Yorgos Lanthimos has been on one hell of a creative hot streak over the past few years. In the last two years alone, Yorgos has released three films (five, if you’d like to count each of the three separate stories from Kinds of Kindness as its own work), which is an insane pace to maintain while still delivering stone-cold stunners every step of the way. His most recent film, Bugonia, sees him reteaming with many of his key collaborators from his past several projects, including Emma Stone, Jesse Plemons, cinematographer Robbie Ryan, editor Yorgos Mavropsaridis, and composer Jerskin Fendrix.

The result is yet another incendiary blend of science fiction, absurdist humor, and Kafkaesque storytelling — all conveyed in a way that feels both classical in its construction and ruthlessly prescient in its themes. Bugonia absolutely rules.

TOP FIVE THINGS ABOUT BUGONIA

5. The Script

The story for Bugonia is inspired by the 2003 film Save the Green Planet! by Jang Joon-hwan; however, many facets of the tale have been reimagined in adaptation. Screenwriter Will Tracy — known for his work on Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, Succession, and Ari Aster’s Eddington — proves uniquely equipped to tackle this politically charged and polarizing oddity of a story. The film follows a pair of cousins (played by Jesse Plemons and Aidan Delbis) who are consumed by internet conspiracy theories and become convinced that their boss, Michelle Fuller (played by Emma Stone), is secretly an alien working to worsen humanity’s existence through technological enslavement and manipulation.

If that premise triggers a cascade of hot-button issues in your mind, congratulations — Bugonia was made precisely for you. Tracy’s script cleverly and irreverently builds upon its bizarre foundation, peeling back layers of paranoia and ideology in ways that feel both biting and surprisingly insightful. It’s a testament to the writing — and to the film as a whole — that not once does it feel predictable. Instead, Bugonia propels forward with such thrilling unpredictability and thematic precision that every twist feels both shocking and deeply satisfying.

4. The Musical Score

In my book, composer Jerskin Fendrix continues to deliver some of the most exciting and invigorating musical scores in contemporary cinema. He was nominated for numerous awards for Poor Things — including the Oscar (rightfully so) — and was somehow overlooked for his equally transcendent and arguably even more intricate work on Kinds of Kindness (wrongfully so). Now, on his third collaboration with Yorgos Lanthimos, Fendrix returns with a bombastic, percussive, and brilliantly purposeful score.

Not only is the music itself ingenious in its composition, but its integration within the film is nothing short of masterful. Fendrix, Lanthimos, and editor Yorgos Mavropsaridis work in perfect synchrony to create a seamless fusion of visual imagery and sonic texture — to the point where one feels inseparable from the other. Nowhere is this more evident than in the film’s opening sequence, where the contrasting viewpoints that define the story — those of Plemons’ and Stone’s characters — are captured so precisely through the musical cues accompanying their intercut scenes. Elsewhere, the film’s stark black-and-white flashback sequences are elevated even further by Fendrix’s operatic and emotionally charged score. It’s genuinely extraordinary work across the board.

3. The Performances

Everyone in the cast is genuinely outstanding — from unexpected scene-stealer Stavros Halkias, to a remarkably nuanced turn from Alicia Silverstone, to Aidan Delbis’s performance as Plemons’ character’s brother, who ultimately becomes the empathetic heartbeat of the film. But of course, the highest praise must go to Jesse Plemons and Emma Stone, both of whom deliver performances so articulate, mesmerizing, and transformative that they border on astonishing.

Much of the film’s tension and intrigue rests entirely on their shoulders, as Lanthimos masterfully draws every ounce of complexity from their dynamic. The story thrives on the audience’s constantly shifting allegiances between the two, and that psychological tug-of-war is handled with exquisite precision. Even more impressive is the fact that neither character is traditionally “likable” — both are deeply flawed, at times even reprehensible — and yet, through the sheer force of their performances, we empathize with them in ways that feel both disarming and deeply human. The result is a film that’s intimate, invasive, and darkly hilarious, anchored by two actors performing at the absolute height of their powers.

2. The Visuals

One of the real pleasures of following Yorgos Lanthimos and his creative collaborators across this informal triptych — Poor Things, Kinds of Kindness, and now Bugonia — has been witnessing the evolution of a filmmaker refining his own visual and thematic language in real time. Before Poor Things, Yorgos’ work was often defined by its use of fisheye lenses and distorted wide shots, giving his worlds a surreal, alien quality. With Poor Things, those visual quirks became a core part of the storytelling itself, seamlessly woven into the perspective of Bella Baxter and allowing audiences to inhabit her eccentric, wondrous worldview.

Then came Kinds of Kindness, which stripped away those fisheye distortions and embraced a new cinematic mode — sharper, cleaner, and yet just as psychologically rich. Partnering again with cinematographer Robbie Ryan, Yorgos pushed his style into deeper, more emotionally charged territory. Bugonia feels like the culmination of that evolution: a film that merges precise composition with expressive freedom, using deep-focus wide frames, converging architectural lines, and masterfully balanced color palettes to build a world that’s both clinical and chaotic.

In many ways, Bugonia feels like a spiritual successor to Orson Welles’ The Trial — a literal Kafka adaptation that shares the same tension between order and absurdity. The Kafkaesque undercurrents of paranoia and disorientation ripple through every frame here, made all the more potent by Yorgos’ uncanny sense of rhythm and framing.

And then, there’s the color — particularly his meticulous use of red. The way it quietly builds, mutates, and finally explodes across the film’s visual spectrum is nothing short of masterful. It’s not just aesthetic flourish; it’s storytelling in chromatic motion. Watching how the color red evolves across Bugonia is one of the most subtly thrilling and satisfying elements of the entire experience.

1. The End

I’m a huge fan of Abbas Kiarostami’s 2010 film Certified Copy. That film is the cinematic equivalent of Schrödinger’s cat — a work that places little emphasis on objective truth and instead thrives in the liminal space between perception and reality. It uses the contradictions within its narrative — the couple who are both meeting for the first time and also long married — as a way to provoke deeply subjective emotional responses in the viewer. Neither interpretation is right or wrong; both simply exist, suspended in uncertainty.

In many ways, the ending of Bugonia evoked that same feeling for me. While some might read it as a definitive narrative conclusion, it struck me more as the film surrendering itself completely to theme — and doing so beautifully. It solidifies Bugonia as a work designed to be experienced differently each time, its meaning refracted through the viewer’s own evolving perspective. Each revisit invites new interpretations, new emotional alignments, and new realizations.

It’s also, crucially, both uproariously funny and deeply unsettling. The final sequence brings the film’s wildest setups to delirious fruition while simultaneously burrowing into something profoundly eerie. It’s the perfect marriage of chaos and control, absurdity and dread.

In short, the ending is Bugonia in microcosm — audacious, hysterical, and hauntingly ambiguous. It’s pure, distilled Yorgos Lanthimos: a filmmaker unafraid to end not with certainty, but with a question that lingers long after the lights come up.

RGM GRADE

(A)

I loved Bugonia. I get that it won’t be for everyone — as is the case with pretty much every Yorgos Lanthimos film — but this one is so far up my alley it’s almost hard to put into words. It’s audacious, weird, hysterical, and surprisingly moving in that singular Yorgos way. Easily a top ten film of the year for me and a stellar addition to an already legendary catalog. Bugonia absolutely fucks.

Will Jones