lewis, Vanessa Eng, Cedric Dumornay, Charita 'Momma Cherri' Jones, Fredricka Whitfield, Rafael Lopez Bravo, Yaisa, Teneisha Ellis, Roger Carvalho, Atsushi Nishijima, Janlyn Mallis Bales, Andy Blackburn, Stella Bizirtsaki and Diana Duah.

Screenplay by Will Tracy.

Directed by Yorgos Lanthimos.

Distributed by Focus Features. 118 minutes. Rated R.

Screened at the 2025 Philadelphia Film Festival.

It must be a really strange thing living inside Yorgos Lanthimos’ head.

Granted, Bugonia is not written by Lanthimos – the screenplay is by Will Tracy. It is also not an original story – Bugonia is based on the 2003 Korean film Save the Green Planet!

Yet, oddly, or perhaps not so oddly, Bugonia somehow fits right into the worldview that Lanthimos has previously explored in Poor Things and Kinds of Kindness. And honestly, each time he dips his toe into the surreal, violent world in his head, it appears to be offering dwindling results.

Bugonia stars Lanthimos vets Emma Stone (Poor Things and Kinds of Kindness) and Jesse Plemons (Kinds of Kindness). Both do very well with what they are given – particularly Plemons, who is a force of nature – but that doesn’t cover up the extreme weirdness of each character. At least for the first time in their last three pictures together Lanthimos didn’t make Emma Stone masturbate graphically on camera.

The concept – high concept, I suppose – is that Plemons plays Teddy, a conspiracy theorist beekeeper who kidnaps Stone’s female corporate executive Michelle, not for ransom or political reasons, but because he has decided that she is an alien. And, no, he isn’t a renegade DIY ICE agent, he actually believes she is an actual space creature.

It’s such an extravagantly nuts idea that maybe it really is true.

And that’s pretty much it. Teddy tries to get Michelle to admit to being a spacewoman and take him to her leader, and Michelle tries to manipulate Teddy to get him to let her go.

There are some sidetracks about Teddy’s dying mother (poor Alicia Silverstone has to play a character that is in a coma throughout most of the running time of the film), Teddy’s mentally impaired cousin (Aidan Delbis) who becomes Teddy’s accomplice and a cop (Stavros Halkias) who is trying to make things good with Teddy after bullying him back in school.

It’s actually marginally interesting – if galactically weird – for the first half of the film. However, as things come to a head, the story gets more and more ridiculous, even if there are some well-made sections.

Without giving away any spoilers, it is pretty obvious what the eventual surprise ending will be, simply because if that ending didn’t happen then there would be absolutely no reason to make the film at all.

Jay S. Jacobs