Bugonia

Director: Yorgos Lanthimos

2025

7 November 2025

See

Package fulfillment technician, amateur apiarist and conspiracy theorist Teddy (Jesse Plemmons) together with his cousin Don (Aidan Delbis) kidnap Michelle Fuller, a tech CEO they suspect is an alien intent on global domination.

Think

Tech companies may be accelerating the destruction of planet Earth, but Teddy and Don take it too far, their ideas and actions are alienating: shaving Michelle’s head so she can’t communicate with her mothership, covering her skin in some sort of antihistamine cream to weaken her powers of persuasion. They even chemically castrate themselves so she can’t seduce them.

Feel

It’s always the exposition that gets me. Sandy (Alicia Silverstone) Teddy’s  other put him on that path. The nightmarish scenes of her, deranged in a bathtub, with excessively protruding accupuncture was something out of a H.K. Giger sketch. Her floating like a balloon while Michelle gives a rehearsed apology for clinical trial negligence and offering pitiful compensation to cover the cost of palliative care feels like it's tapping into the spirit of the times of righteous indignation between the have-nots against the affluent. Tension builds as local cop and former babysitter Casey (Stavros Halkias) sniffs around the run down home where Michelle is held hostage. THe protracted exchanges between Plemmons and Stone are almost too intense, I couldn’t decide who I wanted to come out on top. Both actors are celebrated for being show stealers, in Civil War and Lanthimos’s previous films Poor Things. The trio were last collaborators in Kinds of Kindness. Ultimately Yorgos wins, a return form from The Lobster and The Killing Of A Sacred Deer.