There are movies that treat suffering like a problem to solve, and then there’s Bugonia, which treats suffering like a staircase. Every step hurts. Every step feels weirdly ceremonial. You keep thinking someone will call it off, that the film will suddenly remember we live in a world of HR policies and basic decency. It doesn’t. It keeps walking you toward a vision of “heaven” that looks a lot like a hive: orderly, collective, purifying, and terrifyingly indifferent to the individual.
Yorgos Lanthimos takes a kidnapping thriller premise and turns it into a parable about what people will endure when they’re starving for meaning. Teddy Gatz (Jesse Plemons) wants proof that the world makes sense. Michelle Fuller (Emma Stone) wants control so complete it becomes spiritual. Don (Aidan Delbis) wants escape.
The Title Points to a Rotten Miracle
“Bugonia” isn’t a random cool word someone found in a notebook. It comes from an ancient belief that bees could be born from dead cattle, which is both disgusting and oddly poetic, depending on how strong your stomach is. That idea matters because it frames the whole film as a story of transfiguration: new life emerging from decay, order emerging from carnage, purpose emerging from paranoia.
The movie’s bees aren’t wallpaper. Teddy and Don keep hives beside their rural home, and the colony’s collapse becomes Teddy’s proof that something “outside” is poisoning the world. He doesn’t need a balanced explanation. He needs a villain he can name. When real life feels like a swarm, conspiracy offers a queen.
Teddy Turns Pain Into a Religion
Teddy kidnaps Michelle, the CEO of pharmaceutical conglomerate Auxolith, because he believes she’s an Andromedan alien killing Earth’s honeybees and pushing humanity into numb submission. That’s an absurd sentence, and Bugonia knows it. The trick is that Teddy delivers it with the grim focus of someone reading scripture. His conviction has the clean, bright edge of devotion.
In Teddy’s theology, suffering proves truth. He shaves Michelle’s head, smears her with cream, chains her in the basement, and runs “tests” that look a lot like torture dressed up as science. He’s not playing at cruelty. He’s chasing transcendence. He wants to feel chosen, and chosen people always seem to have a trial period.
Michelle’s Calm Rewrites the Power Dynamic
Emma Stone plays Michelle with a composure that reads as corporate polish at first, then shifts into something colder and stranger. She doesn’t plead the way most captives plead. She studies Teddy. She listens for the shape of his obsession. And once she finds it, she starts speaking the language of his hunger.
That’s where the hive metaphor sharpens. A hive isn’t “nice.” It’s functional. It doesn’t ask the worker bee how she’s feeling today. Michelle understands systems like that because she runs one. Teddy thinks he’s punishing a monster. Michelle treats him like a temporary malfunction.
Don Shows the Soft Underbelly of the Hive
Don is the character who makes the suffering feel personal instead of conceptual. Teddy drags him into the plot as a helper, but Don reads as someone who has spent his whole life being told he’s “part of the team” while never being handed the map.
He latches onto Michelle with a heartbreaking literalness. He wants to go to outer space with her. He wants a world that finally fits the story he’s been promised. In a hive, the worker doesn’t get the view from the sky. Don wants the view. The film lets you feel that desire as both innocence and danger, because desperation can look a lot like faith.
Sandy Makes Transcendence Look Like Grief
Alicia Silverstone’s Sandy is the film’s emotional anchor, even though she spends much of it comatose after participating in an Auxolith drug trial. Teddy frames her as a martyr. The movie frames her as collateral damage.
In stark black-and-white flashes, Sandy’s addiction history surfaces in images that feel dreamlike and punitive at the same time, including a levitation moment in a bathtub that plays like a hymn sung through clenched teeth. It’s the closest the film comes to “holy” imagery, and it’s also the bleakest.
The Film’s Sound and Image Make the Hive Feel Alive
One of the smartest choices Bugonia makes is treating the hive as an atmosphere, not an object. The sound design leans into bees as a kind of constant nervous system. The buzz becomes musical, tuned and shaped so it can sit inside the score like an invasive thought that refuses to leave.
Visually, the film keeps your attention on faces. Close-ups turn skin into landscape, and the basement angles exaggerate the feeling that everyone is trapped inside somebody else’s idea of reality. This is suffering as texture. You feel it in pores, in stubble, in the blank stare of a person who has decided pain means something.
Heaven Arrives as a System That Doesn’t Care About You
Here’s the part that makes the title land, and also makes you want to argue with the screen. Teddy believes suffering will open a door to salvation. Michelle understands that salvation, in this universe, looks like control so complete it erases choice.
The film pushes the hive metaphor to its ugliest conclusion: collective “purity” requires sacrifice, and sacrifice rarely asks permission. Teddy’s suffering doesn’t elevate him. It disciplines him. Michelle’s authority doesn’t liberate anyone. It reorganizes the world until it stops resisting.
Why the Suffering Feels So Weirdly Convincing
The movie’s genius is that it doesn’t mock its characters from a safe distance. It shows why the hive appeals. When the world feels chaotic, a system that promises order starts to look like mercy. When grief won’t move, pain offers motion. When loneliness rots, belonging starts to look worth any price.
Bugonia doesn’t ask you to approve of the suffering. It asks you to recognize the itch that makes people rationalize it. You might leave the movie thinking, “I’d never do that.” Sure. But would you join a hive if it promised your life would finally make sense?
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.