BUGONIA - Film Review

Bugonia is exactly what it claims to be. It is a straight remake of Save the Green Planet! but with a colder heart and a worldview stripped of any remaining warmth. Lanthimos takes the original’s frantic energy and replaces it with a slow kind of despair that sinks into you gradually. It feels like watching someone pull back the curtain on a familiar story and reveal a much bleaker logic underneath.

Jesse Plemons carries the film with a performance that feels uncomfortably real. He plays Teddy not as a spectacle and not as a madman. He feels like the kind of person you pass in life without realizing how much he has been carrying. His mother’s death in a pharmaceutical trial is not presented like a dramatic twist. It is treated like the kind of tragedy that happens quietly to people without influence. That is what gives his performance weight. He is not explosive. He is worn down. Everything he says feels like it comes from years of being ignored.

Emma Stone plays the counterpoint. Her character has that calm, professional tone that sounds like empathy until you look closely and see it is mostly self-preservation. She gives the film its class tension simply by existing in the same room as Plemons. She belongs to a world where help is available at all times, where consequences bounce off you, and where the system works because it was built for your comfort. Her stillness becomes threatening because it represents an entire structure of power that will never collapse on her the way it already collapsed on Teddy.

Bugonia takes its title from an old Greco-Roman myth about bees being born from the rotting body of a dead bull. It is a story about life emerging out of decay and violence, a strange kind of creation that only happens after something larger has already been destroyed. The film uses that idea as a quiet metaphor. Teddy’s entire worldview grows out of the wreckage left behind by a system that failed him. His trauma becomes the ground where new beliefs form. Stone’s character represents the bull, powerful and protected, while Teddy embodies the swarm that rises from what has been ruined. The title captures the film’s central idea that suffering does not simply end. It transforms. It breeds. It creates something new, often in ways no one expects.

Hence, class divide is the foundation of Bugonia. Teddy and Don (Aidan Delbis) have lived their entire lives without proper mental health support. Their trauma is not treated as shocking. It is treated as ordinary. That is the most painful part of the film. You see two men who never received the tools to heal and who eventually created their own explanations for the pain. Not because they are foolish but because no one else ever offered them anything. In contrast, Stone’s character can cause real harm without ever seeing the faces of the people hurt by her decisions.

The cinematography in Bugonia is one of the film’s quiet weapons. Robbie Ryan shoots everything with this unnerving clarity that turns ordinary rooms into interrogation chambers and wide outdoor spaces into neutral zones where nothing feels stable. The camera never flinches. It just watches, patient and clinical, the way the world watches people like Teddy fall through the cracks. The lighting is cold without being stylized and the frames feel too still, like the air is holding its breath waiting for someone to finally break.

The soundscape mirrors this perfectly. It hums, it drones, it pulses in the background like a malfunctioning light fixture that no one has bothered to fix. Sometimes it feels like the world itself is vibrating. Sometimes it goes almost completely silent, leaving you alone with the actors’ breathing and the increasingly unstable logic of the situation. When the alien element reveals itself, the soundtrack shifts from human tension to something more cosmic, but it never becomes the big sci-fi swell you expect. It stays distant and indifferent, exactly like the universe Bugonia suggests we live in.

The film turns this divide into something almost cosmic. It approaches the Fermi Paradox and the Great Filter from the angle of class rather than science. We ask why we have never been contacted by intelligent life. The film’s answer is simple. Maybe they saw us and did not consider us worth engaging. Maybe advanced life always looks down at struggling lower classes and does nothing. Maybe indifference is the filter. Maybe the universe is full of civilizations that stepped over the weak the same way ours does.

When the film reveals the extraterrestrial truth it does not play it as a twist. It lands with a tired certainty. Teddy was right. His suffering did come from something larger than himself. And still nothing improves for him. The world does not reward him for being correct. The truth changes nothing about his situation. That is the bleak brilliance of Lanthimos’s approach. Even a cosmic revelation cannot save a man who started out with nothing.

Bugonia is not about aliens. It is about a world where suffering is invisible for some and profitable for others. It is about class more than conspiracy. It is about cosmic silence more than cosmic horror. It ends with a bitter truth. The universe might be full of life, but that does not mean anyone cares. Being allowed to have 1 or 2 Oreo, however? Now THAT is a universal law, imposed by the most powerful of Andromedans.