Development on the film began as early as 2020, with Jang attached to direct and Will Tracy adapting the screenplay. Ari Aster came on board as producer soon after, and by February 2024, Lanthimos was hired to direct, replacing Jang, while Stone joined the project both as an actress and producer. Plemons joined the cast that May, and it was soon acquired by Focus Features for distribution at the Cannes Film Festival. Principal photography began in July in High Wycombe, England, and Atlanta, Georgia, and during which time, the rest of the cast was announced. Additional filming took place in May 2025 in Milos, Greece. With an estimated budget of $45–$55 million, Bugonia is Lanthimos' most expensive film.[4]
Bugonia had its world premiere in the main competition of the 82nd Venice International Film Festival on August 28, 2025, and was theatrically released in the United States by Focus Features on October 24. It received positive reviews, with critics praising the performances of Plemons and Stone.
Plot
Michelle Fuller, CEO of the pharmaceutical megacorporation Auxolith, is abducted by conspiracy theorist Teddy Gatz and his intellectually disabled cousin Don. Teddy is convinced that Michelle is part of a malignant alien species known as the "Andromedans," and he has manipulated Don into assisting his scheme to drive them from planet Earth.
According to Teddy, the Andromedans' crimes include killing the honeybees, destroying communities, and forcing humans into numb subservience. Planning to use Michelle as a bargaining tool with the Andromedan emperor, Teddy and Don imprison her in their basement, shave her head, and cover her head in an antihistamine cream to prevent her from sending out a distress signal to other Andromedans.
Michelle wakes and unsuccessfully attempts to bargain with them, threaten them, and eventually play along with the Andromedan story. Teddy explains she has four days to negotiate a meeting with the Andromedans before an upcoming lunar eclipse, which will allow the Andromedan mothership to enter Earth's atmosphere undetected.
Flashbacks reveal that Teddy's mother, Sandy, was a test subject for one of Auxolith's drugs, which left her comatose. Michelle covered up the incident and now funds Sandy's treatment in a nearby hospital. Law enforcement searches for Michelle while Teddy and Don continue their interrogation. Michelle notices Don's discomfort with Teddy's aggression toward her and attempts to convince Don to set her free.
While torturing Michelle via electroshock, Teddy comes to the conclusion that she is actually a high-ranking member of the Andromedan royal family, due to her high pain tolerance, and brings her upstairs for dinner. The tense meal culminates in a physical fight interrupted by the appearance of Casey, the local police sheriff, who is searching for Michelle. Casey is also Teddy's childhood babysitter, and is awkwardly apologetic for his implied molestation of Teddy, which he seemingly forgives. Don takes Michelle back to the basement at gunpoint while Teddy distracts Casey by showing him his apiary in the backyard.
Michelle offers to help Don if he reports Teddy to the police. Unmoved by her promises of money, freedom, and travel, Don says he only wants to go to outer space with Michelle. When she promises to take him, he agrees and shoots himself in the head. Hearing the gunshot, Teddy bludgeons Casey to death with a shovel and returns to the basement.
Fearful for her life, Michelle tells a frantic Teddy that a bottle of antifreeze in her car is a special Andromedan medicine and giving it to Sandy will wake her up. Teddy rushes to the hospital and injects the antifreeze into Sandy's IV bag, killing her. At the same time, Michelle frees herself and discovers Teddy has abducted and killed several other people he suspected of being Andromedans before.
Teddy returns to the house, where a furious Michelle cows him into tears by recounting an alternative version of his alien narrative: feeling guilty after accidentally causing the mass extinction of the dinosaurs, the Andromedans created humanity and have spent thousands of years benevolently trying to guide humans away from their innately flawed, unhappy nature. The experiments on Sandy were intended to help humans evolve into the next stage, per Andromedan plans.
Michelle claims that her mothership has the information needed to save humanity, and she agrees to arrange the meeting between Teddy and the Andromedans at Auxolith headquarters. They arrive at the office, where Teddy reveals himself to be wearing a suicide vest while confused colleagues alert police that Michelle has returned. Michelle instructs Teddy to enter her closet, which she claims is the location of the teleporter to her ship.
As Teddy enters the teleporter, the suicide vest detonates, killing Teddy and knocking Michelle unconscious. She awakens in an ambulance on the night of the lunar eclipse. Michelle jumps out of the ambulance and returns to her office, where she enters the closet and teleports onto the Andromedan mothership, revealing that Teddy was right all along, and that she is not only an alien but the Andromedan Empress.
After consulting with her fellow Andromedans, she concludes that the human experiment is a failure beyond hope. She terminates it by popping a clear dome over a model of a Flat Earth, causing every human being to die instantly. A devastated Michelle gazes out at the planet, and a montage shows various scenes of humans around the world lying dead while the bees slowly return.
Cast
Emma Stone as Michelle Fuller, the CEO of a major pharmaceutical company who is thought to be an alien. Stone shaved her head for this role.[7]
Development of an English-language remake of the South Korean film Save the Green Planet! by Jang Joon-hwan began in 2020 with Will Tracy adapting the screenplay, and Jang attached to direct the remake.[8]Ari Aster was signed on to produce and was instrumental in the hiring of Tracy and the decision to gender-swap the central character from a man to a woman.[9]
In February 2024, it was revealed that Yorgos Lanthimos would be directing the remake in place of Jang, with Element Pictures joining the production team.[10]Emma Stone was also in talks to star in the film, making it her fourth collaboration with Lanthimos.[11]Jesse Plemons officially joined the cast by the time it was retitled Bugonia and taken to the Cannes Film Market in May.[2][12] In October, Alicia Silverstone joined the cast.[13] In May 2025, it was revealed that Aidan Delbis and Stavros Halkias were cast as well.[1]
Jerskin Fendrix composed and conducted the film's score, performed by the London Contemporary Orchestra. This marks his third collaboration with Lanthimos after Poor Things (2023) and Kinds of Kindness (2024). According to sound designer Johnnie Burn, Fendrix was asked by Lanthimos to write the score based on four key words: bees, basement, spaceship and Emily-bald. He did not provide him with the script or any other footage until after hearing the score.
Filming
Principal photography began on July 1, 2024 in Oxshott and High Wycombe, England.[14] Filming also took place in Atlanta, Georgia, where it wrapped there in October.[15] For the fictional Auxolith headquarters, the Botanica Ditton Park, a co-working space in Ditton Park, was used as the filming location.[16] The director wanted the ending scenes of Bugonia to be filmed in the Acropolis of Athens, but the Central Archaeological Council of Greece rejected his request. The Sarakiniko Beach in the Greek island of Milos was chosen as the alternative location, with filming taking place in May 2025.[17] The film was budgeted at $45 million, however, a Deadline Hollywood report indicated that the film cost $55 million itself, making it Lanthimos' most expensive film, surpassing Poor Things.[4]
Irish cinematographer Robbie Ryan shot the project on 8-perf 35mm film with VistaVision cameras, marking his fourth collaboration with Lanthimos.[18][19] With approximately 95% of the film shot in VistaVision by Ryan's estimate, it has used the format more than any film since One-Eyed Jacks (1961).[20]
Marketing
First footage from the film was screened at the Universal Pictures/Focus Features panel in CinemaCon on April 2, 2025, with the absence of Lanthimos and Stone.[21] The teaser trailer was released online on June 26, featuring Green Day's song "Basket Case."[22] A day prior to its Venice debut on August 27, 2025, the first poster was released, with a first official trailer, featuring a remix of Chappell Roan's song "Good Luck, Babe!" and revealing Stone's bald look for the film, releasing the next day.[23][24]
A week before its limited release in the United States, an in-universe website titled "Human Resistance HQ" was released, featuring a poorly made website including a deep-dive into Stone's character Michelle Fuller, a collection of articles and files connected to the film's plot, and linked a LinkedIn page of the fictional in-universe company Auxolith. Additionally, two billboards, respectively in Los Angeles and New York City, were released, advertising Auxolith, before each being vandalized with "ANDROMEDAN FILTH" and "JOIN THE HUMAN RESISTANCE."[25]
On October 20, four days before the film's limited release in the United States, an advanced free screening at the Culver Theater in Los Angeles was given to bald audiences, with a barber present to shave people's heads to enter the screening.[26]
Release
Bugonia premiered at the Venice International Film Festival on August 28, 2025.[27][28]Focus Features acquired the film's worldwide rights outside South Korea, which CJ ENM Films & Television retained, to the project at the Marché du Film in May 2024, with its parent Universal Pictures handling international distribution on its behalf.[2] The film had a limited release in the United States on October 24, 2025, before having a wide release on October 31, 2025.[1] It was previously scheduled to be released on November 7, 2025.[29] It was released in Ireland by Universal Pictures on October 31, 2025,[30] and will release in South Korea by CJ ENM on November 5, 2025.[31] In addition to digital screenings, it was shown in 35 mm in select theaters.[32]
Reception
Critical response
On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, 86% of 257 critics' reviews are positive.The website's consensus reads: "Emma Stone and Jesse Plemons are at the top of their game in Bugonia, a bonkers entertainment that applies director Yorgos Lanthimos' whip-smart method to modern society's madness."[33]Metacritic, which uses a weighted average, assigned the film a score of 72 out of 100, based on 59 critics, indicating "generally favorable" reviews.[34] Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of "B" on an A+ to F scale.[35]
David Rooney of The Hollywood Reporter wrote: "Stone and Plemons are both in top form, clearly vibing with the director's idiosyncratic sensibility and upping each other's game." He also praised "the sheer richness, the stinging clarity and the eye-searing colors" of Robbie Ryan's "spectacular" VistaVision cinematography, while admitting that the film is "by no means Lanthimos' best work".[36]Owen Gleiberman of Variety called the film a "heady and gripping experience", describing the script as an "ingeniously witty and incisive exposé of the dueling mindsets it's about." He praised Stone, writing "as an actor, [she] has often led with her empathy, and it's that very quality that renders her cutthroat performance in [this film] so ironically exquisite", while naming Plemons the film's "most extraordinary performance".[37] Alissa Wilkinson of The New York Times also praised Stone and Plemons's performances and stated that Bugonia feels like a "demented riff on Spielberg", adding that "this is not really Lanthimos's weirdest film, and it's not his funniest or his most fun either. It's mostly kind of sad."[38]
Slate'sDana Stevens, in a less positive review, wrote that "the disdain Lanthimos is expressing here is more for humanity itself than for any one subset of it; he's less a misogynist than a misanthropist", describing Bugonia as "unremittingly grim" and "as nauseatingly gory as it is thuddingly obvious."[39] Donald Clarke of The Irish Times found the film "mid-ranking" in Lanthimos' filmography; he praised the three central performances and Ryan's "fabulous" and "inventive" cinematography, but felt that "there is not much substance at the centre" of the film, describing its ecological themes as "stated without being much expanded or explored".[40]
This page is based on this Wikipedia article Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply. Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.
