In ‘Bugonia,’ Yorgos Lanthimos Finds Horror and Humor in America’s Collapse

The following article contains some discussion of key narrative developments.

Something’s in the air, or maybe it’s the water? Chalk it up to chem trails, artificial food dyes or a second Trump administration, but a mind virus appears to be affecting almost every A-list director working in the year 2025, driving them to make explosively violent farces about the decline of civilization.

The epidemic first appeared at the Cannes Film Festival this past May, with a competition slate straining to contain the bleak absurdities of Ari Aster’s Eddington, Julia Ducorneau’s Alpha and Oliver Laxe’s brutal Sirat. It continues in Venice, with Yorgos Lanthimos’s Bugonia (produced by Aster) premiering on the second day of the festival to generous applause, baffled laughter and gasps of disgust at the sheer profusion of bloodshed and preventable death.

Being that this is Lanthimos, the onslaught also features formidable acting from Jesse Plemons and Emma Stone, both of whom become nearly unrecognizable over the course of the film as they enact a desperate duel for the audience’s sympathies. Plemons stars as Teddy, a beekeeping conspiracist with a day job packing boxes at fictional pharmaceutical giant Auxolith. He lives in a ramshackle home in what appears to be suburban Georgia with his cousin Don (Aidan Delbis), who’s on the autism spectrum.

Obsessed with the threat of colony collapse disorder (CCD) affecting his honeybees, Teddy extrapolates the same logic to a societal level, convincing himself that humanity is in danger of becoming “a dead colony, atomized in a trillion directions.” To find a culprit powerful enough to act as humanity’s beekeeper, he turns his attention to Michelle (Stone), the CEO of Auxolith, which happens to be responsible for manufacturing both neonicotinoid pesticides (understood today as a partial cause of CCD) as well as an experimental opioid withdrawal treatment that put Teddy’s mother in a coma. How Teddy got from these hard facts to his conviction that Michelle is an alien from the Andromeda galaxy bent on human destruction is never fully explored, but it’s clear that he’s been Doing His Own Research.

Teddy’s conspiratorial mindset, Michelle’s corporate pabulum about diversity and “dialoguing” and the Southern suburban setting of strip malls and mini-marts come together to make this Lanthimos’s most American (and topical) movie to date. Nevertheless, he still takes the opportunity to plumb some perennial themes. From the internment of all single people in The Lobster (2015) to the experimental upbringings of Dogtooth (2009) and Poor Things (2023), nearly all Lanthimos’s characters bristle against captivity, but when Teddy and Don kidnap Michelle and chain her up in their basement, viewers are treated to a particularly compelling version of the director’s recurring interest in dependence and control. After all, Michelle is a CEO, with the requisite leadership skills to convince almost anyone to do her bidding. If her calm and empathetic assurances that she’s not actually an extraterrestrial won’t convince Teddy, then what will?

A battle between wit and aggression ensues and metastasizes into metaphor signifying the utter disconnect between the American left (incarnated by Stone) and right (Plemons). The former was, until recently, happily well-off – and remains condescendingly certain of its own superiority – but finds itself now at the mercy of the latter, who are convinced they are fighting demons from hell. What’s amazing is that Lanthimos can wring such up-to-the-minute poignancy (and cultural specificity) from a story that was originally conceived as a remake of Jang Joon-hwan’s South Korean comedy Save The Green Planet! (2003), which had been slated for an English adaptation long before Trump’s reelection. In his hands, and through the script’s ingenious fusion of ecological anxiety and medical mistrust, its tense pas de deux begins to feel paradigmatic of the current moment.

If Bugonia is a fable for our time, it’s telling that it ends the same way Eddington does, with a careening, it-was-true-the-whole-time final twist. (This is a spoiler, although I should note that Save The Green Planet! ends the same way.) In a cinematic context, validating Teddy’s conspiracy is kind of a cop out, a deus ex machina in which the embattled antihero’s struggle is automatically redeemed by the revelation of a reality viewers spend most of the film dismissing. In a political context, it underscores the fact that we can’t help identifying with those outside of power, even if we’re horrified by the things they do to fight back. It helps that Lanthimos’s political commentary is far subtler than Aster’s, and that his final reveal of the Andromedans is both hilarious and heartfelt, with some of the director’s zaniest costumes to date – a high bar.

Bugonia is due to arrive in French cinemas on November 26.