Bugonia

The Hive Mind's Final Hour

I’m not sure when Yorgos Lanthimos stopped studying human weirdness from a chilly distance and decided to dive headfirst into the internet’s most paranoid corners, but *Bugonia* is what that choice looks like. His 2025 remake of Jang Joon-hwan’s *Save the Green Planet!* feels like it was transmitted from a message board nobody should be reading at three in the morning. You might expect Lanthimos to sand the source down into something clinically abstract. Instead, with Will Tracy writing, he makes it grubby. The movie is a cramped, vicious comedy about capitalism at the end of its rope and the hollow fatigue of trying to rescue a planet that seems past caring.



The premise is blunt enough to sound like a dare. Teddy (Jesse Plemons), a beekeeper whose brain has been fully overrun by extraterrestrial conspiracy logic, kidnaps Michelle Fuller (Emma Stone), a pharmaceutical CEO he is convinced is an alien from Andromeda orchestrating Earth’s ecological collapse. Helping him is his neurodivergent cousin Don (Aidan Delbis). Michelle gets chained in the basement. Teddy demands that she confess.

From there, the movie turns into a duel between incompatible versions of reality. Plemons is frighteningly precise in this register. He’s spent years playing men whose stillness hides violence, and Teddy feels like that archetype left alone too long with the internet and his own despair. When he explains his theories to Don, his shoulders cave inward and his eyes flick toward the walls as if they might be listening back. He doesn’t rant like a mad prophet. He sounds like a tired teacher trying one more time to walk a bad student through basic arithmetic. Stone has the harder assignment—she spends much of the movie tied to a chair—but she never loses control of the room. Michelle isn’t simply terrified. She’s a predator in expensive clothing, and Stone uses her voice and face like blades, nudging the two men against each other while making every flicker of emotion suspicious.



The scene that stuck with me comes in the film’s middle section. Teddy, stuffed into a ludicrous homemade protective suit, circles Michelle beneath Robbie Ryan’s saturated, punishing light. Jerskin Fendrix’s score groans and crashes in the background like an orchestra dying on impact. Teddy starts listing signs of environmental collapse, especially the disappearance of the bees. It’s excruciating because the alien nonsense is absurd, but the grief underneath it isn’t. Lanthimos pushes in on Stone’s face just enough to catch a brief flicker—maybe pity, maybe irritation, maybe strategic interest. The movie lives in that uncertainty.

I do have reservations. Tracy’s script can get caught admiring its own speeches. Teddy’s lectures about social breakdown sometimes sound less like a cracked consciousness than a clipped op-ed. Maybe that’s deliberate. Contemporary conspiracy culture is often just lonely people reciting borrowed language at each other. Still, it slows a movie that otherwise moves with the nasty, unstable energy of a thriller.



Even so, when the film finally drops through the floor in the third act, it lands hard. *The Guardian* described it as "a spiny, prickly, hothouse flower," and that feels exactly right. By the time the ending arrives—an extinction event played with eerie calm—the comedy has curdled completely. *Bugonia* leaves you staring at a world full of isolated people frantically reaching for a story big enough to explain the chaos. The bleak joke is that nothing is steering the thing at all.