One new sci-fi thriller’s as funny as it’s horrifying, taking audiences on a slow descent into paranoia.
Yorgos Lanthimos’ newest film Bugonia (2025) is a riveting, biting satire that pushes paranoia and absurdity to their limits. The Greek auteur behind recent hits Poor Things (2023) and Kinds of Kindness (2024) delivers another masterclass in discomfort, part hostage thriller, part sci-fi allegory, and entirely unnerving.
The film follows Michelle Fuller (Emma Stone), the icy CEO of a pharmaceutical giant, who’s kidnapped by Teddy (Jesse Plemons), a delusional beekeeper convinced she’s an alien plotting to destroy humanity. Assisted by his naive cousin Don (Aidan Delbis), Teddy imprisons Michelle in his basement to “interrogate” her about her supposed otherworldly motives.
As the ordeal unfolds, the lines between fact and fiction, and victim and captor, begin to blur. Eventually, neither the characters nor the audience can tell what’s real.
Stone delivers another stellar performance for Lanthimos, portraying Michelle as both monstrous and magnetic. Her sharp, unflinching delivery captures the cold detachment of someone who is used to being in control, even as that power is stripped away. Plemons is her perfect foil: erratic, twitchy, and shockingly sincere. Teddy’s a man with his heart in the right place utterly consumed by conspiracy and paranoia, something made terrifying because it truly feels like he believes every word he says.
Cinematographer Robbie Ryan, Lanthimos’ longtime collaborator, shoots the film with his trademark mix of precision and unease. Wide-angle shots make every room feel too big, while sterile colour palettes evoke both corporate detachment and domestic dread. The result’s a visual world that’s both suffocating and eerily beautiful.
Beneath its absurd humour and escalating tension, Bugonia grapples with strikingly topical themes: the viral spread of misinformation, the seductive pull of conspiracy thinking, and the frightening rise in power of tech and pharmaceutical CEO’s. Lanthimos captures the way paranoia can spread in the information age, turning fear into ideology and control into obsession.
The film’s tone oscillates between bleak and hilarious. Lanthimos’ signature deadpan humour surfaces in awkward silences, absurd dialogue, and the horrifying mundanity Teddy explains his outlandish theories with. Lanthimos’ world feels both ridiculous and real, a reflection of ours at its most unstable.
By the final act, Bugonia descends into chaos. The tension builds so relentlessly it’s almost unbearable, propelling the film to its end with equal parts dread, laughter, and disbelief. By the credits, it’s impossible to tell who’s lying, who’s sane, or what was ever true, and that disorientation is Lanthimos’ greatest triumph.
Bugonia is Lanthimos at his most precise and perverse: a film about power, paranoia, and the fragile stories we tell to make sense of the world. It’s deeply funny, deeply upsetting, and completely unforgettable.
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Bugonia, cinema, Emma Stone, Film, Film Review, movie, Movies, Yorgos Lanthimos
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