The algorithm is both a pickpocket and a smothering blanket disguised as a friend when it comes to grief. Whether you lose a person, a place, or a thing, a void of understanding begins to grow like the Earth splitting in two. We may never get the answers to the question of why bad things happen, but there’s a hell of a lot of theories to fertilize our raw feelings and prey on our own insecurities. Tales of a new world order and lizard people walking among us might sound ridiculous to the everyday person — but those most susceptible to the ills of corporations and the uber rich — might be more susceptible to those who man the pulpits of the absurd and far-fetched.
Yorgos Lanthimos’s “Bugonia,” a remake of Jang Joon-hwan’s 2003 sci-fi black satire “Save The Green Planet!,” is aware that the breaths of the world are becoming more strenuous and labored. The title of the English adaptation is an Ancient Greek word meaning “ox-birth,” referring to bees spontaneously born from a cow’s carcass in ritual. Lanthimos and writer Will Tracy leave this up to interpretation, but this choice becomes very apparent given the source material and the characters at play. Teddy (Jesse Plemons) lives with his neurodivergent cousin Don (Aidan Delbis) tucked away in a house in a rural part of town. They both take up beekeeping as a hobby, and Teddy also works at an Amazon-style distribution center.
Emma Stone stars as Michelle in director Yorgos Lanthimos’ BUGONIA, a Focus Features release.
Credit: Atsushi Nishijima/Focus Features © 2025 All Rights Reserved.
A theory has been festering inside Teddy—that perhaps the people of Earth are not what they seem. He believes that a superior alien race, Andromedans, has secretly taken over and is both killing and ruling the planet with an iron fist. Thus, it is his and Don’s job to save the planet they love from an undetected threat. Even though Teddy is made up, his ethos is not fictional; rather, he is a metaphor for the post-COVID echo chamber people were enmeshed with.
In fact, many parts of Teddy’s world are dying off. The town in which he and his cousin reside is worn and devoid of energy. The bees he attends to are starting to disappear, and his mother, Sandy (Alicia Silverstone), is in a coma due to an experimental trial medication gone wrong. Depictions of their last conversations and Teddy’s pain are captured in abstract black-and-white flashbacks paired with Jerskin Fendrix’s eerie score. While the film returns to regular color, Teddy’s world doesn’t. The home he and Don reside in might as well double as an emotional museum of artifacts from past generations. You can see they are the type of people, just by sheer circumstance, that would welcome podcasts named “THE INVASION IS HERE” because something has to be at fault.
Jesse Plemons stars as Teddy in director Yorgos Lanthimos’ BUGONIA, a Focus Features release.
Credit: Courtesy of Focus Features © 2025 All Rights Reserved.
They direct their ire at Michelle (Emma Stone), the CEO of the pharmaceutical company Auxolith. (Lanthimos chooses to gender swap the character as one of a few deviations from Joon-hwan’s film.) She’s got the whole world in her hands, complete with her morning smoothie, expansive home, and boxing coach, before she heads into work. Little does Michelle know, her day is about to go south. After some difficulty, Teddy and Don kidnap the CEO and hold her hostage in their basement. Teddy implores Michelle to cut her hair (as he feels it’s just a way to contact her mothership) and lathers her in antihistamine cream as another preventive measure.
It’s there that “Bugonia” settles into an adversarial dance between worker bees and the “unruly” queen. There’s a more personal connection at stake. Michelle’s company was in charge of developing the medication, which adversely affected Sandy. Michelle says it was in the spirit of moving toward a greater good, and Teddy is not convinced in the slightest.
Lanthimos doesn’t dress his thoughts in metaphors to what his remake is about. These are two different groups of people entrenched in worlds that have no interest in understanding one another. Much of the film’s delight derives from seeing the verbal jousting between Stone and Plemons. Teddy is passionate, but there’s something childlike about him that yearns for some reprieve. He and Don have very little and need to scratch and claw for the little they have. It’s a little irrational to think that kidnapping a high-profile figure is the ill to solve their problems, but desperation mode wins out. Their hopes are pinned on boarding an alien spaceship during a lunar eclipse.
Michelle uses corporate speak, where every detail feels like it’s scrolling on a teleprompter. As “Bugonia” goes on, you’ll find out she’s not as helpless as she appears. The CEO knows when to turn on the naivety and go for the jugular in an attempt to dress down Teddy’s line of thinking. Yes, it is wild to think an alien race has us all under a live pitri dish. However, if they don’t destroy us, humankind will do the job for them.
Ari Asher’s “Eddington” and Lanthimos’s “Bugonia” are looking at the rubble of post-2020’s society and collectively wondering what the hell happened. In their own ways, both films are trying their hands at damage assessment. “Eddington” explores the vampiric nature of social media and how it morphs a small New Mexico town. “Bugonia” is a confined encounter between the haves and have-nots in a somewhat comedic but sad thriller. For Teddy, Don, and Michelle, no mediator is coming to help. Casey (Stavros Halkias), a local police officer, has an unsavory history with Teddy—an example of abuse of power by a pillar of hierarchy in Lanthimos’s film.
“Bugonia” doesn’t definitely say which side is right, driving full speed into a bombastic, gloomy finale – it merely presents how belief can look on both sides of the coin. Higher-ups believe their mission is above all else, without fully considering the fallout. Desperation spurns belief in the unfathomable, leaving those who deserve help at odds with morality. Perhaps the end won’t come with a “War of the Worlds” style invasion, but because we are now far too alien to one another.
