After Poor creatureGolden Lion of the Venice Film Festival in 2024, and Kinds of Kindnessreleased in France the same year, Yorgos Lanthimos signs a new feature film in which he solves problems with humanity, which is presented as a dangerous species, from which no one can be saved. Bugoniain competition at the Venice Film Festival, released in cinemas on Wednesday November 26.
The film opens with a bucolic image of a bee collecting nectar from the heart of a very pretty, colorful flower, perhaps not far from the large, old, secluded house where Teddy (Jesse Plemons) and his cousin Don (Aidan Delbis) live.
Teddy, when he’s not working in the pharmaceutical company warehouse next door, tends his bees with Don. Teddy is a conspiracy theorist who believes that aliens have invaded the planet to attack humanity. With Don’s help, he organizes the kidnapping of Michelle (Emma Stone), his boss, whom he suspects of being one of them. Then begins, in the basement of this house of a pair of broken arms, a mad kidnapping.
With this new feature film, Lorgos Lanthimos highlights the dangerous instability of our contemporary world through the portrait of a broken man, who seeks answers to the tragic events that marked his life since childhood, in extraordinary theories.
In his paranoia, fueled by alarming news about the state of the planet, but also and especially by the situation of his mother, in a coma after participating in a clinical trial arranged by a pharmaceutical company run by Michelle, Teddy has built, from the information he obtained on the web, a crazy theory about a conspiracy fueled by extraterrestrials, “Andromedans”. We could laugh if his obsession didn’t drive him to violent acts.
This new film by the Greek director is a remake of Save the Green Planet!a South Korean film released in 2003. Based on a screenplay rewritten by Will Tracy at the request of Ari Aster, the film’s producer, Lorgos Lanthimos had fun blurring the lines.
Who exactly is this cynical business owner, who thrives in a world of luxury and cleanliness, the incarnation of power, in contrast to Teddy and Don who are dirty and disconnected from society, but in touch with nature? Who is torturing whom? Who’s lying, who’s telling the truth? Was his official speech truer than the ravings of poor Teddy, whose theories and methods were mad, but whose anger was just?
:quality(50)/2025/11/21/bugonia-4-69209d41a5a2f985408756.jpeg)
We are lost, just as we are drowning today in a world engulfed in madness fueled by the multitude and confusion of messages constantly pouring in on us. A violence also occurs in human relationships, which disturbs and leads, like Teddy, to search for meaning in all this conspiracy theory chaos. “Today many people feel invisible and completely discarded”underline the director.
In this confusion, does the human species, which has destroyed everything in its path due to its excessive, utilitarian, and cynical relationship with the world, deserve to continue inhabiting the beautiful planet where bees gather to preserve life? The film decides, closing with a cinematic scene as beautiful and funny as a dream, which interrupts any attempt to freeze the world into a single truth (and which deserves an Oscar for the most beautiful knitting in the history of cinema).
We discover in this new feature film by the Greek director all his obsessions: power, in all its forms, the body, which is often abused, damaged characters, seeking improvement, but also the question of good and evil, with here the figure of the Don, seemingly docile, almost simple, but seems to be the only one who questions himself.
“Don is the soul of the film and its moral compass”explained Yorgos Lanthimos in his film presentation. “He embodies the viewer’s view, as he is constantly in doubt. He constantly questions the situation, but he remains fiercely loyal to Teddy and does not want to go against him. However, something inside Don tells him that what they are doing may be wrong.”
:quality(50)/2025/11/21/bugonia-3-69209c2f3b11a462377780.jpeg)
We also find the cinematic signature of the Greek director, with a direction that beats in a synchronized rhythm, with an aesthetic worked out in detail to nourish the subject, from costumes to sets, including sound, and image, here magnified by filming in the VistaVision format, for which he prioritizes beauty as well as ugliness.
The director depicts Teddy’s pain and soul in tragic black and white, which contrasts with the naturalism of other surreal scenes where we understand the implication that life has not actually escaped him. After Favorite, Poor creature (which won him an Oscar in 2024) and Types of KindnessEmma Stone is totally royal in her new collaboration with Yorgos Lanthimos.
With films of high cinematic value, which juggle the genres of horror, psychological thriller, comedy and ecological fable, Yorgos Lanthimos depicts, with a mixture of humor, tenderness and ferocity, human madness.
:quality(50)/2025/11/21/bugonia-affiche-69209fa322fd9596761136.jpg)
Gender : Science Fiction
Realization: Yorgos Lanthimos
With : Emma Stone, Jesse Plemons, Aidan Delbis, Alicia Silverstone
Country : United Kingdom, South Korea
Duration: 1 hour 59
GO OUT : November 26, 2025
Distributors: Universal Pictures International France
Summary : Two conspiracy-obsessed men kidnap a top CEO, convinced that he is an alien intent on destroying Earth.
