From visionary director Yorgos Lanthimos comes “Bugonia,” an explosive psychological thriller that offers a pitch-black comic window into our modern age of madness.
Provocative and subversive, the film follows two conspiracy obsessed young men as they burst out of their online rabbit holes and kidnap Michelle, a high-powered CEO they believe to be an alien who has come to destroy us. After the pair chain her in a basement and come face-to-face with the enemy, the two sides — the tinfoil-hat basement dwellers and the steely, soulless corporate executive — soon find themselves pitched in a battle as viscerally unpredictable as it is unexpectedly moving.
Anchored by powerhouse performances from Jesse Plemons and Emma Stone and newcomer Aidan Delbis, along with a devilishly sharp script from Will Tracy, Lanthimos constructs an audaciously original portrait of what it means to laugh, cry, and recoil in the fate of humanity.
In “Bugonia,” our age of conspiracies and paranoia, of disconnect and dread has come home to roost in thrilling, riotously unpredictable fashion.
Convinced that Michelle (Emma Stone), the formidable and ruthless CEO of a pharmaceutical company, is an alien plotting to destroy Earth, two conspiracy-driven cousins kidnap her and chain her in their basement. Led by his seemingly erratic, dark-web ideas, Teddy (Jesse Plemons), the ringleader of the operation, has Don (Aidan Delbis) shave Michelle’s head and slather her in anti-alien lotion, before confronting her about a supposed plan for planetary armageddon that involves bee extinction (the film’s title refers to an ancient Greek belief in the birth of bees from dead cows) and a lunar eclipse.
As an ostensible doomsday clock ticks on, Stone and Plemons go toe-to-toe in raw, unyielding performances suited for what increasingly feels like a cosmic battle for the fate of the world — or at least for the fate of our shared sense of reality. Exploring the fringes of human behavior on lush VistaVision, the film offers an immersive and viscerally charged capsule of contemporary life, plunging us into that familiar, maddening sense of what it feels like to be alive today.
“In the world that we live in now, people live in certain bubbles that have been enhanced by technology,” Lanthimos says. “Having certain ideas about people is reinforced depending on which bubble you live in, creating this big chasm between people. I wanted to challenge the viewer about the things that we’re very certain about, the judgment calls that you make about certain kinds of people. It’s a very interesting reflection of our society and the conflict in our contemporary world.”
Even as Michelle tries to expose Teddy and Don’s harebrained logic, our preconceived ideas about either side slowly morph into thornier revelations as much about ourselves as the trio in the basement.
“It has that sort of microcosmic quality,” says Stone, who produced the film with Lanthimos in their fifth project together. “There’s a sort of insanity and a commentary in the midst of a really small environment, which I think Yorgos tends to be drawn to. We’re in a basement, and it’s really just people talking to each other a lot of the time, having perspectives that feel maybe incorrect or twisted. But they reveal these different versions of humanity and what can happen in a downward spiral of convincing yourself of something.”
That downward spiral might be about us all as much as it is about Teddy and Don, but the film is far too irreverent and unpredictable, Plemons notes, to start preaching to its audience. “The tone of it is so wild and varying — it’s so funny and so tragic, and the way into these very big conversations is so left-field and unexpected,” says Plemons. “It’s a really strange but honest portrait of the times we’re living in, how confusing and absurd it all is.”
Stone agrees, noting the singularly surreal sense of humor nestled within the film’s often “deeply sad elements.” “Bugonia” is, in other words, the kind of horrifically funny — or hilariously horrific — film about our global doom times that only Lanthimos could make.
“While the film is in many ways a comedy, it’s much more layered and textured than that and goes to all these places that you don’t expect it to go, and that’s Yorgos’s happy place,” says producer Ed Guiney. “He’s a master of tonal dexterity: he can pivot from high comedy to tragedy in one nanosecond.”
The film’s origin story, though, can be traced to CJ ENM, who saw the potential for an English adaptation of “Save the Green Planet”.
“We began assembling the ideal team—inviting, one by one, Ari Aster and Lars Knusden, who deeply understood and admired the essence of the original as a devoted fan; Will Tracy, who could infuse the story with the zeitgeist of our times; and Yorgos Lanthimos, one of the rare filmmakers capable of pushing such a daring concept to its limits with his singular vision. We were fortunate to bring together this remarkable combination of talents,” says producer Jerry Kyoungboum Ko of CJ ENM.
When Aster — who produced the film alongside Knudsen, Guiney, Andrew Lowe, Stone, Lanthimos and CJ ENM — told Will Tracy to watch “Save the Green Planet” a few years back, he gave the veteran screenwriter little context. Tracy had never heard of the obscure Korean sci-fi comedy and could barely even track down a faithfully translated copy. But, Aster indicated, there was the seed of another story in there — one about us, now.
“Within twenty minutes of watching it, I knew what he was talking about,” Tracy recalls. “I knew that there was something in this Korean film from 2003 that could be adapted in a very exciting way for a contemporary Anglo-American context.”
Amid the apocalyptic dread of the pandemic’s early days, Tracy wrote a boldly explosive reimagining of the story in a frenzied quarantine haze.
“We were locked-down, and I was probably losing my mind a little bit in this little apartment in Brooklyn,” he says. “I wrote it in about three weeks, and I’ve tried not to analyze it too much, but I’m sure something in that atmosphere made its way into the script – that claustrophobic feeling that I don’t think I would have been able to write if not in those circumstances.”
“It was one of the best scripts I’ve ever read: darkly funny, but with great pathos, drama, story, and fantastic characters,” says Lowe.
That script ended up in the hands of Lanthimos, a filmmaker whose singularly ambitious vision Aster knew could bring Tracy’s new story to life. “Yorgos has such a personal, idiosyncratic style, I knew he would find a new visual and tonal language for the story,” Aster recalls. “It would be a totally new interpretation, as Will’s script had already become in the development process.” Miky Lee, who also developed and produced the film through CJ ENM explains, “Rooted in the DNA of Korean cinema, it has been transformed into something daring and imaginative through the vision of Yorgos Lanthimos and Will Tracy, and vividly brought to life by the brilliance of Emma Stone, Jesse Plemons, and the entire ‘Bugonia’ team. It serves as a reminder that authentic stories can evolve into new forms and find resonance with audiences in profound and unexpected ways.”
When Lanthimos read the script, the acclaimed auteur could immediately see in it a vision for a darkly comic provocation: a new kind of psychological thriller built for the big screen — and for the absurdism of our modern moment. “It was such a quick read,” Lanthimos says of Tracy’s script. “It was entertaining. It was complex. It felt very relevant. It was contemporary.”
That idiosyncratic sensibility is perhaps never more poignant than here, in what might be considered Lanthimos’s most anarchic and profoundly humanistic work yet. It is also one that begs to be experienced in theaters: to laugh, cry, groan, and recoil, among one another.
“Most films should be enjoyed like that, in a cinema with other people. It’s a communal experience, but especially this film, the way it’s filmed on VistaVision, a beautiful format, and the sound design that Johnnie Burn has done, along with Jerskin Fendrix’s score,” Lanthimos says. “It’s just a very full and dramatic experience, both in its hilarity and its horror, that can only be experienced fully in a cinema.”
The Basement
Teddy’s basement in “Bugonia,” says Lanthimos, is a contained environment that operates almost like a twisted science experiment, throwing lab rats into a pool containing all of the anxieties, fears, and farcical realities of modern life. But that experiment soon becomes a kind of fun-house mirror reflection, not only of Teddy, Don, and Michelle — i.e. the lab rats in question — but also us as viewers.
“By limiting the environment in which this conflict takes place, we enhance the focus on the characters and what they represent, but also reveal that what appears obvious in the beginning might not be true,” Lanthimos says. “The film slowly reveals layers and layers of complexity in all of the characters, making whoever is watching the film rethink the biases they might have.”
That might be most apparent in our understanding of someone like Teddy. In preparation for his role, Jesse Plemons went down his own rabbit holes, reading about our age of conspiracy paranoia in books like Naomi Klein’s “Doppelgänger.”
“One thing that Klein said that really makes sense is, with a lot of people that migrate towards some conspiracy theory, the seed of that fear is correct,” Plemons says. “The idea that we are being manipulated, our data is being mined, these forces of evil and this sort of capitalist machine are trying to control our lives — if you have all these valid feelings, where can you go? Really the only people that are really talking about it are these fringe conspiracy theorist podcasters. But the seed of the feeling is correct.”
This complex dynamic strikes at the heart of the prickly complexity of “Bugonia.” Forceful in his beliefs and methods, Teddy may appear to be tinfoil-hat lunatic, but the anger and fear that he is motivated by — capitalist exploitation, ecological disaster, and a sense that, as he puts it, “nobody gives a fuck about us” — is starkly real.
His motivations are only complicated by a darker history that gradually, and terrifyingly, boils to the surface. “He’s been dealt a pretty shitty hand in life,” says Plemons. “He’s got a mother that was a part of this trial opioid drug treatment that left her in a coma, and he just desperately wants to help, but he’s gotten a little lost along the way.”
In his mother’s house in the American heartland — where, Stone notes, things have been suspended in time since Teddy’s mother left — Teddy’s time outside of his factory job are spent beekeeping, researching the true order of the universe, and training with Don to prevent a takeover from an alien species. He has cycled through every fringe political and conspiracy subgroup out there before leeching onto this theory about Andromedan control. But all of his deep dives into rabbit holes has perhaps been a defense against the tide of grief and a deep sense of futility in a society that seems to have used his family and cast them aside.
“He was just left to try to sort through all these feelings of absolute powerlessness and hopelessness,” Plemons says. “All this bubbling inside him — where do I put this? How do I take control over this awful circumstance that I’ve been left with? This belief that he’s landed on has given him a sense of power and purpose and a way to sort these things, even in an indirect sort of way. Anytime the past is brought up, he always takes it back to this mission.”
Plemons sees in Teddy what is, if a more extreme version, a similarly tragic reality that exists for many in an era of division and disconnect. “So many people feel in the world today that they’re just completely overlooked and forgotten,” he notes. “They’re just sort of being blown around by the powers that be.”
In “Bugonia,” Michelle appears to be the soulless manifestation of those powers. The powerful CEO of a pharmaceutical bioengineering company, she is ruthlessly in control of everything and everyone in her orbit. “Michelle’s natural way is in being a CEO and being in charge,” Stone says. “She tries instantly to become that even in the midst of an insane situation with Teddy and Don after she’s kidnapped.”
Whether she is indeed an alien overlord or a billionaire executive, she is “a kind of life-sucking force that’s trying to take something from the Earth,” says Stavros Halkios, who plays a local cop who becomes embroiled in Teddy’s scheme.
At least, that’s the initial impression one might project onto her. “Then, scene by scene, you start to understand her more,” says Lanthimos. “You watch her reveal — or try to conceal — all these other layers.”
The more we get a sense of Michelle as an actual person — rather than what she simply represents as a figure of power — who feels pain and has her own thoughts, the more Don comes to squirm at what he and Teddy are doing. If his theory and the mission at-hand have offered Teddy a kind of control in his life, he only wants to pass that sense of empowerment onto Don, his younger cousin who has also lost his family.
“He’s a kind of a shy and awkward person, but also at the same time shows himself to be, in spite of that, really brave and strong,” Delbis says of Don.
In a way, he notes, Don is almost unwittingly roped into this whole situation, a sensitive soul who is thrust into violent extremes simply out of a love for the only person he has left. “Teddy is kind of the last person in the whole world that Don really feels like he can count on, that cares about him,” he says. “And Teddy sees Don arguably in the same way.”
Plemons concurs. “It’s really tragic and really beautiful, their relationship — they’re all each other has,” he says. But eventually, as the mission reaches its extremes, Don chafes against Teddy’s beliefs and what they’re willing to do to Michelle to get the truth out of her. Ultimately, his ambivalence becomes a placeholder for us.
“Don is the soul of the film and the moral compass,” Lanthimos says. “He represents the audience: He’s always conflicted. He always questions things, but he’s also very loyal to Teddy, and he doesn’t want to go against him. But there’s something inside him that tells him what they’re doing might not be the right thing.”
YORGOS LANTHIMOS – Director / Producer: Yorgos Lanthimos is an internationally renowned, six-time Academy Award®-nominated director, producer and screenwriter, and the winner of numerous accolades including a BAFTA Award, a Golden Globe Award, and the Golden Lion at Venice.
He most recently directed the contemporary anthology feature film, KINDS OF KINDNESS, which he co-wrote with frequent collaborator Efthymis Filippou. The film—a triptych of distinct stories featuring the same actors portraying different characters in each instalment—stars Jesse Plemons, Emma Stone, Willem Dafoe, Margaret Qualley, Hong Chau, Joe Alwyn, Mamoudou Athie and Hunter Schafer. It will be released in theatres by Searchlight Pictures on June 21, 2024.
His most recent feature film, POOR THINGS, written by Tony McNamara and adapted from Alasdair Gray’s novel, grossed over $100 million at the worldwide box office and won the Golden Lion for Best Film at the 2023 Venice International Film Festival, where it world premiered. The film was nominated for 11 Academy Awards, including nominations for Lanthimos in Best Picture and Best Director, and winning four Oscars including Best Actress for Emma Stone. It was also nominated for 11 BAFTA Awards, winning five; and won two Golden Globes including Best Motion Picture, Musical or Comedy, among countless prizes. The Searchlight Pictures film marked another in his ongoing artistic partnership with Emma Stone, who also produced the film alongside Lanthimos. POOR THINGS also stars Mark Ruffalo, Willem Dafoe, Ramy Youseff, Jerrod Carmichael, Margaret Qualley, and Christopher Abbott.
He also recently premiered his black-and-white, silent short film, BLEAT, co-produced by the Greek National Opera and conceived to only ever be screened accompanied by a live classical orchestra, just as it was presented in its world premiere in Athens, Greece and U.S. premiere at the 2023 New York Film Festival. Shot on a remote Greek island during the pandemic, BLEAT stars Emma Stone as a young widow who embarks on a singularly unclassifiable journey through sex, death, and resurrection.
Lanthimos’s film, THE FAVOURITE, written by Deborah Davis and Tony McNamara and starring Olivia Colman, Rachel Weisz and Emma Stone, premiered at the 75th Venice Film Festival where it won the Grand Jury Prize and the Copa Volpi for Best Actress for Olivia Colman’s performance, which also won the Academy Award. A critically-acclaimed and box office hit, the film received a leading 10 Academy Award nominations including Best Picture and Best Director for Lanthimos as producer and director; 12 BAFTA nominations and seven wins, including Outstanding British Film; plus five Golden Globe nominations and winner of a record 10 British Independent Film Awards.
He launched to international attention in 2009 with his second feature film, DOGTOOTH, winner of the Un Certain Regard Prize at the 62nd Cannes Film Festival and nominated for the Academy Award® for Best Foreign Language Film. His first English language feature film THE LOBSTER, starring Colin Farrell and Rachel Weisz, was presented in competition at the 68th Cannes Film Festival where it won the Jury Prize. It earned Lanthimos and co-writer Efthymis Filippou an Academy Award® nomination for Best Original Screenplay. His next film, THE KILLING OF A SACRED DEER, also starring Colin Farrell plus Nicole Kidman and Barry Keoghan in his breakthrough role, premiered in competition at the 70th Cannes Film Festival where it was nominated for the Palme d’Or and won Best Screenplay. He directed, produced and co-wrote the film, which received multiple Independent Spirit and European Film Award nominations.
Born in Athens, Greece, Lanthimos began his career directing several dance videos in collaborations with Greek choreographers, in addition to TV commercials, music videos, short films, and theater plays. His first feature film, KINETTA, premiered at the 2005 Toronto and Berlin Film Festivals to critical acclaim; and ALPS, won the Best Screenplay prize at the 2011 Venice Film Festival, and Best Film at the Sydney Film Festival in 2012.
WILL TRACY – Writer: Will Tracy was a writer and executive producer on the HBO series SUCCESSION, where he won three Emmy awards, as well as a WGA award for writing the episode “Tern Haven.” He was part of the inaugural writing staff of LAST WEEK TONIGHT WITH JOHN OLIVER, winning three Emmys, and created the HBO limited series THE REGIME. Will is also the former Editor in Chief of The Onion.
In features, he co-wrote and executive produced THE MENU for Searchlight Pictures and was a producer on HBO Films’ MOUNTAINHEAD. More recently, Will wrote BUGONIA for Focus & CJ Entertainment which stars Emma Stone and Jesse Plemons with Yorgos Lanthimos directing.
Jang Joon-hwan is a South Korean director and screenwriter born on January 18, 1970, in Jeonju. A graduate of Sungkyunkwan University, Jang made his directorial debut with the short film 2001 Imagine (1994), but rose to prominence with Save the Green Planet! (2003), a wildly original sci-fi thriller that became a cult classic. Known for his bold storytelling and genre fusion, Jang followed with Hwayi: A Monster Boy (2013), a revenge thriller, and 1987: When the Day Comes (2017), a critically acclaimed political drama about South Korea’s pro-democracy movement. The latter won Best Director and Best Film at the Blue Dragon and KOFRA Awards. Jang’s work often explores trauma, justice, and societal transformation. He is married to actress Moon So-ri and continues to influence Korean cinema with his visionary approach.
