Time: 118 Minutes
Age Rating: R16 – Graphic violence, cruelty, offensive language & suicide
Cast:
Emma Stone as Michelle Fuller
Jesse Plemons as Teddy Gatz
Aidan Delbis as Don
Stavros Halkias as Casey Boyd
Alicia Silverstone as Sandy Gatz
Director: Yorgos Lanthimos

Yorgos Lanthimos has been on a whole recently, with him making a film every year for the past few years, with Poor Things in 2023, Kinds of Kindness in 2024, and now Bugonia in 2025. With Lanthimos directing and Emma Stone and Jesse Plemons starring, I was already on board with his latest, and so far it’s among my favourite films from 2025.

As it turns out, Bugonia is a remake of a 2000s South Korean film called Save the Green Planet, I haven’t seen that so I can’t comment on how the two compare. Interestingly, Bugonia feels somewhat restrained by Lanthimos standards. Plotwise and writingwise, it is one of his more conventional and subdued films. However, the end result does seem very in line and in tune with what Yorgos Lanthimos has made before though, and the offbeat sensibilities do show here. It’s got a good balance of tone, simultaneously bleak and with effective dark humour, with a degree of dread and hopelessness throughout. It’s a very satirical movie with a lot of (blatant) commentary including about capitalistic greed, paranoia, hierarchy of power, and the human race on the whole. It might not be as overtly crazy as some of Lanthimos’s previous movies, but in the third act, it ups the unhinged and shocking factor and really goes for it and pays everything off quite well.

Emma Stone is amazing in her role, she nails the CEO persona and acts in such a way that it keeps you guessing as to whether she’s an alien or not. Equally fantastic is Jesse Plemons as the conspiracy theorist who kidnaps Stone. His character is unpredictable and driven by anger and past trauma and Plemons brings such intensity to his scenes, and it might be his best performance. The tension between these two is great and really gripping. Aidan Delbis is also really good and noteworthy, as the cousin of Plemons who is roped into kidnapping Emma Stone with him. He’s funny but also brings a lot of humanity and is probably the emotional core of the film.

Yorgos Lanthimos brings his familiar directing style here, even if it largely feels fittingly restrained. The cinematography is striking with really effective uses of wide shots and fish lens, and the movie does well at giving off a general unsettling vibe throughout. The score from Jerskin Fendrix is grand and operatic, and it adds a lot to the tone of the movie.

Bugonia is a bleak, visually stylish, and excellently directed dark comedy, with phenomenal performances from Emma Stone and Jesse Plemons.