Bugonia (2025)

Score: 4.5 / 5

Nobody does black comedy like Lanthimos. His latest, Bugonia, is one of his more accessible and angry films, yet its timely insistence on absurdity fits his oeuvre well. Its premise is deceptively simple: two conspiracists abduct a powerful CEO, convinced that she is an alien intending harm to humanity. The kidnappers, socially awkward and paranoid young men with a plan that goes only about as far as their arms can reach, are led by a beekeeper whose motivations are as hypocritical as they are convoluted. His partner in crime is his impressionable autistic cousin. The CEO, on the other hand, is a sharp, no-nonsense woman who thinks so little of them that it takes some time for her to recognize them as actual humans with real concerns. Their deadly dance, in the men's dingy basement, is the whole of the film's plot.

Reactionary and profoundly irate, the film's heavy-handed messaging is sidelined only by Lanthimos's unique mastery of tone. We're never quite sure if we should laugh at the surreal situation or shudder in fear. After all, this kind of crap has been on our minds for several years in the current American climate. Maybe not about aliens and bees, but certainly about CEOs being disposable, incels acting out violently, and plots against powerful people. It's hard to watch this and not think of what almost happened with Governor Whitmer in Michigan or with Luigi Mangione and the UnitedHealthcare CEO. I also thought more than once of Eddington, this year's other timely bleak comedy-thriller from Ari Aster, who produced this film.

And while the violence in this film is clear and present, so too is its humor. Mind you, I did not laugh out loud in this screening, but you can tell the players likely were between takes. Jesse Plemons and Aidan Delbis are laughably silly as misled conspiracy theorists certain that Emma Stone's biomedical company is responsible for killing the honeybees and, by extension, enslaving humanity. The logic isn't there, of course -- when is it ever in such conspiracies? -- but that's what makes it so funny, at first, when their captive tries to make sense of it. When they further their claims, asserting that she's an alien "Andromeda" and that their own questionable experiments have proven this, we see this for the witch hunt it is. Yet Lanthimos has forced us to see the extent to which the men are certain of their delusions: they have trained for such an act of terrorism. They've even chemically castrated themselves, in one of the film's more insightful details. And it's not all wholly different from what the rich and powerful do regularly (Stone is intercut, in an early montage, running on her treadmill and ingesting vitamins). 

Accomplished cinematographer and sometime Lanthimos collaborator Robbie Ryan does some amazing work in framing the dynamics between the players, especially considering that the bulk of this plot takes place in a single location as a sort of Socratic dialogue/interrogation. Stone's shaved head shines ethereally, usually coated in lotion (there's a hint of The Silence of the Lambs here, too), and the camera is angled just above her, so that she's looking up at us. Plemons's sweaty visage, on the other hand, is often shot from just below his line of sight, so we're looking up at the man in a position of newfound and frightening power. He also utilizes light in haunting ways, bringing surreal hellish vibes to the otherwise workmanlike basement and somewhat otherworldly aesthetics to the stark modernity of the CEO's home and office.

Credit must also be paid to screenwriter Will Tracy, former editor-in-chief of The Onion, who also penned The Menu, the series The Regime and Succession, and who produced (you guessed it) Eddington. The verbal swordplay between characters in absurd yet tense scenes is riveting and ghastly, aided by the A-list actors' unique skills in nonverbal acting. He incisively and wisely avoids totally demonizing any one character, adding emotional baggage to the men that at least humanizes them a bit beyond what could easily have been caricature. He also suggestively resists an easy answer as to the woman's identity and motives, delaying answers in favor of forcing the characters to communicate not only with each other but with us in real time.

We're asked, at various points, to sympathize with each of of the main characters, to the point that, even when the climax and denouement shocked me into stillness, I reeled at the implications Lanthimos seems to be firing away at. What if the issue at stake, the film seems to ask, is just that we're debating issues with incompatible languages? What if, aliens or no, terrorists or no, the real problem is Big Pharma? Sure, we can discuss violence, science, urbanity, financial injustice, culture wars, internet radicalism, but the film isn't trying to preach at us as much as it is attempting to lift the veil on our current social dynamics. Like Plato, Lanthimos urges us to think critically and on a macro-level, to resist succumbing to the invisible powers of our world and the inherent problems of how we interact with each other down here among the commoners.