"Greek weird-wave titan Yorgos Lanthimos has opted for a slight change of tack with Bugonia. After two ambitious projects - the Oscar-winning Poor Things and the more coolly received feel-bad anthology Kinds of Kindness - the director offers a lean and mean thriller with more focus and momentum than any of his work since The Killing of a Sacred Deer."
"Plemons is, unsurprisingly, convincing as a very intense dude, switching between an uptight speaking style to announce his manifesto and a volatile, ugly frustration whenever his hostage, Michelle Fuller (Emma Stone), doesn't affirm his dubious assessment of our modern crisis. Stone is a compelling match for Plemons' erratic intensity; handcuffed in a dingy farmhouse basement, with a shaven head and lathered in an antihistamine cream, she animates Michelle's smug, manicured, but also pragmatic qualities."
Yorgos Lanthimos shifts toward a lean, momentum-driven thriller with Bugonia, trading sprawling ambition for tight focus. Two cousins in rural America plan to kidnap a pharmaceutical CEO whom they believe is an alien, aiming to expose an Andromedan infiltration and stop extraterrestrial control. The film situates contemporary conspiracy culture in apian metaphors, linking corporate-driven colony collapse and social atomization to alien influence through the protagonist Ted's beekeeper worldview. Jesse Plemons portrays Ted as an intense, mercurial zealot; Emma Stone plays Michelle Fuller as a manicured, pragmatic hostage who negotiates under duress. The runtime stays under two hours.
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