Bugonia: Top cast shine in Yorgos Lanthimos’ jet-black satire

Bugonia introduces us to high-powered pharmaceutical executive Michelle Fuller, played by Emma Stone. The film, based on a 2003 Korean movie called Save the Green Planet!, is her fourth collaboration with director Yorgos Lanthimos (she won an Oscar for Poor Things in 2024).

Fuller is a hard-boiled cliché of a tech executive, soon to be knocked off her high-performing stride thanks to a crude kidnapping by two rural cousins.

Jesse Plemons plays ringleader Teddy and 19-year-old newcomer Aidan Delbis plays good-hearted Don. (Incidentally, the character of Don is autistic, as is Delbis himself.)

Teddy is one of those young men who has spent a lot of time on the internet, researching his theory that aliens from the Andromedan galaxy – the one next door to ours so we would be neighbours, cosmically speaking – have been interfering in Earth’s ecology in order to enslave the population.

He has identified Fuller as a high-ranking member of the Andromedan royal family, and believes that by taking her captive he can use her as a bargaining chip on their spacecraft when the next lunar eclipse occurs in three days’ time.

Well, stranger things have happened, I suppose.

As the film escalates alarmingly, we learn the source of Teddy’s unconventional beliefs and the reason why the two cousins live alone in a house that once sheltered a loving family. We also learn that the kitchen has no shortage of tin foil.

Everyone is excellent in Bugonia – Lanthimos clearly has a way with actors who will go more than a few extra miles for him – but I want to single out another first-time feature film performer, the comedian and podcaster Stavros Halkias.

He plays Casey, from the local Sheriff’s office, former babysitter to Teddy and one of the most disturbing characters I’ve seen in ages – on the surface amiable and professional but also shiftily apologising for doing something absolutely heinous years before and swearing that he’s not like that anymore.

Lanthimos has been shocking and surprising audiences for more than 20 years but his ability to combine deep-seated human emotional concerns with a prodigious capacity for absurdity can make for uncomfortable moments, and so it proves here.

But, despite his usual visual flair (supported this time by Robbie Ryan’s marvellous VistaVision cinematography), Bugonia is probably more of a Will Tracy film than a Lanthimos one.

Tracy has been writing and producing edgy 21st century satires for a few years – he was a writer on Succession and wrote the screenplay for the wild comedy horror film The Menu, which starred Ralph Fiennes as a demented Michelin-starred chef taking his revenge on everyone who ever crossed him.

Tracy was also a producer on Ari Aster’s recent Covid-comedy Eddington and Jesse Armstrong’s satire about a billionaire’s retreat turning murderous, Mountainhead.

So, Tracy’s script for Bugonia fits right into that jet-black worldview – that we should pretty much acknowledge that the modern world is on a wild ride to inevitable annihilation and that our only positive is that the ultra-rich oligarchs that are driving it will not only go down with the rest of us - they’ll probably go first.