Two conspiracists kidnap a woman, the CEO of a prestigious company, accusing her of being an alien and wanting to destroy the Earth.
Lanthimos does what he does best. He pulls the rug from under genre, tone, and expectation. While it simply looks and sounds like it aims to confuse, it adds misdirection and turns it into a kind of sensory cat-and-mouse game.
Bugonia looks like a conspiracy satire. You get feverish monologues delivered with absolute conviction, a cocktail of peasant slang and overly polished vocabulary with pseudoscientific nonsense and weirdly accurate observations. Anti-corporate rhetoric flows freely – sometimes generic, sometimes unexpectedly close to the truth. The messengers are social outcasts, “hillbillies” rejected by society, carrying unresolved trauma and resentment that blur the line between insight and delusion. Lanthimos never mocks them outright, but he never fully redeems them either.
Then there’s the music. Old-fashioned orchestral cues surge in at moments that feel deliberately overemphasised – sometimes to underline emotion, sometimes to distort it, sometimes simply to make you question why you’re being told to feel something at all. Whether these moments are justified or ironic is left hanging, and that uncertainty becomes part of the experience.
In Will Tracy and Jang Joon-hwan’s script lies an idea that’s both absurd and funnily logical: corporations and aliens are essentially the same thing. Both are (or act like) non-human entities, both lack empathy, and both have quietly (or maybe not so quietly) taken over the world. The film toys with familiar cosmic paranoia – alien invasions, hidden rulers, unseen forces, flat Earth – while contrasting it with something far less speculative. No proof is needed to show that corporations dominate modern life; we live inside that reality every day. Bugonia thrives in that overlap, where the unbelievable and the obvious become indistinguishable. I’ve said it before, there is no way the word “corporate” enters a sentence and gives it a positive connotation. See, Kombucha (2025): https://kaygazpro.com/kombucha-2025/.
What truly keeps the film alive, though, is unpredictability. Being a Lanthimos film, there’s never a clear sense of how things will escalate, where they’ll tip into violence, comedy, tragedy, or something else entirely. That constant instability is its greatest strength.
Emma Stone and Jesse Plemons deliver performances that feel fully attuned to this off-kilter world – controlled, unsettling, and often darkly funny – Alicia Silverstone is an excellent addition. They anchor the madness without explaining it, which feels exactly right. But really express it! Which is the polar opposite of his previous film, Kind of Kindness (2024): https://kaygazpro.com/kinds-of-kindness-2024/, which I had omitted reviewing but did just before this one for comparison and contrast (emphasis on behavioural hollowness and acting flatness).
Bugonia (like Kinds of Kindness and his earlier films) may not offer answers, but it offers something else: the “itchy” feeling of not knowing where you stand, only that something deeply unsettling is about to happen – not knowing where, when, what, how, or why. But it’s going to happen.
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