Bugonia Review: Jesse Plemons Thinks Emma Stone is an Alien in Yorgos Lanthimos’ Bitter, Brilliant Thriller
Venice Film Festival
The Greek director turns in a rousing sci-fi conspiracy story that tackles Big Pharma and internet radicalisation
Words by Alex Secilmis 31 August 2025
© Universal Pictures
Sipping on a Stanley cup, belting Chappell Roan, and running a pharmaceutical company with an iron fist while wearing Louboutins, Emma Stone’s ice-cold CEO in Bugonia is a force to be reckoned with. Marking her fourth feature with Poor Things director Yorgos Lanthimos, the black comedy auteur affectionately dubbed the “Greek Freak” by many, Stone turns in another singular, engrossingly bizarre performance as girlboss supreme Michelle Fuller. While the heartless executive is an easy figure to lampoon, Bugonia ventures quickly past surface-level satire by probing Michelle’s superiority complex, placing her in a face-off with a determined blue-collar conspiracy theorist (Jesse Plemons) who has been wronged a few times too many. The result is a brutal, searing portrait of online radicalisation, corporate greed, and marginalisation. Leave it to Yorgos Lanthimos to package the most poignant social commentary in a deranged genre film that has as much of a mean streak as it does heart.
Remaking Jang Joon-hwan’s 2003 film Save the Green Planet!, Lanthimos adapts the story as a horror-tinged examination of corporate America and an ever-growing conspiracy culture—it’s no wonder Ari Aster got the project off the ground as a producer. Teddy (Jesse Plemons) is a low-level employee at Michelle’s company, scanning packages for a living and tending to bees in his spare time. He has the guise of an incel, but he stresses that he cycled through numerous ideologies (“alt-right, alt-lite, leftist, Marxist”) before realising his true purpose: to save the world from aliens. He enlists his autistic cousin and housemate, Don (Aidan Delbis), and turns their isolated, run-down farm into an ET-killing boot camp. Their target is Michelle, whose company’s pesticides have caused Teddy’s beloved bees to suffer colony collapse disorder. More importantly, according to Teddy’s meticulous research, she’s an intruder from the Andromeda Galaxy—as made clear by the tell-tale signs of “narrow feet” and “thin cuticles”. Lanthimos and writer Will Tracy, who’s no stranger to socially-conscious black comedies (The Menu, 2022), mine as much comedy—and tension—out of Teddy’s theory.
© Universal Pictures
As the Big Pharma bigwig, Stone is sensational. In both public and private life, Stone plays Michelle as a foreign entity delivering a cold, calculated performance of “empowered” womanhood. It’s so scrupulously uncanny that you might start to hear the conspiracists out. Composer Jerskin Fendrix, for one, seems to agree with Teddy and Don, with a bombastic score that sounds like a Universal Monster movie on acid. Robbie Ryan’s sumptuous 35mm cinematography, heavy on earthy greens and seedy yellows, supports the thesis too, shaping the British residential setting (the film was shot in Wycombe) into an otherworldly imitation of small-town America.
© Universal Pictures
While Stone excels as the hollow semi-antagonist, co-lead Jesse Plemons gives the film its soul. His character’s outcast status and violent nature may prompt knee-jerk comparisons to his villainous turn in Black Mirror, but Teddy is so compelling because of his humanity and deluded sense of noble intentions. With a quietly tortured, highly emotive performance, Plemons—undoubtedly one of the greatest actors today—makes Teddy as pitiful as he is terrifying. It makes perfect sense why someone so effective in both Game Night and Civil War would fit seamlessly into Lanthimos’ nihilistic black comedies, and Bugonia may be his best work yet. As for Teddy’s more reasonable right-hand man, Aidan Delbis delivers a wonderful debut performance, impressing especially when limning Don’s struggle to follow his only friend beyond points of no return.
Its acerbic observations will likely only grow more relevant, but the film is plenty poignant as it is. With Lanthimos at his finest, Bugonia’s overblown yet emotionally grounded antics make for the best kind of satire.