Yorgos Lanthimos can weird us out, gross us out, rile us up, make us laugh, or just disturb us – but rarely does he do it while commenting on current events. As with any thought-provoking filmmaker, we seek meaning and metaphor in his bold choices, but Lanthimos frustrates even that sort of analysis. His films are what they are because that’s how he envisioned them, and if you don’t like it, just move on to the next one.

There’s a bit of a departure from that dada approach in the Greek director’s new film Bugonia, which might make a good double feature with Ari Aster’s Eddington in terms of 2025 films viewing the culture wars through a gonzo lens. (Perhaps unsurprisingly, Aster is also a producer on Lanthimos’ film.)

Bugonia does have an obvious interpretation, almost a literal interpretation, within one of today’s more wacko conspiracy theories, which gets at the heart of the division between progressives of a certain stripe and conservatives of a certain stripe. The character played by Emma Stone and the characters played by Jesse Plemons and Aidan Delbis don’t directly profile as left or right, though that would be their respective roles if we had to choose. But they do struggle with the fundamental inability to communicate with each other, in ways that contain some profundity within their absurdity.

To put it briefly: Teddy (Plemons) thinks Michelle (Stone) is an alien, and Don (Delbis) is happy enough to go along on the ride, for now. Lizard people everywhere, run for cover.

Michelle Fuller is the successful CEO of a pharmaceutical company who’s trying, at least half-heartedly, to give her employees more of a work-life balance. That may be a way of smoothing over some professional mistakes that have left various test patients comatose, as yet unbeknownst to the general public. It isn’t clear why Teddy and his cousin Don have suspicions about her, but they do believe she is a representative of an alien race called the Andromedans, who are hiding out on Earth in order to undermine and ultimately subjugate humanity.

Teddy might be an incel, as he’s medicinally castrated himself and gotten Don to agree to the same. Don, you see, is on the autism spectrum, as is the actor who plays him. This extreme procedure is to prevent Michelle’s feminine wiles from operating on them as they prepare to use her as leverage with the Andromedans, whose ship, they believe, will be arriving a few days hence under the cover of a lunar eclipse. And so they kidnap her from her home, though not without Michelle’s vigorous survival instinct nearly taking them both out.

She awakens to a shaved head in Teddy’s basement – the aliens can communicate to the mothership through their hair – and a real dilemma about how to convince her kidnappers she is not, in fact, an alien. Then, perhaps, that she is one, as it quickly becomes clear that Teddy is not a person with a rational side that can be appealed to. She’ll need every bit of her cleverness, and a variety of tactics, if she wants any chance of making it out of this alive.

We are inclined to sympathise with Don, because he’s obviously being manipulated, and even Teddy, because he’s obviously disturbed, and even Michelle, because she’s been kidnapped, even though you can’t find a safer profile for a villain in a 2025 film than to make her a pharmaceutical executive. None of them are good people, though Don would be if he could stand up to Teddy more effectively, and weren’t hampered in that regard by intellectual challenges.

The subject of Bugonia is not, though, their respective merit as people. Rather, it’s the futility of trying to present a convincing argument to somebody who is so fundamentally different from you that they can only be represented through these extreme personality types. It’s how to win a no-win situation.

As the story’s simpletons, Teddy and Don have only their conviction to cling to. Michelle has the savvy to adapt her strategy to new information, and Stone has the savvy as an actor to portray these minute shifts in her comprehension. It’s fascinating watching her go from trying to dominate the pair through threats and reverse psychology, to the dawning horror that their personality makeup renders them immune to the intellect she used to get to her place in life. However, neither is she willing to resort to begging.

It does indeed mirror the sorts of frustrations we have while shouting at people across the political spectrum from us on social media, in addition to the specific scenario being reminiscent of Q-Anon. Lanthimos couldn’t actually call them lizard people, but aliens is close enough.

Lanthimos would of course balk at any suggestion that what he’s doing is so simple or banal. In fact, the film is an adaptation of the Korean film Save the Green Planet!, which is 22 years old. As such, he peppers the film with what has become his trademark, the sick joke that emerges quickly and unexpectedly. Some of these are actual plot twists. Some of them feel cruel. It’s his exploding of our conventional interpretations of what he’s doing that always separates the Lanthimos lovers from the Lanthimos haters.

The former group does outnumber the latter, with one recent example, Poor Things, having garnered so much praise that it was nominated for best picture. Lanthimos also attained a best picture nomination for The Favourite, which was his first of now four collaborations with Stone.

Even as odd as it was, Poor Things had a moral purity from which the director now seems to want to separate himself. The Favourite lived in the grey areas, and that’s the cynical space where Lanthimos seems more comfortable, hence explaining both Bugonia and last year’s Kinds of Kindness. Even if Bugonia is a Q-Anon theory put on screen, he’s not convinced one side is the ludicrous purveyor of obvious claptrap while the other is comprised of incredulous innocents. They’re both comprised of human beings, which means maybe they do deserve to be wiped out by aliens.

 

Bugonia is currently playing in cinemas.