Venice Film Festival 2025: Bugonia

Bugonia is a savage pondering on the landslide of civilisation that hits very close to home. A remake of the 2003 South Korean movie Save the Green Planet! from director Jang Joon-hwan, Yorgos Lanthimos' gender-swapped take kicks off its outlandish proceedings with a jab at conspiracy theorists, with Jesse Plemons portraying Teddy Gatz, a beekeeper who believes Earth has long been a playground to a sophisticated alien race, the Andromedans. 

Painstaking research has led Teddy to Michelle Fuller (Emma Stone), a high-powered Big Pharma CEO who rises at dawn, reads the news in an LED face mask before training and heading to work. The epitome of health and wealth, Michelle is ethereal, almost superhumanly so by most people’s standards, as she cruises the office in her lacquered Louboutins. To Teddy, however, she's more than just an aloof, greedy executive who has made some questionable decisions — she's an alien of a vicious kind. As such, he believes Michelle needs to be kidnapped in order to save the planet, and involves his good-natured cousin Don (Aidan Delbis) in pulling off his heroic plan.

Lanthimos maintains a sharp eye for the grotesque in his latest collaboration with Stone, who produces with Ari Aster. The result incorporates everything from Mediterranean lore to classic sci-fi tropes, and reveals itself to be a riotous ode to destruction and re-creation inspired, curiously, by bees, with Lanthimon celebrating nature's smallest, most tireless workers. Not a wordplay on the perennial flower, "bugonia" refers to an ancient, extremely detailed ritual based on the belief that the striped pollinators could be generated by a cow's carcass.

Much like the practice to which it owes its name, Bugonia toys with the lines of reality and fiction, planting the bug of doubt in its viewers' ears over its two-hour runtime. The movie holds some truths at the core of its absurdist premise, which suggests an alien political pastiche eyeing Mars Attacks! Will Tracy's script amplifies the boisterous discomfort of Jang's original, offering a mournful meditation on corrupted humanity.

The second team-up with Stone and Plemons is an improvement on the previous one, Kinds of Kindness. Lanthimos finds his stride in this delightfully grim two-hander, which feels like a tight, cross-class tennis game of status and species. Joined by Delbis, who adds layers as Bugonia's comic relief, the two protagonists vibrate so perfectly on the film's frequency that it's hard to imagine any other actors filling their shoes. In lesser hands, this humanist War of the Worlds could've been tragically watered down, but the duo gladly shed any vanity and go berserk.

Their physical comedy quiets down, though, in the melancholic third act, a grand finale that plays out as a disquieting yet tender look at the tribulations of the human experience. Lensed by The Favourite and Poor Things cinematographer Robbie Ryan, the film is visually stunning, even in its bleak, gasp-inducing conclusion. A reminder of humans' minuscule but devastating role in the world, Bugonia is a blast of a bigger picture that turns the threat of annihilation into a real treat.

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Bugonia had its world premiere at Venice Film Festival
Released 31 Oct by Universal; certificate TBC