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PORTSIDE CULTURE

BUGONIA IS YORGOS LANTHIMOS AT HIS BEST  
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Eileen Jones
November 6, 2025
Jacobin
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_ In Bugonia, Emma Stone plays a kidnapped pharmaceutical CEO trying
to convince her deranged abductors that she’s not a sinister alien
in disguise. As a portrait of our political impasse, it’s a
shocking, wild ride with an ending you won’t see coming. _

Bugonia concerns a pair of rural men who abduct Michelle Fuller (Emma
Stone), the CEO of a pharmaceutical company, because they’re
convinced she’s an alien come to destroy Planet Earth through
corporate means. , (Focus Features)

 

he new Yorgos Lanthimos film _Bugonia _is a wild, delirious ride, with
an ending that’s driving certain critics to ranting fury. But it’s
starting strong with the public, giving Lanthimos his best opening
weekend
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ever.

Which is only just, since this is the best Lanthimos film since _The
Favourite_ back in 2018.

_Bugonia _concerns a pair of rural men, Teddy Gatz (Jesse Plemons) and
his autistic cousin, Don (newcomer Aidan Delbis), who abduct Michelle
Fuller (Emma Stone), the CEO of the pharmaceutical company Auxolith,
because they’re convinced she’s an alien come to destroy Planet
Earth through corporate means. The cousins plan to force her to
arrange a meeting with the “Andromedan” rulers on the mother ship,
so they can negotiate a deal with the aliens to leave Earth in peace.

Teddy works for Fuller’s company as a lowly package shipper. His
mother Sandy (Alicia Silverstone) was once an opioid addict who later
became a test subject for an experimental Auxolith drug. This put her
into a coma, and she lives in a local care center, still emotionally
tethered to Teddy, a situation that appears in his mind as if her soul
is a floating balloon he holds tenuously by its string. Teddy’s
father deserted them long ago, leaving Teddy and Don as the last
family members living in unwholesome isolation in a dilapidated
farmhouse where God knows what has been going on for years.

There are definitely shades of _The Texas Chainsaw Massacre_ (1974)
here, that unforgettable tale of heartland horror about a rural family
once employed in the local slaughterhouse that is now long since
closed. Cross that with another admirable cinematic antecedent, _They
Live_
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(1988), John Carpenter’s brilliant take on Reagan-era corporate
yuppies as aliens secretly overrunning the earth, and you’ve got the
seeds that sprout into _Bugonia_.

There’s an action-packed act one, including a hilarious abduction
scene complicated by the fact that Michelle spends a lot more time in
the gym than Teddy or Don. She beats them in several rounds of
fighting all over her vast, manicured lawn before they finally bring
her down with a hypodermic needle. Then for act two, screenwriter Will
Tracy (_The Menu, The Regime, Succession_) has Michelle and Teddy face
off against each other in a series of debates going nowhere. It’s a
point raised by a number of critics
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They are two people forcefully asserting, in turn, their clashing
versions of reality, without ever listening to each other, without
ceding any ground. They talk _at_ each other, but nothing ever sinks
in, nothing ever sways the other person even minutely; they just keep
talking.

It’s funny because this critical point tends to get made in pious
deploring tones, suggesting that all might be well “if they’d just
talk it out.” As if the problem here is faulty communication —
shades of Democratic Party members, always insisting it’s the loss
of civility and clear, respectful discourse that’s making our
political situation so dysfunctional and grotesquely punitive. And not
the massive class disparity with Teddy and Don on one side and our
world’s Michelle Fullers on the other.

The fact is these characters share no common ground, not to mention
that Michelle never argues in good faith. Besides, Teddy has already
heard it all before, and he’s mentally armed himself against the
alien/corporate point of view. He even, in mid-rant, cynically sums up
the next several points she’s going to make. And he knows that
talking is never going to lead to her “ceding ground” in his
direction in a way that addresses the plight of the rural working
class. The whole reason Michelle keeps saying “Talk to me” is
because — whether she’s an alien or a corporate CEO or, as Teddy
believes, a horrifying blend of the two — she’s mastered the art
of rhetorical spin that puts those she’s addressing at a further
disadvantage. It’s all a series of power plays with her.

We see this early on while watching Michelle go through her typical
day, before the abduction. At one point, she announces that, from now
on, all Auxolith employees can leave at 5:30 p.m., presumably after a
reasonable eight-hour day. No more “bad old days” of crushing
mandatory eighty-hour weeks. But then she goes on to remind her
employees that “we _are _running a business here,” so if there’s
still work left undone, the worker could _choose_ to stay to fulfill
their implied duty to the company. Michelle concludes that she’ll
leave it up to the individual worker’s “conscience.”

And you know what that means. Now each worker gets the message —
they’d better work even harder to be even more productive, or else.
And the boss is completely off the hook, because she can always claim
each employee made their own choice to work soul-killing overtime.

Even captive, with wrists and ankles bound (and head shaved because,
according to Teddy’s research, aliens communicate through their
hair), Michelle seems the far more formidable figure, not least
because of her rhetorical skills. She’s so expert at turning lines
of argument against her interlocutor that Don panics when he’s alone
with her, knowing he’s no match for her sophistry. And what she
talks him into is — well, I can’t say. Spoilers and such.

But it’s no spoiler to note that Don is right to panic, because to
say the least, there’s no way this ever-intensifying “take me to
your leader” plot can end well. _Bugonia_ is permeated with
pitch-black humor, tragic poignancy, and deep dread, which makes it an
armrest-clutching experience to watch. Highly recommended!

Here Tracy and Lanthimos have found inventive ways to depict our
increasingly deranged political impasse in America, making them
freshly enlightening as articulated in unexpected ways by extreme
characters. _Bugonia_ is clear that we’ve reached this point for
good reason — ceding any further ground to corrupt ideologues
building empires of wealth on human suffering can’t be allowed to go
any further.

It’s a shame I can’t discuss the film’s ending here, because
it’s a doozy. And it’ll probably define your whole experience of
the film, regardless of what you thought of it before the last four
minutes. I loved it for its sheer madness, which has an emotional
logic of its own, but there are certain reviews that are one long
screech of fury over the way this ending supposedly ruins everything
that went before.

I can give you a hint at the head-spinning quality of it by noting
that, over the last shots in the film, the old Pete Seeger antiwar
anthem “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?” is sung by Marlene
Dietrich. _All _the verses. For those who don’t know, by the time
Dietrich recorded the song in 1962, she was a jaded, world-weary
old-time Hollywood diva who’d seen it all. To say the least, her
aging, heavily Teutonic, deeply ironic smoker’s voice cuts against
the sad sweetness of the melody and lyrics in a way that you’ll
remember for a long, long time.

Don’t miss this one. Lanthimos has announced he’s taking a break
from overwork after his paroxysm of filmmaking that brought forth
_Poor Things_ (2023), _Kinds of Kindness_ (2024), and now _Bugonia_ in
rapid succession. Who knows when he’ll be back? Needless to say,
_Bugonia _beats them all.

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Contributors

Eileen Jones is a film critic at Jacobin, host of the Filmsuck
podcast, and author of Filmsuck, USA.

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* bugonia
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* Yorgos Lanthimos
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* Big Pharma
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* populism
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* anti-coporatismm rural america
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* conspiracy theories
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