Is Yórgos Lánthimos’s new film Bugonia, starring Emma Stone, really worth it?

By Alexis Thibault.

Bugonia, Yórgos Lánthimos’s new film with Emma Stone

Riding high on the success of Poor Things (2023) and seemingly unfazed by the lukewarm reception of Kinds of Kindness at the Cannes Film Festival a year later, Greek filmmaker Yórgos Lánthimos once again teams up with the brilliant Emma Stone and Jesse Plemons for Bugonia (2025).

Premiered at the 2025 Venice Film Festival and slated for release on November 26th, this wild thriller follows two beekeepers obsessed with conspiracy theories who kidnap the CEO of a pharmaceutical giant. Lost in fantasies sourced from the dark web and convinced she is an alien sent to wipe out the bees – a nod to the Greek myth of bugonia, a ritual based on the belief that bees could be born from a cow’s carcass – they keep her prisoner and start questioning her.

The origin of the film leads back to another director, Ari Aster. As the future producer on the project, he urged screenwriter Will Tracy to watch the obscure cult film Save the Green Planet! (2003) by Jang Joon-hwan. Though hard to find, the Korean classic had a profound impact on Will Tracy, both visually and narratively. Later, Yórgos Lánthimos took this biting material and reshaped it into something more stripped-down, direct and in tune with our times… A moral fable steeped in absurdity.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bd_5HcTujfc

A film conceived like a photo exhibition

Everyone knows Yórgos Lánthimos‘s taste for unsettling universes, where normality cracks under the weight of irony. With Bugonia, the 52-year-old Greek filmmaker shapes his feature almost like a photo exhibition. A sequence of meticulously composed static shots, reminiscent of Gregory Crewdson, Todd Hido or Stephen Shore. Each frame feels carved out of unease, as if a piercing eye was watching our ailing society through the glass of a museum…

To achieve this hypnotic effect, the director shot in 35 mm VistaVision, a rare horizontal format that offers an extended image surface with astonishing clarity. A return to an old-fashioned kind of visual luxury. Robbie Ryan, who was also director of photography on The Favourite (2018), crafts every detail with precision.

True to his signature visual happenings, Yórgos Lánthimos also devised an unexpected promotional campaign. One screening was open only to those willing to shave their heads. A direct reference to the transformation Emma Stone’s character underwent as the supposed alien, whose hair is believed to enable communication with her own kind.

A satire that could be more scathing

Despite its 120-minute runtime, a slight sense of drift creeps in halfway through. True to the director’s signature aesthetic, the film stretches out its scenes and lets its characters wade through elliptical, meandering dialogue. The intent is clear – to portray an era saturated with rhetoric, stances, beliefs, and dialogues falling on deaf ears. But it seems that Bugonia gets trapped by its own formal rigor at times. Sarcasm simmers without ever striking hard, as if the director preferred distant commentary rather than a overt criticism.

The final act, built like a long photographic slideshow, completes this drift toward artistic installation. A brilliant idea on paper, but one that perhaps unintentionally highlights the gap between the film’s visual ambition and its narrative machinery. Yórgos Lánthimos doesn’t stumble, but runs out of steam. One can spot the structures, anticipates the breaks, notice the seams.

One trump card remains… Emma Stone and Jesse Plemons, two actors with rare acting precision, capable of embodying the grotesque without reducing it to a mere caricature. Their presence offers the story a human depth that the sometimes overly conceptual framework tends to erode.

Bugonia by Yórgos Lánthimos, coming out in theatres on November 26th, 2025.