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Coming into Bugonia, I was both intrigued and skeptical. Yorgos Lanthimos is one of those directors who never gives you the same movie twice — and whether you walk away loving or hating it, you’re guaranteed to remember it. After Poor Things, which swept awards season, and last year’s divisive Kinds of Kindness, Lanthimos returns with Bugonia, another deeply strange, endlessly fascinating, and surprisingly human story.
Reuniting Emma Stone and Jesse Plemons for the third time, Bugonia feels like the culmination of Lanthimos’ recent creative run. Stone plays Ava, a high-ranking executive at a powerful medical conglomerate. Plemons plays Caleb, a delivery worker at the same company — and an obsessive conspiracy theorist convinced that Ava and her corporation are at the root of everything that’s gone wrong in his life.
The film opens with a mesmerizing close-up of a beehive, bees working tirelessly under the guidance of their queen. A voice-over calmly describes the structure of a hive and what happens when the queen disappears. It’s both a metaphor and a warning for what’s to come — Bugonia is very much a film about control, dependence, and the chaos that follows when leadership is questioned.
Without giving too much away, Caleb and his mentally challenged but fiercely loyal cousin, Eli, decide to abduct Ava. At first, it feels like a revenge plot — a working-class man raging against corporate greed. But Bugonia doesn’t stay that simple. Soon, Caleb reveals his true motive: he believes Ava is not human at all, but an alien infiltrator sent to study and manipulate humanity.
That reveal hits like a gut punch. It’s absurd, terrifying, and oddly hilarious — the kind of surreal pivot only Lanthimos could pull off. From that moment, Bugonia transforms into a claustrophobic psychological chess match. Ava tries every tactic to survive: sometimes mocking Caleb’s delusions, other times feeding into them. She adapts, manipulates, and provokes — and what begins as a hostage situation slowly turns into a power struggle between two people who each think they’re in control.
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Watching Emma Stone and Jesse Plemons go head-to-head is pure cinematic electricity. Stone gives one of her boldest performances yet — a fascinating mix of fear, arrogance, and dark humor — while Plemons delivers a haunting portrayal of obsession and fragility. Their scenes together are so unpredictable that you genuinely never know who’s winning the mental game.
Visually, Bugonia is hypnotic. The cinematography oscillates between sterile corporate offices and grimy, dimly lit basements. At times, the film shifts into black-and-white, diving into surreal flashbacks of Caleb’s childhood and his dying mother — sequences that blur the line between memory, dream, and hallucination. The way Lanthimos integrates these visions gives the story a haunting emotional core amid all the madness.
The score is equally spectacular — a full orchestral suite that plays even in quiet, mundane moments, like someone biking through a field or making coffee. It’s intentionally over-dramatic, and yet it fits perfectly with the chaos of the story. The music mirrors the psychology of the characters: overwhelming, erratic, and beautiful all at once.
What’s most fascinating about Bugonia is that even in its insanity, it feels grounded in reality. Lanthimos uses Caleb’s paranoia to explore how misinformation, online extremism, and loneliness can warp people’s perception of truth. At the same time, he uses Ava’s character to show how power, ego, and moral superiority can make someone just as delusional in their own way.
By the end, I realized that everyone in Bugonia — from the characters to the audience — is being manipulated. Stone manipulates Plemons, Plemons manipulates Stone, and Lanthimos manipulates us. The result is a film that is funny, disturbing, and impossible to look away from.
Bugonia is not just one of the best films of the year — it’s one of the most daring. It’s the kind of movie that reminds you how thrilling it is when a filmmaker takes big, bizarre risks and completely commits to them.
Bugonia has a run time of 1 hour 58 minutes, and is rated R for bloody violent content including a suicide, grisly images and language.
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