Yorgos Lanthimos has always liked stories where people test each other in strange rooms. In Bugonia he gives us one of his sharpest setups yet. Two scrappy, conspiracy soaked abductors believe that a powerful pharmaceutical CEO is an alien who plans to wipe out humanity, so they kidnap her to save the world.
The twist is that the supposed alien is played by Emma Stone, shaved head and all, and she is so composed, so surgically clever, that you start to wonder whether the captors have caught a monster or just made one.
A Remake That Changes the Center
The film is adapted from an early 2000s Korean cult favorite about eco paranoia and class rage, but Lanthimos and writer Will Tracy shift the balance by putting a woman at the center of the conspiracy. In the original story the abducted figure was a male industrialist; here she is Michelle Fuller, the public face of a pharma empire, polished, unsentimental and very used to being the smartest person in any boardroom.
Gendering the target this way matters, because now the act of kidnapping looks less like dragging down a faceless executive and more like punishing a female-coded authority who refuses to apologize for power. The abduction becomes a ritual meant to humble her.
The Beekeeper and the Believer
On the other side we have Jesse Plemons as Teddy Gatz, a beekeeper whose hives are failing and who has decided that the planet is failing with them. He is joined by his younger, more impulsive cousin, and together they build a bunker of string maps, amateur science and furious sincerity.
Teddy is pathetic and frightening at once. He wants to protect life but keeps choosing violent methods. He wants to heal the bees but decides the proper treatment is to remove a human life. The film keeps asking whether that trade is ever justified, even when you tell yourself the universe is at stake.
Is Michelle Actually the Alien?
Lanthimos has fun refusing to answer that too quickly. Michelle never breaks the way a regular hostage would. She studies her captors and mirrors their language. She pokes at the fractures in their little resistance cell. At some point you realise that even if she is a perfectly ordinary human CEO, she has the detachment of someone who lives above consequences.
If she is an alien, she is the kind who learned to pass by running a corporation. Stone plays that contradiction with a cool that borders on reptilian. Her stillness is more threatening than her outbursts. That performance is what critics singled out in Venice, because it lets the film work both as thriller and as satire of every “girlboss saves the planet” branding exercise we have seen in the last decade.
Bodies as Proof
One of the production stories that slipped out early was that Lanthimos wanted to stage a grisly mass tableau at the Acropolis and got blocked, so he shot the ending in Greece somewhere less sacred. That tells you where his brain was. He wanted a final image stacked with bodies, because in this film bodies are evidence.
They say: look how much it cost to get the truth. Look how far obsession will go once it has a spiritual excuse. The kidnappers think sacrifice will make their argument irrefutable. Instead it shows how unstable their righteousness always was.
Rebirth That is Not Clean
The film also keeps faith with its source by staying wonderfully messy. There is slapstick pain, a few splattery jolts, bright candy colors over grimy basements, even a needle drop that makes you laugh at how hard it is trying to be triumphant. It is funny, but it is not comforting.
Several reviewers have already called it misanthropic, and that is fair, because the movie suggests that whether or not Michelle is an alien, humanity is still happy to torture each other on camera for meaning. The rebirth we get at the end is not a garden blooming after rain. It is more like a new hive built inside an abandoned car. Useful. Buzzing. Slightly gross.
Why the Emma Stone Casting Matters
This is the fourth time Stone has worked with Lanthimos, and by now she knows how to play within his world of ritual and cruelty. Here she removes most of the softness she had in Poor Things and most of the arch comedy she had in The Favourite. What is left is control.
She makes Michelle a person who believes she earned everything, which makes her a perfect target for two men who believe the world was stolen from them. Watching her in that chair, bald and unflinching, you understand the movie’s main question: if we destroy the people at the top, do we get our planet back, or do we simply learn to enjoy destroying people at the top.
This is a story about people who love life so much they are willing to kill for it. That is the trap. That is the irony. The title calls it clearly. You can make something new out of death. You can even make it look noble. But if you never stop killing, all you have done is teach the hive to live on corpses. That is the dark joke at the center of Bugonia, and it is the part that lingers when the credits roll.
Rachel Sikkema is a New Zealand-based writer and creative entrepreneur who explores the intersection of film, culture, and modern relationships. Through her articles, she examines how stories shape the way we connect, love and see ourselves. When she’s not writing about film and television, she’s watching Dexter and The White Lotus for the third time.