His latest film, 'Bugonia', suggests the only remedy might be a total system crash.
This conversational sci-fi conspiracy thriller, wrapped in the thorny hide of a black comedy, is a searing, squirm-inducing duel between two of modern America’s most potent monsters: the red-pilled, wifi-poisoned paranoiac and the soulless, jargon-spouting corporate CEO.
It is Lanthimos at his most approachable yet arguably most cynical, trading the ornate stylings of Poor Things for a grimy, basement-level examination of a society rotting from the top down and the bottom up.
'Bugonia' centers on a collision of two worlds that are, in fact, just different circles of the same hell. On one side is Michelle Fuller (a chillingly precise Emma Stone, Poor Things), the CEO of the monolithic pharmaceutical company Auxolith.
'Bugonia' centers on a collision of two worlds that are, in fact, just different circles of the same hell. On one side is Michelle Fuller (a chillingly precise Emma Stone, Poor Things), the CEO of the monolithic pharmaceutical company Auxolith.
Her life is a meticulously curated regimen of 4:30 a.m. workouts, passive-aggressive HR videos, and Louboutin heels, a monument to capitalist self-optimization. On the other is Teddy (a transformative Jesse Plemons, Civil War, Breaking Bad), a greasy, wild-eyed beekeeper whose reality has been warped by the internet's darkest corners.
Consumed by online forums and crackpot podcasts, Teddy has become utterly convinced of two things: first, that the catastrophic decline of the honeybee population is the direct fault of corporate greed, and second, that Michelle Fuller is not human at all, but a high-ranking alien from Andromeda sent to orchestrate humanity’s demise.
Fueled by righteous fury and a deeply personal grudge (his mother, Sandy (Alicia Silverstone), was left comatose by a faulty Auxolith drug), Teddy enacts a desperate plan.
Fueled by righteous fury and a deeply personal grudge (his mother, Sandy (Alicia Silverstone), was left comatose by a faulty Auxolith drug), Teddy enacts a desperate plan.
With his gentle, neurodivergent cousin Don (Aidan Delbis) as his lone accomplice, he kidnaps Michelle. They drag her to their dilapidated farmhouse, shave her head to sever her supposed connection to the mothership, slather her in antihistamine lotion, and chain her to a bed in the basement.
Teddy’s demand is simple: he has three days, until the next lunar eclipse, to force a confession from Michelle and use her to negotiate humanity’s survival with her alien emperor. What follows is an intense psychological siege, a battle of wits and wills where the line between persecutor and persecuted, sanity and delusion, becomes terrifyingly blurred.
Yorgos Lanthimos has built his career on dissecting the grotesque mechanics of power, often through the lens of control, confinement, and sexuality. From the oppressive family structures in Dogtooth to the venomous courtly manipulations of The Favourite and the hedonistic liberation of Poor Things, his films consistently explore how desire and the body become battlegrounds for dominance.
Yorgos Lanthimos has built his career on dissecting the grotesque mechanics of power, often through the lens of control, confinement, and sexuality. From the oppressive family structures in Dogtooth to the venomous courtly manipulations of The Favourite and the hedonistic liberation of Poor Things, his films consistently explore how desire and the body become battlegrounds for dominance.
The prompt asks specifically how the overt sexuality of his prior films translates into 'Bugonia', a film framed as a power struggle and kidnapping.
Here, the sexuality is not one of pleasure or liberation but of violation and control, twisted into a sterile, almost clinical form of assault. The initial abduction is a brutal act of domination. Michelle is stripped, her body objectified and neutralized with a bizarre coating of lotion.
Here, the sexuality is not one of pleasure or liberation but of violation and control, twisted into a sterile, almost clinical form of assault. The initial abduction is a brutal act of domination. Michelle is stripped, her body objectified and neutralized with a bizarre coating of lotion.
The shaving of her head is a particularly potent act; it is a desexualizing violation, stripping her of a conventional symbol of femininity and identity, remaking her in the image of Teddy’s delusion.
This isn’t the curious, exploratory sexuality of Bella Baxter of Poor Things, it is a violent, non-consensual reprogramming of the body to fit a paranoid narrative.
The film's psychosexual undercurrents are palpable, if repressed.
The film's psychosexual undercurrents are palpable, if repressed.
Teddy’s mission requires him and Don to "cleanse themselves of their psychic compulsions," a phrase dripping with Freudian implication, further reinforced when they "chemically castrate themselves" in preparation for their mission.
It suggests a deep-seated fear of or revulsion towards sexuality, which Teddy sublimates into his grand conspiracy.
He cannot process the messy, cruel realities of corporate negligence and human frailty, so he recasts Michelle not merely as a corporate villain but as a seductive, alien corruptor whose very biology is a threat. The basement becomes a Freudian nightmare, where Michelle’s captivity is less about extracting information and more about Teddy asserting total control over the feminine, corporate Other that he believes has poisoned his world and unmanned him.
In Lanthimos’s world, power is the ultimate aphrodisiac, and in 'Bugonia', its expression is as cold and terrifying as the void of space Teddy imagines.
At its core, 'Bugonia' is a furious diagnosis of a world terminally ill with its own information.
At its core, 'Bugonia' is a furious diagnosis of a world terminally ill with its own information.
Working from a sharp, incisive script by Will Tracy (The Menu, Succession), Lanthimos crafts Teddy not as a simple villain, but as a tragic monster birthed by the digital age. He is the terrifying end-point of "doing your own research," a man whose encyclopedic knowledge of un-vetted opinions has calcified into unshakable dogma.
Plemons embodies him with a sweaty, desperate sincerity, making his rants against "techno enslavement" and corporate malfeasance resonate with uncomfortable truths, even as their foundation crumbles into sci-fi fantasy. The film powerfully argues that in an era of collapsing trust, humans no longer seek information; we seek validation for our deepest fears, and the internet is an endless, affirming echo chamber.
Opposite him stands Michelle, a different kind of monster forged in the crucible of late-stage capitalism. Stone’s performance is exquisite in its heartlessness. She portrays a person whose humanity has been sanded down by corporate-speak and ruthless efficiency. Her dialogue, a masterclass in passive-aggressive manipulation, feels genuinely alien.
Opposite him stands Michelle, a different kind of monster forged in the crucible of late-stage capitalism. Stone’s performance is exquisite in its heartlessness. She portrays a person whose humanity has been sanded down by corporate-speak and ruthless efficiency. Her dialogue, a masterclass in passive-aggressive manipulation, feels genuinely alien.
The film uses cinematographer Robbie Ryan's clever framing to play with our allegiances; the camera often looks down on Teddy, emphasizing his lowly status, while gazing up at the captive, bald Michelle, evoking images of a persecuted martyr like Renée Jeanne Falconetti in The Passion of Joan of Arc.
Why, Lanthimos asks, do we use the visual language of the persecuted on a Big Pharma CEO?
The film brilliantly sustains this ambiguity, forcing the audience to question who the true parasite is: the deluded kidnapper fighting a phantom menace, or the CEO whose company demonstrably destroys lives for profit.
This ending, which re-contextualizes everything that came before, is the film’s biggest gamble.
This ending, which re-contextualizes everything that came before, is the film’s biggest gamble.
For some, this pivot will feel unearned, a jarring tonal shift that doesn't quite cohere with the contained, single-joke premise.
For others, it will be the masterstroke that cements the film’s bleak thesis about humanity's self-destructive egotism.
It is a conclusion that refuses easy answers, leaving the audience in a state of shell-shocked ambiguity about blame, justice, and whether our species even deserves to survive.
'Bugonia' is a spiny, prickly, and deeply unsettling piece of work. It may lack the visual extravagance of Poor Things or the emotional generosity of The Favourite, but it compensates with thematic potency and two of the year’s most compelling performances. As a remake of Jang Joon-hwan’s 2003 Korean cult classic Save the Green Planet!, it successfully Americanizes the story, zeroing in on the country's unique susceptibility to conspiracy culture and corporate rot.
'Bugonia' is a spiny, prickly, and deeply unsettling piece of work. It may lack the visual extravagance of Poor Things or the emotional generosity of The Favourite, but it compensates with thematic potency and two of the year’s most compelling performances. As a remake of Jang Joon-hwan’s 2003 Korean cult classic Save the Green Planet!, it successfully Americanizes the story, zeroing in on the country's unique susceptibility to conspiracy culture and corporate rot.
