Spoilers are not aliens, despite what you’ve been told.

This is one of those films that you can probably recommend to a cinephile but definitely not someone who wants to enjoy their time watching it. That should tell you already that it’s easy to find the audience that should veer away from this movie and complicated to define its intended demographic. Then again, when you said Yorgos Lanthimos, what would come to mind? Honestly, I watched it more as a curiosity and I don’t think I need to watch it again.

(Credit: Focus Features)

Bugonia (2025) was directed by Yorgos Lanthimos and written by Will Tracy and Jang Joon-hwan. Teddy (Jesse Plemons) has dragged his cousin Don (Aidan Delbis) into his conspiracy theory that aliens are already here trying to take over the world. They will abduct a powerful CEO of a big company, Michelle Fuller (Emma Stone) and force her to take them to their leader. Michelle finds herself a prisoner, her head shaved and shackled to the floor. As she try to use her wits to escape, she finds herself baffled at every turn. Suffice to say, things will not go as planned.

This is a dark absurdist comedy, one where audiences will shift their empathy from side to said. Teddy starts as an almost naive conspiracy theorist to a toxic incel-adjacent chauvinist that resorts to violence when his views are shattered. Michelle is the innocent victim but also a corporate shill that has put profit and power above the lives and welfare of the people that her company has poisoned. At some point we stop empathizing for either.

The film does go in a rather crooked reveal that I feel was unjustified. No, this does not justify either’s character point of view and I wish we could have stayed grounded (or even better, completely ambiguous) up to the end, but the filmmakers felt it was necessary to pick the unhinged and then for some reason add some gore into it. The ending resorts to pure deranged outcome. The issues of mental health and corporate criminal negligence just fade into the background.

Perhaps recommended if you like the absurd dark humour of the filmmaker, but I find it sidesteps the root issues of the premise to focus on the fantastical. I wish we’d have an outcome that would’ve explored the psychological consequences of greed and conspiracy slop, but that’s not this movie. Perhaps save it in your films-for-a-rainy-night box, but I wouldn’t put it anywhere close to the top.

That will do for now.