Since their 2018 collaboration The Favourite, Emma Stone and Yorgos Lanthimos have become one of the most defining director and actor duos of Hollywood cinema, dominating both the festival circuit and awards season. Their partnership has yielded a Golden Lion for Lanthimos and a second Oscar for Stone. It is hardly an overstatement to call their latest collaboration, Bugonia, one of the year’s most anticipated films. The cast also includes Jesse Plemons, who won Best Actor at Cannes for Kinds of Kindness (2024), his first collaboration with the pair, and newcomer Aidan Delbis.


Adapted from Jang Joon-hwan’s 2003 South Korean cult film Save the Green Planet!, Bugonia follows Teddy (Plemons), a conspiracy-obsessed beekeeper, and his cousin Don (Delbis), who kidnap Michelle Fuller (Stone), the powerful CEO of a global corporation. Convinced she is an alien plotting humanity’s destruction, Teddy locks her in his basement, determined to save the planet through increasingly delusional acts of torture. His theories are built from conspiracy podcasts, internet rabbit holes, and his own pseudo-scientific experiments to purge himself of psychic compulsions and shut the aliens out of his “brain box.”

Read my full review here: https://www.indiependent.co.uk/bfi-london-film-festival-2025-bugonia-review/