Yorgos Lanthimos and Emma Stone’s fifth outing together is a wild, precision-tuned gut punch—and, yeah, I liked it more than Kinds of Kindness. Where last year’s anthology felt airless and uneven to me, Bugonia is a full-body jolt: funny, frightening, and maddeningly relevant to an era drowning in conspiracies. The title nods to an ancient Greek notion that bees spring from dead cattle; the movie takes that morbid myth and spins an anxious, buzzing parable about belief, grievance, and the stories we tell ourselves when reality won’t cooperate.
The setup: a beekeeper, a CEO, and a kidnapping
Jesse Plemons is terrific as Teddy, a perpetually aggrieved loner who tends hives and harbors grudges. He’s convinced that Michelle (Emma Stone), the impossibly poised chief executive of a pharma-bioengineering giant, is not just ruining the planet—she’s an alien sent to finish the job. With the help of his timid cousin Don (Aidan Delbis), Teddy nabs Michelle outside her mansion and drags her to his isolated childhood home. Hair is shaved, rules are laid down, and a hostage chess match begins.
From there, Bugonia becomes a nerve-scraping two-hander. Michelle calibrates her every word to survive; Teddy clings to the narrative that makes his failures feel cosmically ordained. He even works a nothing job at her company, which only deepens his resentment. Don, caught in the middle, slowly realizes the “mission” is less righteous crusade than delusion spiraling out of control.
Conspiracy as coping mechanism
The film nails how seductive conspiracies can be when the world feels unfixable—opioids, ecological collapse, economic drift. Teddy’s hive metaphors are painfully on-the-nose in the best way: he identifies with worker bees he believes are discarded by a queen who doesn’t care if the colony burns. Lanthimos and co-writer Will Tracy (tipping their hats to 2003’s Save the Green Planet) turn that mindset into a paranoid thriller that doubles as brutal character study and pitch-black comedy.
Performances that hum
Stone is a marvel, playing Michelle as a genius operator who’s constantly recalculating the odds—contrite one moment, icy the next, always alive to the power dynamics of a locked room. Plemons, meanwhile, delivers a tightrope act: Teddy is dangerous, ridiculous, and, somehow, heartbreakingly human. You can see why he scares you and why, for a beat, you almost pity him. Delbis is a great foil—watchful, hesitant, the guy in the room who knows they’ve crossed a line but can’t quite step back. A late-arriving local cop (Stavros Halkios) adds a neat ripple of tension without breaking the spell.
Craft turned up to 11
Visually, this is Lanthimos in maximalist mode. Shot on rarely used VistaVision rigs, the images are lush and wide without ever feeling ornamental. Robbie Ryan’s compositions trap characters inside rooms and frames within frames, making the house feel like an elaborate terrarium for bad ideas. James Price’s production design is razor-specific—cold corporate modernism versus the stale, memory-soaked clutter of Teddy’s home—each space telling you who holds the power, and why.
Talky—and all the better for it
There’s a stage-play density to the dialogue that never bogs down. The script is quick, needling, and mean when it needs to be, with feints and reversals that keep you guessing who’s steering the scene. It flirts with the outrageous—then finds just enough plausibility to sting. That’s Lanthimos’ sweet spot: the absurd made uncomfortably credible.
So, how does it stack up?
For me, Bugonia stands shoulder-to-shoulder with Poor Things, The Favourite, Dogtooth, and The Lobster—and I genuinely prefer it to Kinds of Kindness. It’s leaner, sharper, and more emotionally legible without losing the director’s taste for the bizarre. It entertains like gangbusters while quietly asking whether our “truths” are just elaborate stories we use to make pain feel purposeful.
In a year crowded with Big Ideas, this is the one that feels most of the moment: a buzzing, beautifully deranged thriller about what happens when grievance hardens into religion—and when the hive finally turns on the queen.