Edgar Allan Poe grandly called his short stories “Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque”. “Grotesque” alludes to the decoration found in ancient grottoes, combining plant, animal and human motifs; “arabesque” to decoration using flowers and calligraphy.
Yorgos Lanthimos is the great contemporary exponent of the grotesque and arabesque. His films, from the perversions of Dogtooth and Alps, through the dating horror The Lobster, to the female Frankenstein’s monster in Poor Things, and the anthology of cruelty, Kinds of Kindness, all present freaks of nature, aberrant situations that we are given no choice but to accept as they appear and recognise as painfully related to our own.
His new film, Bugonia, is directly in the tradition of Poe or, even more closely, HP Lovecraft. The title comes from Ancient Greek and refers to ritual based on the belief that bees spontaneously generate from a cow’s carcass. Not that it’s Greek: it’s actually a vigorous remake of a 2003 Korean pulp horror, Save the Green Planet!.
Teddy Gatz (Jesse Plemons, never better) is a rural beekeeper who’s also a raging conspiracy theorist. Teddy is convinced that not only are the bees facing colony collapse disorder but so too is all of humankind. And he knows who to blame: aliens, specifically Andromedans, masquerading as human beings; even more specifically, the Andromedan queen bee, Michelle Fuller (Emma Stone, tremendous), the chief executive of the pharmaceutical firm Auxolith, for which Teddy works in a packaging warehouse. For good measure, he also blames her and her company for having reduced his addict mother to a vegetative coma after treatment with an experimental drug.
Teddy, gaunt, ratty and fiercely focused, is going to war, roping in his gentle, confused cousin Dan (Aidan Delbis, very touching – a graduate of LA’s Miracle Project, an arts programme celebrating neuro-diversity). Dan doesn’t really understand what Teddy is planning, hesitating when Teddy says they need to chemically castrate themselves to clear their heads of all psychic compulsions. Teddy persuades him, telling him that he’s his only friend. “All we’ve lost, all that’s been done to us, we’re setting it right again.”
Whatever else she may be, Michelle is a corporate monster, brilliantly embodied by Stone: super-fit, glossy and grinning, in a slick suit and Louboutins, terrorising her employees. Pretending to be all in favour of diversity, she tells them they’re welcome to leave at 5:30. “Just remember we are running a business here, so let your conscience guide you kind of thing?”
When Teddy and Dan try to kidnap her, she kicks off those shoes and beats them up, until they manage to stick her with a syringe of tranquilliser. She wakes up in chains in the basement of their farmhouse, her head shaved to prevent her using her hair to communicate with her mothership, and slathered with antihistamine lotion to disrupt her alien nervous system. “Welcome to the headquarters of the human resistance,” says Teddy, pointing out the giveaway alien features to Dan: the narrow feet, the obtruding earlobe, the slight overbite…
Michelle’s undaunted. “I’m a high-profile female executive. I’m crucial. In all humility I can say that,” she says. But Teddy’s resolute. What he wants is for her, or rather for it, as he insists on calling her, to take him up to the mothership as soon as the moon is full. And then things start getting really quite messy…
Bugonia is a richly furnished production all round. The script, by Will Tracy (a writer on Succession), effectively updates the Korean source, drawing on the feelings of helplessness and rage nurtured online that are growing every day now. “You’re going to say that I’m in some kind of internet-induced auto-hypnotic feedback loop!” Teddy rants at Michelle. Maybe he is? Or maybe he isn’t.
Robbie Ryan’s photography, using big-field Vistavision, makes it all look great, like natural history gone wrong. Another score by Lanthimos regular Jerskin Fendrix is a treat. But the real pleasure of Bugonia is seeing Stone (this is her fifth film with Lanthimos) and Plemons work together. They are a match for each other in ferocity and commitment, truly seeming almost a mini-repertory company now, caught up in the power games that Lanthimos evidently plays as director as well as portrays.
For a short story, Bugonia may be a little overlong, (like almost all films now) but the final act, an extended montage, is well worth the wait and strangely alters the mood of the whole film. Quite grotesque, actually.
“Bugonia” is in cinemas now
[Further reading: Who killed Pasolini?]
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This article appears in the 30 Oct 2025 issue of the New Statesman, No More Kings