My two least-favoured film genre are horror and science fiction.
My favourite film genre is black comedy with well-written scripts.
Bugonia (2025) is all three and I loved it. So why does the favourite outweigh the two dislikes?
Director Yorgos Lanthimos is no stranger to this complicated melange. His previous film “Poor Things (2023) is summarised by reviewers on IMDb as visually striking with standout performances by Emma Stone and Willem Dafoe. It delves into feminism, liberation, and societal norms through a surreal lens.”
Bugonia is visually striking and delves into environmental and human-related Armageddon through a similar lens.
Teddy (Jesse Plemons) and Don (Aidan Delbis) live on a rural property. They keep bees. Teddy works in packaging at a nearby pharmaceutical company, his cousin Don is mentally challenged. They appear to be each other’s only friend and represent the apparent hopelessness of a major portion of the USA’s small town citizens.
Teddy is what a kind person would describe as a conspiracy theorist. He is gradually revealed to be insane.
The two kidnap his boss, Michelle (Emma Stone) – a wunderkind of the pharmaceutical industry and a powerful woman, who trains and works hard to be self sufficient.
A back story emerges during this deprivation of liberty. Teddy’s mum – a self-described “slob, c—t mother” – is on life support in the town’s hospital.
She has previously undergone a clinical trial from Michelle’s company. Compensation is paid but it is not enough. The fabulously rich paying under the odds to the ignorant poor. However, sometimes money is not the solution.
Years later, the damaged Teddy has filled his mind with the wonders of the internet and the knowledge and theories of the world. He is convinced Michelle is an Andromedan, an alien whose people really run the world. Humans are mere vassals of these dictatorial but hidden, superior beings.
While she is being held prisoner, Teddy and Michelle debate this in earnest with some magnificent dialogue that shows he is able to go nearly toe-to-toe with his captive. However, there is a doubt in his eyes as he talks. Don is asked to stay quiet and Michelle – the viewer feels – is merely buying time, at one time admitting she is Andromedan, then later appealing to her captors’ better natures by denying it. She offers financial and psychological help to no avail.
It’s hard going and complications occur when a local deputy sheriff, Casey (Stavros Halkias), who has history with Teddy as his paedophilic former babysitter, comes to the house.
Casey is there to further apologise to Teddy for his youthful actions but is also investigating credible police information that Michelle’s last phone ping was from a nearby tower.
From here Bugonia heads in the Parasite (2019) direction. Bloodshed prevails. This is no surprise as co-screenwriter (with Will Tracy) Jang Joon-hwan created the cult film Save the Green Planet (2003), the Korean film inspiration of Bugonia.
To further explain the plot – if indeed I am even capable – would ruin it for those who haven’t seen it.
Tracy also wrote The Menu (2022). Listed beneath this movie on IMDb are the following: dark comedy, psychological horror, satire – This is Bugonia in a nutshell.
Bugonia has biblical messages; lessons for we on earth who collectively keep destroying the planet on which we live; dire warnings of where an obsession with the internet can lead; corporate greed versus the downtrodden (“You can’t beat me because you are a loser and I’m a winner and that’s fucking life!”, Michelle screams at Teddy during a fight).
The film’s name is taken from an ancient Greek belief that bees could spontaneously generate from the carcass of a bull or cow. Indeed bees play a prominent part in the whole tale, from its serene beginning to the aftermath of destruction.
The musical background composed by regular Lanthimos collaborator Jerskin Fendrix was effective without being enjoyable. Even more effective and particularly poignant was Marlene Dietrich singing Where Have all the Flowers Gone at the conclusion.
Seventy years since that song’s creation, we the people are still destroying ourselves.
Every actor did well in this but Plemons was extraordinary. When I tried to think of the many movies this guy has appeared in, I could not name one but I do remember his key roles in the acclaimed TV series Breaking Bad (2008-13) and Fargo, season 2 (2014). He is very, very good.
Stone continues her tremendous body of work, not least of which was in Poor Things for the same director.
A great but disturbing film.
4.5
I WRIGHT 