Bugonia review – A bald Emma Stone dazzles in Yorgos Lanthimos’s timely, heartbreaking comic satire
The director and star of ‘Poor Things’ and ‘The Favourite’ reunite for this funny and deeply topical film about conspiracy theorists and a kidnapped CEO who may or may not be an alien
Clarisse Loughrey
Thursday 30 October 2025 12:40 EDT
Bugonia is one of the best films in recent memory to capture what it feels like to be alive right now. Because of that, it is Yorgos Lanthimos’s darkest and most timely work. Here he’s joined forces with new collaborator Will Tracy, the former editor-in-chief of satire site The Onion and a writer on the similarly cutthroat series Succession. Tracy, then, lives at the centre of the great circus show that is contemporary America, and when he’s paired with Lanthimos’s trademark deadpan, we’re delivered a true alchemical wonder: violent, absurd, current, fantastical, shrewd, and unexpectedly heartbreaking.
The film it’s adapted from, Jang Joon Hwan’s Save the Green Planet! (2003), was always meant to feel at least a little outrageous. Yet it doesn’t take much from Tracy and Lanthimos to make its premise – a conspiracy theorist kidnaps a CEO, convinced they’re an alien – uncomfortably plausible in our real-life landscape of internet rabbit holes, loneliness epidemics, and AI-induced psychosis.
At present, the world feels like the punchline to a joke someone would make on their deathbed, and the fact that no one knows whether to laugh or cry about it is an integral part of why everyone seems to be losing their mind. Lanthimos makes sure his film plays that way, too. Take, for example, his and Tracy’s choice to make the CEO here a woman, Michelle Fuller, played by the director’s thespian go-to, Emma Stone. She’s the head of a pharmaceutical company her kidnapper Teddy (Jesse Plemons) blames for, among other things, the decline of the bee population.
She represents performative ethics at their most slickly sinister, declaring that her workers are now free to leave at 5.30pm (“new culture, no more unpleasant incidents!”) – of course, that is, unless there’s work to be finished. So, you don’t exactly want to believe her sneering invocations around the “politicised optics” of her imprisonment. And when Teddy shaves her head and slaps antihistamine cream all over her body (to dampen the extraterrestrial neurotransmitters, you see), you want to laugh at how she looks like a fumbled attempt at an Uncle Fester costume.
And yet, as much as Bugonia keeps you aware that Michelle has always weaponised her gender in order to maintain a portrait of innocence, Stone will still flash up these small, disorientating little moments of humanity (or extraterrestriality, perhaps?). She and Lanthimos are an ideal match, because she can push for the new and the wild – from a Frankenstein’s monster remix to a bald, alleged alien – all while maintaining a tight control over tone, both dramatically and comedically.
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