Why Bugonia winning the 2026 best picture Oscar is perfect for the supreme anxiety of these maddening times

There’s no Oscar best-picture hopeful this year with slimmer chances than the latest black comedy from director Yorgos Lanthimos, which has been met with a cautious reception even while scoring nominations at most major awarding bodies. But this underdog status highlights what’s interesting about the film: defined by an apparent sourness and misanthropy missing from frontrunners like One Battle After Another and Hamnet, the gorgeous and unhappy Bugonia feels far more suited to its moment – even if many of us would hesitate to admit this.

The story follows a conspiracy-obsessed white American man, Teddy (Jesse Plemons), who persuades his loyal cousin Don (Aidan Delbis) to help kidnap Michelle Fuller (Emma Stone), the CEO of a biomedical company.

Teddy believes that Michelle represents an extra-terrestrial race that is working to infiltrate and destabilise humanity, and he wishes, quite literally, to be taken to her leader. Will Tracy, nominated for his screenplay, adapts the 2003 South Korean film Save the Green Planet! and smartly whittles its story down, retaining the major twists but excising a couple of subplots.

What remains keeps largely to the compelling battle of wits between abductor and abductee, the latter gender-swapped from the original film. Tracy, Lanthimos and co-producer/star Stone craft a focused study in class dynamics that demands its viewer constantly refocus their own values and ethics.

Teddy, deeply troubled, seems to be enacting a revolutionary strike against the corporate class, whose frequent malfeasance has, so we see in the film, real and painful consequences for the 99 per cent. (Weeks after filming wrapped, big-pharma CEO Brian Thompson was murdered in New York. An encapsulation of popular reaction to this might be a December 2024 Saturday Night Live audience cheering a reference to Thompson’s alleged killer.) But this anti-hero’s motivations are far from altruistic or even particularly righteous.

Michelle, meanwhile, is every bit the “girlboss” archetype: self-serving, powerful, glib. Yet, the violence she endures is horrible, while the film-makers clearly enjoy watching her smoothly manipulate the confused Teddy.

For all this, Bugonia deftly avoids a kind of dreary “both-sides” satire through the way it gradually raises its stakes and recalibrates its characters, forever complicating the cosy dichotomies that plague so much "political" popular art. (Duck out now if you wish to avoid spoilers.)

As the story progresses, Michelle drops more details about the Andromedan race, supposedly invented on the spot to placate Teddy. Meanwhile, we discover more grotesque details about Teddy’s backstory. The details accumulate, and complicate the film’s already slippery point of view. At the film’s end, both Teddy and Don are dead and Michelle – revealed to have been an alien all along – returns to her people and pushes a button that instantly kills all Earthlings. Lanthimos closes with a series of upsetting but rather breathtaking tableau shots of human corpses, all having been shut down painlessly in the middle of their day-to-days. The animals remain and thrive.

Mercilessly absurdist as it riffs on ideas of supreme power and ecological collapse, Bugonia (the title itself is far from inviting) refuses to flatter its viewer with easy ideas. Robbie Ryan’s remarkable cinematography highlights something sickly about its subjects; the film’s visual texture seems to be that of both a sweaty, hazy Southern Gothic drama and a grimy sci-fi.

Its spaces, even Michelle’s clean corporate office, thrum with the same sense of unease and looming violence as the excellent Jerskin Fendrix score that ties the action together. Many similar instincts are present in Bugonia’s biggest competition, Oscar’s runaway favourite this year: Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another. That film’s frontrunner status lies not just in its obvious quality, and the “overdue win” narrative that attends the legendary Anderson, but in its specific contemporary political motifs and viewpoint, from its opening raid on an immigration facility onward.

Audiences and awards voters have been drawn to the film’s floating sense of representing and critiquing the here-and-now; the notion, perhaps, that supporting it somehow sticks it to someone.

The thing is, no film can bear that weight; even the radical classic Battle of Algiers, which features in one scene of Anderson’s film. In any case, One Battle After Another, for all its pointed sideswipes and clear strong feelings about its country’s political system, is clearly more motivated by its march towards comfort and encouragement, the strains of Tom Petty’s American Girl playing us out as radicalised teen Chase Infiniti drives off to fight the next generational fight.

It’s stirring… and in its own way, intrinsically Hollywood, from a film-maker who grew up just a few miles over from Tinseltown’s great white sign. It’s a film that endorses revolutionary violence, while keeping this safely in the confines of spectacular entertainment. Bugonia, on the other hand, never once draws back from its slide into madness. It remains nervy to the end.

This is not to tear apart the highly engaging and accomplished One Battle After Another. But its frontrunner status is shored up by a sense of attention-grabbing timeliness that, upon examination, isn’t necessarily as robust as its loudest cheerleaders would claim. Perhaps voters wishing to highlight a film that aptly summarises the supreme anxiety of these maddening times might look elsewhere.

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