‘Bugonia’ San Sebastian Review: Jesse Plemons and Emma Stone Face Off in Yorgos Lanthimos’ Conspiracy Chamber

The ever-expanding phenomenon of “rabbit holes”—echo chambers, algorithmic loops, whatever name you prefer for the modern compulsion to lock oneself inside a closed circuit of ideas that only reinforce one’s own biases—finds a striking, if at times chaotic, stage in Bugonia. Yorgos Lanthimos’ new film unfolds as a pitch-black comedy that pits two characters, parked at opposite ends of the ideological spectrum, against one another in what amounts to a showdown for the fate of the planet.

In this world of extremes, Teddy (Jesse Plemons) is a particularly troubling case. He’s convinced—thanks to online “research,” podcasts, endless YouTube videos—that the global elites are actually members of a sinister alien race from the Andromeda system bent on enslaving humanity. His oddball philosophy, steeped in trauma, loneliness, and far too much free time, has only one follower: his dim-witted cousin Donny (Aidan Delbis), who lives with him in a remote cabin.

Teddy hatches a macabre plan to kidnap Michelle Fuller (Emma Stone), the icy CEO of Auxolith Corp., whom he believes to be a high-ranking alien. His scheme is elaborate and deranged: force her to confess her extraterrestrial origins and, during a lunar eclipse, demand that she beg her intergalactic emperor to abandon the invasion. Michelle, naturally, is abducted by force—and what follows is both grotesque and absurd. Her captors shave her head, smear her with strange ointments, and beat confessions out of her, all while she stares in disbelief at the lunatics holding her hostage.

Secrets and backstories surface, but Lanthimos isn’t much interested in unraveling them. Instead, the film sets up a duel between two equally grotesque forces: on one side, a population radicalized online, swerving between the far right and far left in ways that are sometimes hard to pin down; on the other, corporate overlords who parade as responsible and socially conscious, yet embody the most ruthless strain of late capitalism. Aside from a handful of exterior scenes, Bugonia becomes a chamber piece, a claustrophobic face-off where Plemons and Stone clash physically and “ideologically” over nothing less than the fate of the universe.

Loosely inspired by Bong Joon-ho’s Save the Green Planet!, Lanthimos’ film is both a horror-tinged parody of the tightest, strangest belief systems imaginable and a brutal satire of corporate power. The billionaires at its center may or may not be aliens, but the film makes it clear enough: their lack of compassion for anything recognizably human is monstrous either way. Through Teddy, Michelle, and to a lesser degree Donny, Lanthimos builds a series of ideological oppositions that mirror today’s online culture wars—flat-earth theories, conspiratorial rabbit holes, and all the nonsense that passes for “research” on the internet.

At some point, the narrative raises the stakes with more action and spectacle, and that’s where the film loses some of its sharpness. Even so, it remains far more unsettling—and effective—than Ari Aster’s recent attempt to tackle similar ideological tensions in Eddington. What Lanthimos pinpoints here is the closed-mindedness itself: the unwavering belief that reality is fixed and non-negotiable. Bugonia makes it clear that things are more complicated than any algorithm suggests, yet also shows how futile it is to “convince” fanatics of their own errors.

The film stumbles again near the end, when Lanthimos pushes into deliberately Grand Guignol territory, turning Bugonia into more of an ironic farce about the narrow vision of its characters than a sustained political debate. But even with its excesses, the film leaves us with unsettling questions: What is the real world? Which version of it do we actually inhabit? And are the opposing sides truly as far apart as they think—or disturbingly closer than they’d ever admit?