‘BUGONIA’ Is Alienating For All the Right Reasons

A twisted morality play-cum-psychological thriller with a maybe-science-fiction bite – one that only Yorgos Lanthimos could execute at this level – Bugonia may be a remake, but it’s still infused with vivid originality and alive with possibility. The story of a radicalized gig worker and his slow-witted cousin who kidnap a powerful biochem CEO (convinced she’s an alien from the Andromeda galaxy) plays out as a tense, one-location two-hande that crackles with the high-voltage energy of Jesse Plemons and Emma Stone. It’s unnerving, darkly funny, sharply acted, and loaded with just enough satirical commentary on the tragedy of modern life to keep it gripping from its bleak opening moments to its glorious finish.

Adapted from the 2003 Korean dark comedy Save the Green Planet!, Bugonia is ultimately a film about identity. On the surface, it interrogates the identity of Michelle Fuller (Emma Stone, in yet another interesting, commanding turn), but on a deeper level, it questions the identity of the entire human species circa 2025. From our first encounter, Fuller is a #GirlBoss automaton. She wakes at precisely 4:30 AM, practices MMA, and slurps down her anti-aging vitamin regimen. Then it’s off to the Auxolith office, where she sermonizes about diversity in a corporate training video before launching into a broader screed on a new era of Work Culture. Employees are encouraged to leave by 5:30 PM, assuming their work is done, their quotas are hit, and their conscience agrees it’s safe to clock out. Auxolith is Corporate Hell and she is its Empress. She speaks fluent tech-bro, eager to “start dialogues” and “unpack” issues, while actually just dressing up banal ideas in buzzword drag. Like so many CEOs of the moment, her job is to repackage basic human needs as innovation. But beneath Fuller’s glassy smile and chilling lack of real humanity is a deeper subterfuge, one possibly bent on the total domination of all humankind. Or at least, that’s what Teddy (Jesse Plemons) believes.

Teddy has the whole scheme worked out, you see. Enlisting the help of his developmentally challenged cousin Don (Aiden Delbis), he sets out to kidnap Fuller and force a reckoning with her superiors in a kind of reverse “take me to your leader” scenario. Some of the details of Fuller’s abduction are a bit hazy, and the procedural response is limited to one bumbling cop (played by comedian Stavros Halkias). Still, Ted and Don manage to snatch and hold Fuller with startling ease. They promptly shave her head and slather her in antihistamines to dull her alleged alien powers and block telepathic communication, apparently channeled through her hair follicles.

Fuller, now chained in Teddy’s basement, slowly realizes the grim truth. She has been taken hostage by a man who appears untethered from reality and is suffering a genuine psychological break. And his dumb cousin. Their belief that she is not human is unwavering. Fuller calculates that her only chance at escape lies in playing along with his delusions and admitting that, yes, she is indeed an alien.

This being a Yorgos Lanthimos film, nothing is quite that simple. As the layers peel back, we begin to understand what’s truly driving these characters for better and worse and what lays at the heart of their true identities. Teddy, for instance, insists that his belief Fuller is an alien has nothing to do with the fact that her company’s pharmaceuticals put his mother (Alicia Silverstone) in a coma. But we know better. While our sympathies shift between characters as we uncover what brought them here, Lanthimos enjoys toying with the idea that maybe there’s more to Fuller than meets the eye. Just as Teddy and Michelle are locked in a cerebral cat-and-mouse, Lanthimos plays a similar game with the audience. Fortunately, it all leads somewhere rich, satirical, funny, dark, poignant and gloriously satisfying.

Plemons and Stone are both outstanding in their respective roles. Plemons is a greasy live wire with deep-seated trauma, and Stone delivers one of her coldest, most calculating performances to date, all while shorn and strapped down to various chairs and beds. Both deliver awards-caliber turns without overindulging in the character’s idiosyncrasies, bringing their (stunted) humanity to life without making them into caricatures. Their commitment to the deeply held truths of these characters, each forced to play levels of roles within roles, grounds the film’s extraterrestrial flourishes.

That the “victim” comes off as less human than the “antagonist” speaks to a very real class tension gripping the United States. The modern folk hero has become the one who lashes out at power, especially when that power cloaks itself in corporate benevolence while denying insurance claims or enabling genocidal ideations. In a world where the line between good guy and bad guy is increasingly murky, Bugonia roosts in the gray zone. One thing is clear: poor Donny doesn’t deserve to be involved in any of this. A moment of medical intervention on his, ahem, impulses becomes a darkly comic and deeply horrifying showcase of how Bugonia blends psychological torment, body horror, and bleak absurdism, all in a single scene. Few directors juggle tone like Lanthimos and this is proof perfect of why he makes a certain kind of movie that no one else dare replicate.

Bugonia manages to be two things at once: a deeply weird and unconventional film, told almost entirely through the friction between two unmovable characters, and a deceptively simple morality test for modern society. It’s Yorgos retreating away from the more “mainstream” fare – if you dare call it that – of his recent Best Picture contenders (Poor Things, The Favourite) and returning to the unsettling, brain-breaking mania of his pre-Stone collabs, namely Killing of a Sacred Deer and Dogtooth, both movies that toy with how any society is only upheld by a mutual agreement to play by its rules. When those rules are broken, all bets are off. Even the laws of science bend.

Squeezed on all sides by the Information Age, we are living in a state of constant digital overload that once seemed unimaginable. The result is a world increasingly fractured, primed for violent rhetoric and action, and seemingly hell-bent on its own destruction. Yes, Bugonia’s satire is thorny and strange, but it’s also strikingly familiar and poignant to the times we find ourselves in. We all suspect that something is off—that beneath the serotonin-juicing apps and corporate platitudes and algorithmically tailored news feeds, something fundamental is breaking down within the human experience. The world feels increasingly surreal and distant, yet unbearably in your face. Invasive. Loud. Unyielding. Every decision is politicized (even shopping your local beer aisle has political stakes), every break capitalized by #content (as our attention spans become shorter and shorter), every truth contested (the era of “alternative facts” has polluted every sector of society). In a time when reality itself feels negotiable, maybe there is a certain moral clarity in being absolutely convinced the way Teddy is. Maybe conviction, even if it’s based in delusion, is the last refuge left when nothing around you makes sense anymore. Or maybe we are just being ruled by aliens.

CONCLUSION: Amongst my favorite working directors, Yorgos Lanthimos has a way of poking at how we perceive reality that is unsettling, absurdist, and deeply satirical, and with ‘Bugonia’ he applies an unsettling sci-fi edge to further knock us off-kilter. Emma Stone, shaved head and all, is great, but Jesse Plemons proves once again that he too is one of the greats.