Bugonia review: Emma Stone and Jesse Plemons face off in madcap sci-fi satire

Premiering in competition at the Venice Film Festival, Bugonia starts like a kidnap tale and gets weirder and wilder. Jesse Plemons, another Kinds of Kindness alum, plays the tightly-wound, greasy-looking Teddy, who works in the packaging department of biomedical company Auxolith, run by Stone’s power-dressing CEO, Michelle Fuller.

He’s also an amateur beekeeper, even bringing honey into work for his colleagues. And like anyone attuned to environmental issues, he’s worried about these insects dying off for good. When the story starts, he’s teamed up with his impressionable, slobby cousin Don (Aidan Delbis, making his screen debut) for a very important mission: to abduct Michelle.

This is not for financial gain; there is no ransom to be demanded here. Rather, he’s convinced Michelle is an alien who has assimilated on Planet Earth, with the express intent of destroying all known society. As a lunar eclipse approaches, his plan is to force Michelle to take him to her mothership in order that he may save us all.

The kidnap itself goes not-exactly-smoothly, with Teddy and Don turning up at Michelle’s modernist house, wrestling her to the ground (she fights back with devilish energy, something that doesn’t come as a surprise, given we’ve seen her kickboxing with a personal trainer). Taken to the basement of Teddy’s remote house, they shave her hair – “to prevent you contacting your ship”, reasons Teddy – and attempt to get her to confess she’s an alien.

What follows is a battle of wills between Teddy and Michelle, a woman who comes across like “pure corporate evil”, as Teddy puts it, with her dislike of diversity training and the “new era” of allowing employees to leave at 5.30pm.

Is he mentally ill? Is he bang on the money about her alien-ness? Only time will tell in a story that packs a real punch in the final third, with blackly comic blood-splattered shocks that can fairly be described as grotesquely amusing.

Scripted by Will Tracy, a writer on TV show Succession who also penned the dark comedy The Menu, Bugonia may well be extraterrestrial in its outlook, but it's truly a prod at the way corporations have taken over our planet, maximising profits at the expense of everything else.

Are we the masters of our own demise? Quite possibly. “Sometimes a species just winds down,” we’re told, and for all its outrageous laughs, the underlying – and very serious theme – is that Earth is heading for extinction.

Reuniting the shaven-headed Stone and Plemons is a smart move by Lanthimos, who relishes letting the two actors face off in the basement scenes for what is a deadly game of cat-and-mouse. There’s a small-but-key role too for Alicia Silverstone, who featured in Lanthimos’s 2017 movie The Killing of a Sacred Deer, but that may be better left as a surprise.

Veering from the original movie, not least with switching the gender of the Stone character, it holds enough surprises even for those that have seen the Korean version. “We are not alone!” reads one news clipping on Teddy’s wall. Well, are we?

Bugonia arrives in UK cinemas on 31st October 2025.

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