Few filmmakers understand the absurdity of being human in the modern day quite like Yorgos Lanthimos. Across Dogtooth, The Lobster, The Killing of a Sacred Deer, The Favourite and Poor Things, he’s made an art of treating cruelty, loneliness, and delusion as cosmic punchlines. His latest, Bugonia, might be his funniest and most disturbing yet. It’s a brutal, often hysterical satire about ecological collapse, conspiracy culture, and how easily “righteous” anger can curdle into madness. It’s the kind of movie that makes you laugh until you realize you’re the one being laughed at.
Jesse Plemons stars as Teddy, a lonely beekeeper living on the outskirts of nowhere with his autistic cousin Don, played by Aidan Delbis. Their days are quiet but melancholy, surrounded by buzzing hives that are dying off in alarming numbers. Teddy, who’s spent too long alone and too much time online, decides he’s uncovered the cause: Michelle Fuller, a pharmaceutical CEO played by Emma Stone, who he believes has poisoned the planet with her company’s products. Convinced he’s saving the bees, and maybe humanity itself, Teddy hatches a plan to kidnap Michelle (with Don’s unwitting help) and force a confession out of her.
The brilliance of Bugonia is in how Lanthimos and writer Will Tracy (The Menu, Succession) play this absurd setup straight. It’s all too easy to believe Teddy’s warped logic because it’s the kind of logic the internet encourages; filled with half-truths, real pain twisted into performative outrage. Teddy talks like an activist, but his actions and habits tell another story. He preaches purity and sacrifice yet lives off microwavable taquitos and soda, like a man trying to save the world with a grease-stained napkin. His hypocrisy is both hilarious and heartbreaking, and Lanthimos navigates the dark absurdity with a Coen brothers-esque flair.
The film opens with cuts between Teddy and Don’s grimy routines and Michelle’s sterile corporate life. Each side mirrors the other in its own rot. Teddy’s home is filled with clutter and paranoia; Michelle’s office is sleek and inhuman, a temple to capitalist delusion. Stone plays Michelle as the final boss of the “girlboss” era - a modern woman whose power and confidence have become so commodified that they’re indistinguishable from evil. And yet, when she’s captured and tortured, we see the flickers of humanity that make it all unbearable.
The violence in Bugonia is hard to watch not because it’s graphic, but because it’s so believable. Lanthimos and cinematographer Robbie Ryan (Poor Things, Kinds of Kindness) shoot it with a detached stillness, letting the horror and absurdity blend together until you’re not sure whether to laugh or gag. Plemons, who might just be the most unpredictable actor working today, walks that razor’s edge masterfully. He’s genuinely funny one moment and deeply tragic and unnerving the next, a man too intelligent to be dismissed and too damaged to be redeemed. His performance is a slow-motion implosion, the kind of turn that feels destined to be studied for years.
Stone, reuniting with Lanthimos for the third time, once again proves she’s one of the most fearless actors alive. Michelle is both quietly monstrous and sympathetic, a symbol of everything wrong with the world and a person caught inside the very worst of it. The two performances together create a terrifying balance: a man who believes he’s right and a woman who’s certain she is, locked in a cycle of punishment and pain that neither can escape.
The multiple interrogations between them is a small masterwork in itself (a dinner scene is a particular highlight), with the first of them ending with Teddy and Don performing a deranged victory dance that perfectly captures Lanthimos’ mix of comedy and despair. Teddy's line of “We can’t see her as a human woman, and even if she was, she’s still evil” lands like both a joke and a manifesto: a summation of the dehumanization at the heart of all fanaticism.
As the story spirals further into chaos, Lanthimos lets his trademark tonal shifts take over. One moment, it’s darkly hilarious. The next, it’s a nightmare. Gallons of blood spill, the cousins’ self-righteous crusade collapses into total insanity, and what began as a mission to save the bees becomes an autopsy of human delusion. Beneath the black humor lies something tragic: Teddy’s belief that there must be somewhere better than this, some cleaner world beyond all the noise and rot. But his quest for purity only spreads more poison. Trauma begets trauma. Hate creates hate.
For all its despair, Bugonia is surprisingly fun to watch. Lanthimos’ world feels so close to ours that the absurdity hits harder, and his use of music - Green Day’s “Basket Case,” Chappell Roan’s “Good Luck, Babe!”, among others - feels inspired. The songs aren’t just ironic cues; they’re part of the film’s DNA, reminders of how modern life soundtracks its own destruction. There’s something chillingly perfect about hearing “Basket Case” echo through scenes of torture and breakdown, as if the entire planet were singing along.
And yet, even as things reach their most grotesque, Lanthimos finds space for beauty. The final stretch of Bugonia is wild and unhinged, leading to an epilogue of haunting, almost spiritual imagery. For all the talk of extinction and apocalypse, the ending suggests that the natural world might outlive us after all. Humanity may be hopeless, but life itself remains miraculous.
It’s this tension - between horror and hope, between laughter and mourning - that makes Bugonia such a triumph. Like the best of Lanthimos’ work, it’s both a satire and a lament, mocking humanity’s stupidity while still mourning what we’ve lost. It belongs in the same conversation as Eddington, Companion, One Battle After Another, and Baby Invasion, all standouts of this year that are wrestling with the end of the modern world and the toll its taken on our collective psyches.
Bugonia is disgusting, hilarious, and impossible to shake. It’s a film about the death of empathy and the rise of delusion, but also a reminder that even in our ugliest moments, there’s still something absurdly, beautifully human about the mess. Lanthimos once again proves that no one else makes movies quite like he does. You’ll laugh, you’ll flinch, and days later you’ll still be thinking about everything you watched up on that screen.
‘Bugonia’ is now playing in theaters.
