Is the Information Age making us less smart? What drives people to online echo chambers where they embrace conspiracy theories? Some of today’s most interesting filmmakers seem driven to answer those questions.
In Ari Aster’s recent Eddington, about a small town during the pandemic, a de-glammed Emma Stone plays a woman whose conversion to an online belief system similar to QAnon endangers her marriage. Stone re-glammed for Bugonia, the latest from director Yorgos Lanthimos (The Lobster, Poor Things), in which she plays a pharmaceutical exec who is the target of a down-at-the-heels conspiracy believer. (She and Aster also coproduced the film.)
While Bugonia feels ripped from the headlines, it’s actually a remake of the 2003 South Korean satire Save the Green Planet! That film’s writer-director, Jang Joon-hwan, shares Bugonia’s writing credit with Will Tracy (The Menu).
The deal
Teddy Gatz (Jesse Plemons) is a dutiful warehouse employee, a meticulous amateur beekeeper and a caring housemate to his younger cousin, Don (Aidan Delbis), who’s on the autism spectrum. Teddy also believes that aliens — specifically, Andromedans — have covertly enslaved the planet by impersonating human beings. The colony collapse disorder affecting honeybees is a mere harbinger of the alien plot to dismantle our whole civilization.
Teddy has identified one of these “Andromedans” as Michelle Fuller (Stone), superstar CEO of the pharmaceutical corporation for which he works. He ropes Don into a plot to abduct Michelle, hoping to force the aliens to negotiate with him aboard their spaceship during an imminent lunar eclipse.
The impeccably poised Michelle turns out to be more than a match for two troubled young men, however. They can chain her in a basement and shave off her hair (which Teddy insists is a communication device), but she isn’t eager to play along with their otherworldly narrative. And she has a few plans of her own.
Will you like it?
The conspiracy theories aren’t the only aspect of Bugonia that feels painfully current. The film also highlights the economic divide between the cousins’ marginal lives in their rambling ruin of a house and Michelle’s blithe privilege.
In one darkly comic scene, Michelle outlines a new policy designed to improve “work-life balance” by allowing employees to leave their desks at 5:30 — with so many caveats that only a fool would take advantage of it. As a promo for the movie, this clip provoked strong reactions from TikTok users who were clearly familiar with corporate doublespeak.
Lanthimos uses beautifully staged long shots to highlight the class contrasts — for instance, between Michelle’s headquarters and the dilapidated strip mall where the cousins shop. We may feel like aliens ourselves, observing the absurdities of this fragmented culture from afar.
Once Don and Teddy have completed their intensive prep (which includes chemical castration) and pulled off their abduction, however, the film’s physical scope narrows. Bugonia becomes less of an absurdist comedy and more of a chamber drama about the clash of ideologies, played out in Teddy’s cramped home. Despite a few shockingly violent set pieces, much of the movie resembles a three-character stage play.
Tracy’s screenplay holds our interest by making Michelle cagey, contemptuous and somewhat opaque. Stone gives her a haughty imperturbability reminiscent of Elizabeth Holmes — or of Jerry Lewis as the abductee in The King of Comedy. Michelle deals with her kidnappers as she might recalcitrant employees, doling out just enough fake sympathy to get them where she wants them.
Sweet, scared Don, who has more heart and common sense than his cousin, is vulnerable to her tactics. But Teddy’s elaborate delusions insulate him from normal methods of persuasion. Plemons was born to play a role like this, spouting lines about “techno-enslavement” with utter conviction. Since Michelle knows something about weaponizing words, she soon realizes she must learn Teddy’s language to reach him.
Bugonia is most interesting when it explores how a shared vocabulary can bond people, even — or especially — when that vocabulary bears no relationship to reality. (Lanthimos seems to gravitate toward this theme — see sidebar.) While the film’s ending is highly memorable, it’s also a gleefully perverse cop-out from addressing the larger question of how to bring radicalized people like Teddy back into the fold when institutions have failed them.
The satire hits home, though. Bugonia is named for the ancient Mediterranean practice of “spontaneously” generating honeybees from an ox’s corpse — a testament to the persistence and creativity of human folly. With his own plan for saving his beloved bees, Teddy isn’t so different from his pretechnological forebears. But the danger of using ritual to summon a force greater than yourself is that you might actually succeed.
If you like this, try…
Save the Green Planet! (2003; Kanopy, check your local library): Acclaimed writer-director Jang was reportedly the original hire to direct the American remake of his film, which he has said was inspired by a viewing of Misery.
Dogtooth (2009; Kanopy, Kino Film Collection, Roku Channel, rentable): While Lanthimos didn’t write Bugonia, it shares something with his breakout film: a fascination with people who build insulated bubbles in which nonsense is the norm. This story of a couple who go to extremes to control their children’s education is gripping, funny and not for the faint of heart.
Landscape With Invisible Hand (2023; Kanopy, rentable): What if aliens actually did economically colonize Earth, without bothering to hide their agenda, and used our own free-market rhetoric against us? Vermonter M.T. Anderson’s fine satirical novel became this uneven but interesting film.
This article appears in Nov 5-11 2025.
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