Bugonia Movie REVIEW [Venice Film Festival 2025]

Lanthimos’ BUGONIA captivates with Stone and Plemons. It’s a fearless, off-beat film for our times, but the messaging overshadows the story.

Nobody does it like Yorgos Lanthimos, that stands for both his stylistic choices and approach to storytelling, as well as the rapid rate at which he brings out a new film nowadays. Having marked his presence at the 2023 Venice Film Festival with Poor Things he has shot two films since: last year’s Kinds of Kindness and his return to the Venice Film Festival this year: Bugonia.

A remake Jang Joon-hwan’s 2003 film Save The Green Planet, the first for the Greek auteur, where all his Lanthimos-ness is dialled up to 11 in a movie that feels very much of our times. In Bugonia, two conspiracy-obsessed young men, Teddy (Jesse Plemons) and Don (Aidan Delbis) kidnap Micheller Fuller (Emma Stone) the high-powered CEO of a major pharmaceutical company, convinced that she is an alien intent on destroying planet Earth.

Bizarre as it may sound, it’s exactly what Lanthimos has become known for, it’s his signature stamp on the stories he tells, and once more Lanthimos uses the bizarre nature of his narrative to bring out the hysterical and deliver macabre laughs with the sometimes cringe inducing characters, such as is the case for Teddy, a lunatic on a mission with the attitude and social awareness of a petulant child, whose isolation and broken upbringing no doubt brought him to the moment he chooses to imprison a woman in his basement so she can make contact with her mothership and eventually save the Earth from its invaders, classic mentally healthy behaviour.

But while Teddy and Michelle’s back and forth brings both tension and laughs, Don’s part in the film unravels in the background as a tragedy; that of a man who unwittingly gets drags into a dangerous scenario and toxic living situation, where it’s clear that Teddy’s influence on him is so strong due to his isolation from anyone else besides family. He gets dragged into the same whole Teddy dug himself into only because Don doesn’t know any better, and maybe never had any better. The echo chamber effect feels very real and is constantly present in the film, in no small part due to the isolation we find ourselves in as an audience inside Teddy’s house: a hivelike structure with warm colours but a sinister tinge permeating every inch of every wall.

This isolation is purposeful and intentional on Teddy’s part, whenever the outside world wants to peer in he is hesitant and uncomfortable, most notably seen when local police officer Casey (Stavros Halkias) who happens to be Teddy’s former babysitter beigns to investigate the kidnapping of the famous CEO. The way Teddy sees it he exists only for his mission; blaming Michelle and her company Auxolith for placing his mother Sandy (Alicia Silverstone) in a come for an experimental procedure Teddy is convinced is a front for their true conquering Earth purposes.

Yet, Stone’s Michelle reads on paper as someone who would much more naturally fit the role of an antagonist, despite her being kidnapped and tortured in a basement under a house in the middle of nowhere situation, as he comes across as sterile and emotionless, someone who lives to work, whose entire life is on the clock with a very strict schedule and even dangerous dietary regiment: from waking up at 4:30am to direct exposure to radiation daily, countless pills being ingested and herself working in an isolated office that is bigger than Teddy’s entire house.

This contrast between the two characters, as well as their strong-willed personalities, makes the dynamic between the now two very familiar actors, especially under Lanthimos’ helm, so interesting and riveting to watch.

Despite how dark it can get, Lanthimos always manages to cleanse the palette of every scene with a purposefully awkward laugh or giggle; particularly during an extremely uncomfortable dinner scene where characters share an immensely unappealing plate of spaghetti & meatballs, there’s a flow to how dark & humorous Lanthimos can make a scene feel, as if he’s juggling tones without ever losing grasp of his point and messaging.

Said messaging cannot be missed too, Lanthimos doesn’t go for subtle purposefully, in fact, the bizarre nature previously mentioned takes front stage in the third act of the film, and what at first felt like a guessing game with Lanthimos using light and sound mixing to keep us guessing, engaging us in his crazed mystery, becomes and narrative solely focused on making sure the message comes across, when it arguably already had in spades.

It’s the biggest issue with Lanthimos messaging, he uses a narrative to deliver his message but eventually to accentuate his point he takes a magnifying glass and zooms in so close on what he wants to say that the story feels lost and almost plays second fiddle to the message itself.

Not to say there aren’t elements worthy of praise due to this: Lanthimos collaborations with cinematographer Robbie Ryan are always a feast for the eye: filled with character in each frame, leaving us unnerved with the enormity of the world and the places we see but little by little closing in to make us feel trapped and with no way out just like the characters. The performances too: Emma Stone’s intense yet dismissive Michelle proves to have to many layers as the film unravels it’s impossible to deny her commitment to the role, as well as Plemons whose “lack of chemistry” with Stone is essentially the point of their relationship. The pair never fails to lean into the grotesque, the gory, the bizarre and the macabre under Lanthimos’ direction.

The fun in Yorgos Lanthimos films is never to find out if he’ll make a good or bad movie, but much more how easy it will be to engage with, and he never fails to challenge audiences in what he delivers and how he delivers it, constantly keeping us guessing, intriguing us with his narrative choices and hard turns to engaging us through character and off-beat hilarity, leaving us uncomfortable but also uncomfortably laughing while also making us scratch our heads so much we can’t help but need to have conversations about what the hell did we just watch?

BUGONIA is a tough one to digest. Stone is fearless & Plemons always a welcome presence, both playing in Lanthimos’ off-beat & macabre playground that never fails to captivate. For better or worse a movie of our times but one where the story gets lost in the messaging.

FINAL GRADE: B-

BUGONIA releases in theaters on October 24, 2025.

NEXT: Patty Guggenheim on Bringing a New Kind of Darkness to Twisted Metal Season 2