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(CIFF Review) Alien Queens and Worker Bees: Inside Lanthimos’s BUGONIA

By. Professor Horror 

                                                                                          

 

 

Yorgos Lanthimos’s BUGONIA recently played at the 61st Chicago International Film Festival in the Special Presentations lineup, marking another twisted entry in the director's growing partnership with Emma Stone. Known for his surgical direction and penchant for social cruelty, Lanthimos crafts a world that looks sleek but feels diseased, where truth decays beneath the weight of ideology. Both Stone and Jesse Plemons excel in roles that require tonal dexterity and emotional restraint. Each actor thrives when narrative logic bends and human behavior veers toward the grotesque, making BUGONIA a perfect vessel for their talents.

 

The film begins with something deceptively beautiful: a flower, a bee, and a grain of pollen. Lanthimos opens with the imagery of ecological balance before tearing it apart. Bees sustain most of the planet’s food sources, yet their decline has long been a favorite playground for conspiracy theories. Two working-class cousins, Teddy (Plemons) and Don (Aidan Delbis), decide to “fix” the bee problem in a way that defies reason and law. Their target is Michelle Fuller (Stone), the pristine CEO of a massive technology company resembling Amazon. Teddy, who works for her, becomes convinced that Michelle is an alien orchestrating environmental collapse. Don, too trusting to question him, follows along. The film’s visual language immediately contrasts their worlds: Teddy and Don inhabit spaces of clutter, grease, and fast food, while Michelle lives in antiseptic minimalism. Through these contrasts, Lanthimos constructs a quiet class war disguised as a kidnapping plot.

 

Teddy embodies the modern conspiracy theorist, a man who replaces faith with data and empathy with certainty. And within this role, Plemons delivers one of his most chilling performances as he portrays a character whose intellect is as articulate as it is fractured. His rambling theories mimic the syntax of scientific reasoning while eroding its integrity and revealing how easily rational language can be hijacked to justify delusion. Don, by contrast, reflects the human cost of belief. His loyalty to Teddy feels almost religious, driven by the need for belonging in a world that offers none. The cousins’ relationship becomes the emotional core of BUGONIA: a fragile partnership sustained by manipulation and love. Lanthimos exposes the tragedy of those who cling to ideology not because they are cruel, but because it gives their lives coherence.

 

As their plan unfolds, the film’s tone oscillates between absurd humor and mounting dread. The kidnapping is not treated as a traditional thriller but as a perverse act of devotion. Teddy insists that Michelle’s death will “save humanity,” while Don treats the mission like a moral duty. Lanthimos turns what might have been a standard abduction narrative into an examination of control, both personal and systemic. His direction lingers on the banality of their cruelty: cheap snacks, bad lighting, and the hollow ritual of self-justification. These small moments highlight how extremism grows not from genius but from tedium, from the desire to impose meaning on the meaningless.

 

                                                          

 

When Michelle awakens in the basement, the tone shifts from dark comedy to philosophical standoff. The transition is gradual, emerging through subtle visual changes...a steadier camera, cooler lighting, and the sudden quiet of the house. Lanthimos drains the chaos from the frame to focus on psychological warfare. Michelle maintains an unsettling calm, speaking to her kidnappers with corporate precision and emotional detachment. Rather than pleading for freedom, she interrogates their logic, subtly reclaiming power through reason and silence. Stone’s performance blurs empathy and alienation, but her composure invites the question of whether her captors’ delusion might contain a fragment of truth. And through these interactions, Lanthimos encourages viewers to oscillate between skepticism and belief, exposing how persuasion operates not through evidence but through charisma. 

 

What follows is a slow unraveling of both captor and captive. Michelle’s responses begin to mirror Teddy’s logic as she creates a feedback loop of control where both parties attempt to convert the other. Lanthimos’s camera traps them in tight frames, forcing the audience to confront how ideology compresses human space until violence becomes inevitable. The result is a study in persuasion and submission, and one that feels as relevant to political discourse as it does to horror. Even as the absurdity escalates, the film remains grounded in an uncomfortable truth: reality bends easily when certainty replaces doubt. By its final act, Bugonia erupts into moments of grotesque comedy and shocking violence. The humor curdles into horror as bodies, symbols, and beliefs collapse under their own contradictions. The gore is plentiful but never gratuitous as it functions as punctuation for Lanthimos’s moral argument. The audience at CIFF laughed, groaned, and audibly gasped, all instinctive responses to a film that refuses to tell them when to feel safe.

 

The creative partnership between Lanthimos and Stone continues to be one of contemporary cinema’s most fascinating collaborations and I am here for it. Their work together bridges high art and grotesque spectacle, revealing that absurdity is often the most honest mirror of human behavior. BUGONIA is not as ornate as Poor Things, but it carries a sharper sting. It questions the comfort of knowledge, the ethics of control, and the ease with which we surrender to narrative simplicity. Therefore, Lanthimos’s film insists that belief, not truth, governs the modern world...and that the real horror lies in how good it feels to be certain.