Bugonia (2025)
Unsafe Places
Put on your tin-foil cap, because we’re going for a ride!
Bugonia was my favorite film of 2025, even more than Hamnet, and that is saying a lot. I’ve admired Yorgos Lanthimos for years, but this felt like the moment he stepped through a doorway and became something else. His earlier work occupied a shared tonal universe: strange, and emotionally alienated by design. Bugonia keeps the precision and the danger, but it finds a new voice. It is funnier, more injured, and, by the end, more devastating than I was prepared for.
The premise sounds almost absurdly simple: two conspiracy-addled cousins kidnap a pharmaceutical executive because they believe she is the leader of an alien civilization intent on destroying humanity. At first, the film lets us sit comfortably inside that assumption. These men appear to be damaged, isolated, dangerously delusional people torturing an elegant, intelligent woman in the basement of a ruined house. The kidnapping itself is staged with a kind of pitiful comic minimalism — blunt, awkward, almost stupid — so that you laugh before you realize how much pain is already in the room. And then the film begins its cruel magic trick. Every time you settle into certainty — no, she cannot be an alien, these men are just insane — Lanthimos gives you one detail, one look, one impossible turn of phrase, and for a second the floor drops out. Then the film seems to return to earth. Then it does it again. And again. By the time the truth arrives, the audience does not merely register a twist. The audience gasps because the film has been training us to doubt our own perception for nearly two hours.
That is what makes the revelation feel earned rather than clever. Bugonia is not withholding information in the cheap sense. The deeper question is more unstable: what happens when damaged people misread the world, but the world itself is also corrupt, predatory, and perhaps far stranger than we want to admit? What if delusion is not the opposite of truth but a grotesque, broken instrument that sometimes points in the direction of something real while destroying everything it touches?
The film’s destabilization is structural and visual, not merely verbal. Robbie Ryan’s camera and the lighting design do something I have not seen in another Lanthimos film: they overexpose. Outdoor scenes are shot with the sun near apex, the highlights blown, the world refusing to be flattered or shaped. Even indoors, the light is high and unkind. Teddy and Don are constantly squinting. They lean their heads forward and narrow their eyes against a world that is too bright to read plainly, trying to see through what is in front of them to whatever they believe lies underneath. The squint is the conspiracy posture made physical. The world keeps telling them it is one thing; they know very well it is something else; their faces register the strain of that perpetual epistemic effort.
This visual logic finds its sharpest expression in the basement, where Michelle is shellacked in a white residue meant to neutralize alien transmission. The substance does not, of course, neutralize anything. What it does is make her look like a light bulb. Her features are blown out. Her face becomes a featureless white surface that the cousins then squint at, trying to see through. The thing they cannot read is the thing they made unreadable. Their ritual produces the visual condition of their own perception, and then they take their inability to see as confirmation that something is being hidden. The joke and the cruelty are that they are not entirely wrong — she is what they think she is — but their apparatus has blinded them to the very thing it was supposed to reveal. The film’s whole epistemology is in that image.
The basement itself reinforces the refusal. It is shot with a flat, unromantic clarity that declines the Silence of the Lambs vocabulary entirely — no low-angle dread, no swirling drafts, no horror-chamber sound design. It is just a basement: ugly, practical, a place where someone might store tools or old furniture or a captive human being. That refusal to over-code the space is crucial. The film does not tell us how to feel too soon. It leaves us inside the discomfort of not knowing, and lets our assumptions become part of the machinery.
What reached me most is that Bugonia creates sympathy in every direction without ever letting anyone off the hook. Jesse Plemons’s Teddy is monstrous and broken. His certainty is terrifying because it has the force of religion, but beneath that certainty is grief, deprivation, humiliation, and a life that seems to have offered him almost no healthy way to metabolize pain. He is not softened into innocence; the film never makes that mistake. But it also refuses to treat him as a disposable lunatic. His madness has a history.
Emma Stone’s Michelle is not merely a victim, and she is not merely a corporate villain. She is both. And then she is something else entirely. After the operatic physicality of Poor Things and the acidic social games of The Favourite, this is a different kind of person, or alien: contained, strategic, observant, every micro-decision in the face doing narrative work. She is terrified, but she is also assessing. She is vulnerable, but she is never simple. She is a captive, but she is also someone accustomed to power, someone whose decisions have likely destroyed lives at a distance. The film places her immediate danger beside the institutional violence she represents and refuses to let either cancel the other out. Corporate harm is not theatrical the way the basement is theatrical. It does not arrive with ropes and shaved heads. It arrives through policy, profit, distance, and withheld accountability. Bugonia puts those two violences in the same room and will not let us choose which one to care about.
Aidan Delbis’s work as Don is one of the film’s great achievements, and almost no one is talking about it. That silence is its own quiet failure of attention, because Don is the moral center of Bugonia. There are famous performances in film history built around neurological difference — Daniel Day-Lewis in My Left Foot, Leonardo DiCaprio in What’s Eating Gilbert Grape — and those performances have their place. They are crafted, serious, memorable pieces of acting. But they are translation work: skilled actors rendering an interior life from the outside, building legibility for an audience that needs the performance to bridge a distance. What Delbis is doing is different in kind. The legibility is not being constructed from the outside. Watching Bugonia, I was not thinking about technique. I was not watching an actor demonstrate a condition. I was watching Don.
Don is not an accessory to Teddy’s madness or a softening device for the plot. He has his own moral weather. His loyalty, confusion, sweetness, fear, and need for order all exist at once. And — this matters — he is not suffering because he is neurodivergent. He is suffering because the world around him has failed him. He has been left in poverty, grief, isolation, untreated trauma, and dependence on a cousin whose love is real but whose delusion has become catastrophic. His condition is not the tragedy. The tragedy is the life he has been handed, the systems that damaged his family, and the way Teddy’s certainty finally consumes even the person who loves him most.
The basement scene between Don and Michelle is his scene, though they share it. She promises him escape, kindness, even a place aboard the ship he believes in. We think she is lying because survival demands it, and we hate the necessity of that lie even as we understand it. But the scene does something more complicated than that. His prayer to her — his hope that there is some other place where he might be safe, understood, and included — is almost unbearably tender. The scene could easily have become exploitative. It could have invited us to look at Don as pathetic, or to treat his belief as merely foolish. Instead, it lets the moment remain spiritually exposed. His longing is real. His pain is real. His innocence is real, even inside a situation that is morally horrifying.
Stone’s work in this scene is the other half of the achievement. Whether Michelle means the offer is not the point and the film is wise not to settle it. What is etched on her face is genuine compassion for the organism in front of her, even as she calculates for her survival. The compassion is real and the offer may be a lie, and neither cancels the other. That double register — sincere feeling inside a calculated act — is the film’s entire operating principle, and the basement scene is its cleanest demonstration. When Don takes his own life, the film does not use it as shock. It uses it as rupture. Stone’s reaction is extraordinary because the horror is not just that her chance at freedom has vanished. The horror is that something innocent, already badly damaged by the world, has been destroyed in front of her. For all her calculation, for all her power, for all the ambiguity of who and what she is, she cannot reduce that moment to strategy. Neither can we.
Don is the film’s exposed nerve. Without him, Bugonia would still be cruel, funny, and conceptually brilliant. With him, it becomes heartbreaking.
The dinner-table sequence, with spaghetti and meatballs served like some grotesque parody of domestic civility, is one of the great scenes of the year. Michelle is handcuffed, cleaned up, and brought upstairs from the basement while trying to negotiate for her life. The setting is absurdly ordinary. The food is ordinary. The ritual of sitting together at a table is ordinary. But the emotional stakes are unbearable. She apologizes, calculates, confesses just enough, flatters just enough, and almost reaches Teddy. For a moment, you can feel the possibility of escape. You can also feel the manipulation. You resent her for it and understand her completely. Every sentence is a tool. Every silence has weight. The wrong word might kill her. The right word might save her, but only if it can pass as truth.
The scene is funny, but not because it makes light of suffering. It is funny because human beings are absurd even at the edge of catastrophe. They still serve dinner. They still try to make a scene conform to a social shape. They still say things that sound like apologies or explanations or offers of kindness when what they really mean is: please let me live.
The final stretch is where the film becomes great. The revelation that Teddy has not only killed people he believed were aliens, but has actually killed many who were, lands with astonishing force. When Michelle asks how many of them were her people, the whole movie turns inside out. Suddenly the basement is not only a crime scene; it is a battlefield. Suddenly the conspiracy is not entirely madness. Suddenly the victim has been a sovereign, a ruler, an observer, and a judge. And suddenly all the human pain we have been asked to hold is placed beside something far larger and more horrifying.
This is the rare twist that does not cheapen what came before it. It deepens everything. The conspiracy theorists are not simply right; they are also catastrophically, unforgivably wrong. Their belief system has identified a truth while destroying their capacity to understand it. They have mistaken fragments for knowledge, suspicion for certainty, certainty for violence, and violence for a form of spiritual self-justification. The film does not flatter them for being correct. It condemns the way they got there.
The ending should not work. Let me be clear, it works completely. An alien council deliberates humanity’s fate, and Michelle makes the final decision. The gesture is almost ridiculous in its simplicity: a small puncturing, a little cosmic pinprick, and humanity is gone. People on boats, opening gifts, kissing, walking dogs, living ordinary lives — simply extinguished. Lanthimos does not give us apocalypse as spectacle. He gives us apocalypse as punctuation. Jerskin Fendrix’s score, which has spent much of the film in an uneasy chamber-instrument register, opens here into something almost liturgical, and that choice is what allows the sequence to land as judgment rather than as spectacle. It is funny in concept and annihilating in effect. You can laugh at the absurdity of the mechanism and still be gutted by the result.
That is the miracle of Bugonia: it can hold those reactions in the same breath. The conspiracy theorists are not simply right; they are also catastrophically wrong. The executive is not simply innocent; she is also complicit. Humanity is not simply victimized; it is indicted. The film does not resolve these contradictions. It arranges them into terrible clarity.
I left the theater with the feeling I am always hoping movies will give me and so rarely do: the sense that the whole room had traveled through the same impossible emotional passage together. When the revelation landed, people gasped. Not because the movie had tricked us cheaply, but because it had earned the gasp. It had built a trap out of pain, absurdity, grief, class rage, corporate violence, delusion, and cosmic judgment — and then let it close.
Bugonia is savage, hilarious, heartbreaking, and alive. It is Lanthimos at his most controlled and, somehow, his most emotionally expansive. A masterpiece.