Bugonia Review: BFI London Film Festival 2025

Emma Stone is so perfect she must be an alien. Jesse Plemons sets out to prove it in Bugonia

In a musty basement, two young men, Teddy (Jesse Plemons) and his cousin Don (Aidan Delbis) catastrophise about the state of the world. The bees are dying. Elitist corporations are pumping the population full of medications to control them. Society is on the brink of an out-and-out colony collapse. Fortunately, Teddy has a plan to save the world. Convinced that the CEO of the multibillion-dollar pharmaceutical company he works for is actually an alien plotting to destroy the world, he believes that if he can just get her to take him to her leader, he can negotiate on behalf of humanity. So, Teddy and Don kidnap her.

But ice queen, boardroom bitch Michelle (Emma Stone) is probably the last person someone should ever try to kidnap. She’s trained in self-defence, negotiation and de-escalation techniques, and as a woman who has reached the top of the pyramid in a man’s world, she normally eats losers like Teddy for breakfast. Rather than show even a modicum of fear, she is soon trying to pay off, intimidate or manipulate her hostage takers into releasing her. When she begins to understand the sheer depth of Teddy’s delusions, she must start to play into them if she is going to have any hope of surviving.

Bugonia is the fourth collaboration between Emma Stone and the Greek master of dark absurdism, Yorgos Lanthimos, in a partnership that has already produced the widely celebrated The Favourite, Poor Things and Kinds of Kindness. It’s adapted from the 2003 Korean movie Save The Green Planet, a cult sci-fi hit that Yorgos now stamps with his own particular brand of bleak surrealism. It’s emotionally his coldest work yet, observing these characters and this society with a fatalistic detachment, yet in terms of plot, it’s also his most accessible and easily digestible film so far.

Plemons and Stone give an absolute masterclass in acting, the two of them so reliably brilliant it would be easy to overlook just how good this work is, but it’s sure to be awards nominated. Stone’s level of control as the calculating Michelle is commendable, selling this woman as so prepared, pristine and unshakeable that you yourself could almost assume she is some sort of higher being. Plemons is conversely chaotic and unpredictable, terrifyingly well studied in his mad beliefs and preaching them with dark-eyed conviction. Watching the power shift back and forth between the two of them is thrilling.

Bugonia is beautifully shot, interspersed briefly with the sort of hyper-stylised imagery Lanthimos perfected in Poor Things. He keeps us grounded in the real world more often here, before edging towards a wildly outrageous, gory final act. It’s soundtracked by a crashing, intrusive orchestral score by Jerskin Fenrix that sounds like it could be a lost piece of Holst’s Planets Suite. Occasional pop music interludes are placed with wry humour – in a standout scene, Teddy interrogates Michelle while Green Day’s Basket Case plays on the stereo in the background.

Bugonia would make an interesting double bill to Ari Aster’s 2025 release Eddington, two films released in quick succession about how people can be drawn down the rabbit hole of conspiracy theories in response to personal and societal struggles. Teddy’s beliefs may be extreme, but they’re only a few steps further into the darkness from claims being made by increasingly larger corners of the internet right now. Lanthimos exaggerates our own post-fact world in which it’s not necessarily the side that is telling the truth that will win out, but the one that gets their message across the most powerfully.

Darkly funny and bleakly observant of society, Bugonia is a hugely entertaining rollercoaster of a movie. Liable to leave you shell-shocked in the theatre as the credits roll, its waves of paranoid loneliness are a stark reminder of the importance of human connection in an increasingly divided world.

Bugonia is playing as part of the BFI London Film Festival. It will be released in UK cinemas on 31st October 2025