Bugonia Review: Lanthimos's Dark Alien Comedy (2025)

Film / Opinion2025 Release

Bugonia review: a bald Emma Stone, a beekeeper and a very bad week

Last updated: 19 July 2026

By Tristan · Arts, exhibitions and creative culture

This is an opinion piece. Views expressed are the author's own and do not constitute professional advice.

This review also contains an affiliate link. If you buy or rent through it, I may earn a small commission at no extra cost to you, and it does not change my opinion.

Cool Factor: 4/5

This Bugonia review comes in late and a little shell-shocked. Yes, I am well behind the crowd on this one. I finally watched Yorgos Lanthimos's dark alien comedy last night, on a whim, after it turned up cheap on Amazon Prime Video. Two hours later, however, I was googling the soundtrack and staring at the ceiling. So yes, it got right under my skin, and this Bugonia review is my honest attempt to explain exactly why.

Below the cut I go deep on Emma Stone, Jesse Plemons, the tone, what the film is really about, and whether it earns that ending. First, though, a promise: this Bugonia review stays spoiler-free up top, and I flag the one spoiler section clearly before it begins.

What is Bugonia?

Bugonia is a 2025 black comedy thriller directed by Yorgos Lanthimos and written by Will Tracy. The premise is simple and unhinged. Two conspiracy-obsessed young men kidnap the CEO of a pharmaceutical giant, convinced she is an alien sent to destroy Earth. Then they lock her in a basement to prove it.

At 118 minutes, it never overstays its welcome. Notably, it is also Lanthimos's most expensive film to date. Its reported budget of 45 to 55 million dollars surpasses even Poor Things. For Emma Stone, it is a fourth film in a row with the director. For Jesse Plemons, it follows straight on from Kinds of Kindness. Clearly, this is a tight creative gang who trust each other.

Crucially, I came to it fresh, without the auteur baggage. I had not seen the trailers on repeat, and I had no theory to defend going in. That turned out to be the ideal way to meet a film that runs entirely on not knowing who to believe.

The source: remaking Save the Green Planet!

First, some context. Bugonia is an English-language remake of the 2003 South Korean cult film Save the Green Planet!, by Jang Joon-hwan. The producer Ari Aster championed the idea, and he brought in Tracy, a Succession writer, to pen a gender-swapped, Americanised version. Jang was originally set to direct, yet he stepped down citing health issues, and Lanthimos took the reins in early 2024.

Interestingly, the original was itself sparked by an online rumour that Leonardo DiCaprio was an alien seducing the planet's women. Tracy, meanwhile, deliberately kept his distance from the source. Lanthimos did the same. As he told Dazed, 'I watched the film once after reading Will's script, to make sure we weren't just doing the same thing in English. From then on, I never thought about the original material.'

So what changes? In short, Bugonia is more grounded and more restrained than its zany source. The cartoonish set pieces are gone. Instead, we get a tense chamber piece that often plays like black-box theatre, closer in mood to Kinds of Kindness than to the swirling lenses of Poor Things.

First impressions and tone

Tonally, Bugonia sits in that familiar Lanthimos register: deadpan, cruel, occasionally very funny, and always a touch unsettling. Yet early in this Bugonia review, I should be honest. It is not laugh-out-loud funny, and it is not really trying to be.

Instead, it is often quite sad. It works as a bleak reflection of the way we live now. Echo chambers harden people, and manipulation flows in both directions. Alissa Wilkinson at The New York Times put it well when she noted the film 'is mostly kind of sad'. I felt that too, and it lingered.

Above all, the tension comes from a genuinely unstable question. Who do you actually hate more here, the billionaire or the captor? That uncertainty is the engine of the whole thing, and for a long stretch it hums.

Emma Stone as Michelle Fuller

Emma Stone plays Michelle Fuller, the ice-cold CEO of pharma conglomerate Auxolith. The film introduces her as a Time magazine 'Leader of the Year', and she visibly shudders at the word 'diversity'. Stone shaved her head for the role, and she has said she loved it. Physically, then, she is stripped back to nothing but face and voice, which is a brave place for any star to work from.

What impressed me most, however, is the arc she pulls off. Michelle moves from dislikeable, to weirdly likeable, to someone you genuinely worry about. Finally, she becomes a figure you either root for or recoil from. Somehow Stone holds all of those at once. That is the trick of the performance.

She sees it differently, mind. 'In my mind, it's two people trying to save the world in different ways,' Stone told Dazed. 'They both have that instinct to try to better humanity, so to speak, but from different backgrounds.' Watching it, I found myself rooting for a corporate shark, which I did not expect. The joke, of course, may well be on me.

Jesse Plemons as Teddy

If Stone supplies the range, Jesse Plemons supplies the gravity. He plays Teddy Gatz, a warehouse worker, amateur beekeeper and full-time conspiracy theorist. He has long greasy hair and eyes forever on the brink of tears. His logic is airtight and completely mad. Since he believes aliens signal through hair follicles, he shaves Michelle's head. Since an Auxolith drug trial harmed his mother, his rage carries a real wound underneath.

For me, Plemons just edges the film. He is magnificent to hate, and yet the pathos never fully leaves him. Honestly, none of Stone's arcs would land without the wall he gives her to hit. That is why the two feel so complete together, like two halves of one argument.

His cousin Don, played by Aidan Delbis, is the quiet heart of it. Don is lonely, autistic, and slowly sceptical of Teddy's rants. He carries the same lost-boy sadness I felt watching Archduke at the Royal Court, and Lanthimos knows it. As the director told Dazed, 'Don represents the audience.' That framing is spot on.

Direction, look and score

Visually, Bugonia is stunning. Irish cinematographer Robbie Ryan, on his fourth Lanthimos collaboration, shot roughly 95 per cent of the film on 35mm VistaVision, the widest use of the format since the early 1960s. As a result, faces loom, colours sear, and the basement feels enormous and airless all at once.

The score matters just as much. Jerskin Fendrix, composing his third Lanthimos film, wrote it before seeing a frame, working only from three words Lanthimos gave him: bees, basement, spaceship. The London Contemporary Orchestra performed it, and it is genuinely unnerving. The needle drops are sharp too, from Green Day's 'Basket Case' to a warped remix of Chappell Roan. I looked up several tracks the moment the credits rolled, which is always a good sign. For this Bugonia review, the craft alone almost justifies the ticket.

It is a film I am glad I watched once, and fairly sure I will never watch again.

What Bugonia is really about

Underneath the alien nonsense, Bugonia is about paranoia and broken trust. It takes aim at Big Pharma, with Auxolith and its ruinous drug trial standing in for the industry. Moreover, it is about class, ecological dread, and the dying honeybees that give the film its strange title. Bugonia, after all, names an ancient ritual that Virgil describes, one that held that bees sprang from a dead animal's carcass.

The film also refuses to let you feel clever. Tracy said as much to Dazed: 'Teddy's not wrong about everything in this film. He's been abused by the system.' That line stuck with me, because the scariest thought Bugonia plants is not that Teddy is insane. It is that he is only a few clicks away from someone real.

Honest critical observations

Now for the harder truths, because a fair Bugonia review has to name them. My biggest problem is the violence. Some of it is Tarantino-esque and extreme, and one electric-shock torture scene tipped over into gratuitous for me. It genuinely upset me. In fact, I turned the film off afterwards and left it for a few days before finishing. I am glad I went back, yet that scene did not need to be that cruel to make its point.

The deadpan cruelty also grated over time. Because the humour rarely lands as an actual laugh, the darkness can start to feel like the only note. Critics have pushed at this too. Slate called Lanthimos 'a misanthropist' and the film 'unremittingly grim', while The Irish Times felt 'there is not much substance at the centre'. I would not go that far, but I understand the charge.

Then there is rewatchability, or the lack of it. Bugonia leans hard on its reveal, so it risks the M. Night Shyamalan problem. Once you know the twist, some of the fun quietly drains away. That, more than anything, is what holds it back for me.

Spoiler warning. The next section discusses the ending in detail. Skip past it to 'Why Bugonia matters now' if you have not watched the film yet.

The ending, explained (spoilers)

So, the twist. It turns out Teddy is right, more or less. Michelle really is an Andromedan, and the closet in her office really is a teleporter. She escapes to her mothership, concludes that the human experiment has failed, and wipes out humanity in a single, quiet gesture. The animals and plants survive. The bees drift back to Teddy's abandoned apiary.

Did it earn itself, or reach for shock? For me, mostly the former. I half-expected the reveal, and the film knows we will. Yet the faster, wilder final act is where Bugonia truly clicks, helped along by a spaceship sequence that turns unexpectedly Mighty Boosh in its silliness.

My favourite stretch, though, is those closing shots of a dead, human-free planet. Lanthimos filmed them at Sarakiniko Beach on Milos, after the Acropolis turned him down, and they play like an Apple TV screensaver of the apocalypse. Serene, beautiful and deeply sad. Similarly, the standout sequence for me is the mid-film hospital dash: Teddy stumbling out, cycling home, dread and dark comedy tangled together. That is Bugonia at its best.

Why Bugonia matters now

Bugonia arrives at the perfect, awful moment. For this Bugonia review, the timing is really the point. Conspiracy thinking is no longer fringe, and social media has supercharged the spread that Save the Green Planet! could only hint at in 2003. Consequently, a story about two people who cannot bridge their realities feels less like satire and more like a documentary.

It also matters commercially. Lanthimos now has genuine box-office pull, so a difficult, gory art film can reach multiplexes at all. Meanwhile, the wider trend of remaking Korean cinema for Western audiences keeps growing, and Bugonia is one of the more thoughtful examples, even where it stumbles.

Where to watch Bugonia, and is it worth it

Practically, this Bugonia review has to answer the obvious question: where can you actually watch it? Bugonia reached UK cinemas in autumn 2025, following its Venice premiere in August. Now, it is easy to catch at home. You can buy or rent it on Amazon Prime Video and Apple TV, and a UK 4K and Blu-ray release followed in early 2026. I paid a few pounds to rent it, and for a film this singular, that felt like fair value.

Is it worth two hours and a rental fee? For the right viewer, absolutely. If you enjoyed our take on Tuner, and you like your cinema strange and uncomfortable, Bugonia rewards the effort. That said, it is not casual Friday-night viewing, so pick your moment.

Watch Bugonia on Amazon Prime Video

The verdict: my Bugonia review score

Cool Factor

★★★★☆

4 out of 5

Overall, this Bugonia review lands on a solid 4 out of 5, our Stone cold rating. It is inventive, smart and utterly distinctive, with two exceptional lead performances and images I will not forget. I have not seen a film quite like it, and I doubt I will again.

So why not Ice cold? Because the cruelty tips into gratuitous once or twice, the comedy rarely earns a real laugh, and the reliance on its twist saps the urge to revisit. In other words, it is a brilliant one-time experience rather than a lifelong favourite. Still, brilliant is brilliant. If your tolerance for darkness is high, do not miss it. If a family member has faced mental illness, or you have ever been held somewhere against your will, this one may cut too close, so please tread carefully. That is where this Bugonia review ends: dazzled, disturbed, and quietly glad I pressed play.

Frequently asked questions

Is Bugonia worth watching?

Yes, if you like dark, clever, uncomfortable cinema. It is beautifully made and superbly acted, and it earns its 4 out of 5 Cool Factor. However, it is genuinely bleak and occasionally very violent, so it is not for everyone.

What is Bugonia about?

Broadly, two conspiracy theorists kidnap a pharmaceutical CEO, believing she is an alien. Underneath, it is a film about paranoia, distrust of institutions, class and ecological dread. Above all, it asks what happens when two people who cannot agree on reality are forced into one room.

Is Bugonia a remake?

Yes. Bugonia is an English-language remake of the 2003 South Korean film Save the Green Planet! by Jang Joon-hwan. Will Tracy wrote the new script, and he deliberately let the two films stand apart rather than copying the original beat for beat.

Where can I watch Bugonia in the UK?

Currently, you can buy or rent Bugonia on Amazon Prime Video and Apple TV in the UK. A 4K and Blu-ray edition also followed in early 2026, so physical fans are covered too.

How long is Bugonia?

Bugonia runs for 118 minutes, so a little under two hours. Given how intense it gets, that runtime feels about right.

Is Bugonia connected to Poor Things?

Not in story, no. However, it shares a creative team, since Yorgos Lanthimos directs and Emma Stone stars in both. Tonally, though, Bugonia is far bleaker and closer to Kinds of Kindness than to Poor Things.

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