Bugonia: a fable about conspiracy theory (review)
Yorgos Lanthimos offers a crazy new role to Emma Stone as a CEO kidnapped by two losers convinced that she is an alien.
The machine Yorgos Lanthimos hits full throttle. Bugonia is his third film to reach us in barely two years, after Poor Creatures and Kinds of Kindness. The director divides (even in the editorial staff of Première), his detractors accusing him of his cynical tone, the have-you-seen stridencies of his direction. Flaws that we partly find in Bugonia, which we are also obliged to admit is extraordinarily effective and entertaining.
It must be said that Lanthimos has excellent material on hand: it is inspired by the hallucinatory South Korean UFO Save the Green Planet! (Jang Joon-hwan, 2003), the story of a beekeeper who kidnaps the CEO of a pharmaceutical company because he is convinced that he is a belligerent extra-terrestrial. What was twenty years ago a crazy variation on The Invaders mixing thriller and torture-porn, here becomes a political and eminently contemporary fable on conspiracyism, culture wars and the misdeeds of Big Pharma.
The actors are exceptional (one of the filmmaker’s great strengths), starting with Emma Stonewho plays the business manager with a robotic approach going through all the states, shaved head, coated with various substances, tortured on Green Day, singing Chappell Roan at the top of her lungs, swinging her pumps with insane flexibility to put her self-defense lessons to good use. Lanthimos, tired of endless filming, has just announced that he was going to take a little break. Damn, we were just starting to have fun…
By Yorgos Lanthimos. With Emma Stone, Jesse Plemons, Aidan Delbis… Duration 1h58. Released November 26, 2025
