By Vincent Volcano, Hellwood’s retired arsonist-in-chief, still wearing the red scarf and the scars from practical flame bars. Flames Fade, but Classics Burn Forever!
Yorgos Lanthimos’ Bugonia opens with the promise that “It all starts with something magnificent,” which is exactly what I told a producer once before they replaced my hand-built lava geysers with a screensaver. Here, the magnificence is a paranoid abductee plot trapped in an A24-branded terrarium: Jesse Plemons plays Teddy, a man convinced aliens (and not the studio notes department) are destroying humanity and the bees; Emma Stone is Michelle, a sleek corporate chessmaster he kidnaps because she must be an extraterrestrial, or at least an executive with good lighting. Genre tags scream Comedy/Thriller/Sci-Fi, the cinematic equivalent of writing “trust me” on a loan application.
Lanthimos, ever the patron saint of weaponized awkwardness, remakes Save the Green Planet! and smartly keeps the bones—delusion vs. invasion—while sanding it into a prestige curio for the Focus Features mantle. Robbie Ryan’s camera is tactically unshowy, which in Hellwood means tasteful, and on Earth means the AD got nervous about overtime. The movie is shot like someone placed Kubrick in an artisanal hive: honeycomb framing, sterile concrete, and the sort of pastel menace that tells you you’re about to be taught a lesson about capitalism while chuckling at a man duct-taping destiny.
Performances? Plemons serves a slow-burn psychosis sautéed in deadpan butter—precise, unfussy, like he rehearsed in a bunker. Emma Stone keeps staking real estate on Mount Risk, toggling between corporate tungsten and human flicker with the sort of clarity that makes you forgive the screenplay every time it confuses a motif for a message. Their pas de deux is half Stockholm Syndrome, half TED Talk, and yes, they make it sing—if sing means “vibrate uncomfortably at 60Hz.”
The supporting hive hums: Aidan Delbis’ Don is written as the naif on the spectrum, deployed with care and a dash of convenient exposition. Alicia Silverstone strolls in, a ghost of 90s sunshine with a knowing smirk, reminding you movies used to let side characters have personalities instead of QR codes to the companion podcast. Stavros Halkias gets a few chewy beats that taste like nihilism dipped in diner coffee.
Will Tracy’s script plucks the conspiracy chords with clean fingers: big pharma malfeasance, apocalypse fatigue, bee-cide as metaphor for our gelatinous attention spans. The film wants to sting and salve at once—no small act—but occasionally it stands around admiring its own hexagons. The pacing is a conveyor belt that believes it’s a funhouse: jokes, dread, a revelation, a moral feint, repeat. And yet, Lanthimos resists the modern studio’s favorite third-act hobby—detonating theme park rides over blue soup. For that alone, I would build him a shrine of matchbooks.
Set pieces are more psychological chokeholds than spectacle. When Teddy lays out his Andromeda cosmology on a thrifted corkboard, I felt a pang of nostalgia for the days we set a stage on fire to illustrate obsession. Here, obsession is rendered in negative space, the cut between a rational explanation and a man’s refusal to accept it. Elegant. Also slightly smug. The bees, meanwhile, buzz in as leitmotif, flit out as indictment, and return for a curtain call. If you were hoping to learn anything practical about apiculture, you will come away with vibes and an urge to compost your phone.
Lanthimos’ biggest flourish is restraint—he trusts faces. The practical effects I crave are replaced by practical silences, and I hate how well that works. The cinematography’s 70s chill pairs with a score that drips like warm resin: not memorable enough to hum, but it coats the throat. He’s still the rare modern director who gets negative space to do positive work. I grumble, but the craft is undeniable.
Does Bugonia break ground? Not so much as it tills it with a beautifully designed hoe. Its brio is curated, its shock calibrated—indie transgression with a concierge. But every so often it slices the skin: the way belief metastasizes into mission; the comfort of narratives that absolve us from acting; the horror that the alien is less Andromeda than algorithm. When the film whispers this, not shouts it, the temperature spikes to the good kind of hellish.
Flaws worthy of a roasting spit:
– The satire sometimes winks so hard it sprains an eyelid.
– The ethical gray areas are tastefully arranged like a charcuterie board—I prefer my moral ambiguity freshly slaughtered.
– A late-game swerve leans more clever than true; cleverness ages like milk near a space heater.
Mercies I begrudgingly praise:
– Stone and Plemons deliver the sort of actorly duel that could power a small devil town.
– The absence of IP handcuffs. No cameos by a Bee Cinematic Universe. Blessed be.
– A finale that resists fireworks in favor of afterburn. The smoke lingers.
In my day, we’d have rolled a twelve-ton wax moon into frame and set it aflame with a flamenco of pyrotechnicians. Bugonia instead lights a match in a locked room and asks you to listen to the oxygen run out. Different method, similar scorch. Do I wish the film occasionally traded its sly grin for a shriek? Yes. Do I resent how often it got under my asbestos skin anyway? Also yes.
Final verdict from your retired firebrand: Bugonia is a meticulously engineered hive—sometimes museum sterile, frequently honey-sweet with venom beneath. It doesn’t quite mutate the genre, but it vibrates at a frequency that rattles the ribs of our conspiracy-addled epoch. See it in a theater. Bring your skepticism, your sense of humor, and maybe a jar of real honey to remember what unprocessed sting tastes like.
Score: 7.5 out of 10 torched monocles. Flames Fade, but Classics Burn Forever!
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Ah, Vincent Volcano, writing as though the film industry needed more sparkly aphorisms and less ignited enthusiasm! Reading your review of *Bugonia* felt like sipping lukewarm tea while staring at a poorly hung abstract canvas—confusing and mildly irritating. But kudos to you for working in more metaphors than characters in the film. I particularly enjoyed the part where you compared the film’s pacing to a conveyor belt laden with existential dread—very insightful and totally not melodramatic.
And tell me, do you often serve your cinematic critiques with a side of pretentiousness or was that just the bees buzzing in your ear? Because I certainly got a strong “look at me, I’m artsy” vibe from your choice of words!
You also mentioned Stone and Plemons’ performances being juicily electrifying. Honestly, if I wanted to feel electricity, I’d just chew on some tinfoil! But I digress.
Anyway, keep fanning those flames, Volcano. Just remember, the only thing worse than a film critic is a critic who thinks they can burn the world down with their wordplay alone. Flammable metaphors aren’t as effective as actual fire, my friend! Cheers to your torched monocles—hope they’re good for more than just burning the midnight oil!