Bugonia (film)

• 1. Introduction

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  Bugonia, a 2025 black comedy thriller directed by Yorgos Lanthimos, begins with an abduction. Two young men seize a powerful chief executive and lock her away. They are certain she is an alien in disguise, and that she intends to destroy Earth. Everything that follows tests who in that room is actually right. Why would a film about conspiracy and captivity borrow its name from an ancient ritual involving bees? How did a South Korean story find its way into the hands of Lanthimos? What did it take to shoot, sell and score a film this strange? And how did critics and awards voters decide to judge it? This documentary follows Bugonia from its slow development through festivals, theaters and awards season.

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• 2. A Remake Takes Shape

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  In 2020, plans began for an English-language remake of Save the Green Planet!, the 2003 South Korean film by Jang Joon-hwan. Will Tracy was hired to adapt the screenplay, and Jang was attached to direct. Ari Aster signed on as producer and was instrumental in bringing Tracy aboard.

  Tracy has said he watched the original only once before he began writing. He made no effort to reproduce its story faithfully, because he wanted the two films to stand apart from one another.

  Jang later stepped away from the director's chair, citing health problems, but he stayed on as an executive producer. By February 2024, Lanthimos had been revealed as the new director, and Element Pictures joined the production team. Jang said he was pleased and called Lanthimos a "very fitting" choice.

  The finished film is a co-production of the United Kingdom, Ireland, South Korea and the United States. In May 2024 it was retitled Bugonia and taken to the Cannes Film Market, and Focus Features soon acquired it. Focus took worldwide rights outside South Korea, which CJ ENM Films and Television kept for itself.

  The title comes from a folk ritual described in some ancient Mediterranean texts, including Virgil's Georgics. The ritual calls for sacrificing a cow, in the belief that bees would spontaneously arise from its carcass. Tracy's script also changed the original's central character in one way that Jang himself helped approve.

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• 3. The Andromedan Theory

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  Teddy Gatz, a conspiracy theorist, has a personal reason to hate Auxolith, the pharmaceutical conglomerate led by Michelle Fuller. His mother, Sandy, once joined a clinical trial for an Auxolith drug, and it left her comatose. Teddy has come to believe Michelle belongs to a malignant alien species called the Andromedans. In his view, they are killing Earth's honeybees, wrecking communities and pushing humans into numb obedience. He recruits his autistic cousin Don to help.

  In their basement, Teddy and a reluctant Don shave Michelle's head and cover her body in antihistamine cream. The cream is meant to stop her from signaling other Andromedans. Teddy tells her she has four days to arrange a meeting with the Andromedan emperor. After that comes a lunar eclipse, which would let the Andromedan mothership enter Earth's atmosphere unseen. Once he has tortured her with electricity, Teddy reads her tolerance as proof that she belongs to the royal family.

  A dinner upstairs ends in a physical fight between Teddy and Michelle. Casey, a local deputy sheriff who once babysat Teddy, arrives looking for her. Don knocks Michelle unconscious with the stock of a shotgun and chains her in the basement. Meanwhile Teddy leads Casey out to the beehives in the backyard.

  When Michelle wakes, she offers to help Don if he reports Teddy to the police. Don answers that he only wants to travel to outer space with her. She promises to take him, and he shoots himself. Casey hears the shot, and Teddy kills him with a shovel.

  Michelle then persuades Teddy that a bottle of antifreeze in her car is an Andromedan antidote for his mother. Teddy dislocates her kneecap, drives to the hospital and injects the antifreeze into Sandy's IV bag, killing her. Back in the basement, Michelle takes the keys from Don's body and frees herself. She finds jars of severed human body parts and a binder of photographs of other captives Teddy suspected.

  Teddy returns, furious at her deception, and Michelle reduces him to tears with a story of her own. In her telling, the Andromedans created humans in their own image out of guilt over accidentally causing the dinosaurs' extinction. Early humans in Atlantis tampered with their genome, became more aggressive and set off a global nuclear war. A few survivors rode out the war in an ark, and their descendants are the violent humans of today. The Andromedans, she says, have spent thousands of years trying to steer people away from that nature, and Auxolith's experiments were part of the effort. She agrees to arrange a meeting at Auxolith headquarters.

  In her office, Michelle says she will make contact by typing a series of numbers into a calculator. She tells Teddy that her closet is a teleporter to her ship. Teddy reveals a homemade suicide vest under his clothes. As he steps into the closet, she backs away and presses enter on the calculator, and the vest detonates by mistake. It kills Teddy and knocks her unconscious.

  Michelle wakes in an ambulance, jumps out and returns to her office. There she enters the closet and truly teleports to the Andromedan mothership, where she is revealed as the Andromedan leader. After consulting her fellow Andromedans, she concludes the human experiment has failed. She places a clear dome over a model of a Flat Earth, and every human dies at once. Other animal and plant life remains, and bees slowly return to Teddy's apiary.

  The ending sits in a very different place from the original film's, a difference one critic would later seize on.

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• 4. Faces in the Basement

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  Emma Stone shaved her head to play Michelle Fuller, the film's counterpart to Kang Man-shik, a man in the original. Aster, Tracy and Jang chose to swap the character's sex before Lanthimos was involved. According to Jang, it was one of the last creative decisions he made before stepping down as director.

  Stone was in talks to star in February 2024, which made this her fourth collaboration with Lanthimos. She also joined as a producer.

  Jesse Plemons plays Teddy Gatz, a beekeeper obsessed with conspiracy theories. Teddy adapts Lee Byeong-gu from the original film, and the two men share a belief that the target is an alien. Both are also driven by a wish to avenge a mother's poisoning. Plemons was officially on board by the time of the Cannes Film Market in May 2024.

  Alicia Silverstone joined in October 2024 as Sandy Gatz, Teddy's mother. In May 2025, Aidan Delbis and Stavros Halkias were announced. Delbis plays Don, and Halkias plays the deputy sheriff Casey Boyd.

  Stone's shaved head would soon become the subject of one of the production's most technically tricky shots.

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• 5. Cameras and Score

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  Principal photography began on the 1st of July 2024 in Oxshott and High Wycombe, England. Filming then moved to Atlanta, Georgia, where it wrapped in October. Teddy's house, basement included, was built on a site within the Culden Faw Estate. The fictional Auxolith headquarters was filmed at Botanica Ditton Park, a co-working space in Ditton Park. Additional shooting took place at Arborfield Studios.

  Lanthimos wanted to film the ending at the Acropolis of Athens, but the Central Archaeological Council of Greece rejected his request. Sarakiniko Beach on the Greek island of Milos became the alternative, and filming there took place in May 2025.

  The film was budgeted at $45 million. A Deadline Hollywood report indicated the true cost was $55 million, which would make it Lanthimos's most expensive film, ahead of Poor Things.

  Irish cinematographer Robbie Ryan shot the project on 8-perf 35 mm film with VistaVision cameras. It was his fourth collaboration with Lanthimos. By Ryan's own estimate, about 95 percent of the film was shot in VistaVision. That is more use of the format than any film since One-Eyed Jacks in 1961.

  The head-shaving scene posed a special problem, because the cameras had a tendency to shut down. The crew filmed it in a single take with four VistaVision cameras running at once.

  Jerskin Fendrix composed and conducted the score, which the London Contemporary Orchestra performed. It was his third collaboration with Lanthimos, after Poor Things in 2023 and Kinds of Kindness in 2024. Sound designer Johnnie Burn recalls that Lanthimos asked Fendrix to write from three key words: bees, basement and spaceship. Fendrix saw neither the script nor any footage until after he had delivered the music.

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• 6. Human Resistance HQ

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  At CinemaCon on the 2nd of April 2025, the first footage from Bugonia screened during the Universal Pictures and Focus Features panel. Neither Lanthimos nor Stone attended. A teaser trailer followed online on the 26th of June, set to Green Day's song "Basket Case." The first poster appeared just before the Venice debut. The next day came the first official trailer, set to a remix of Chappell Roan's "Good Luck, Babe!" It also revealed Stone's bald look.

  A week before the limited United States release, an in-universe website called "Human Resistance HQ" went live. It was deliberately poorly made, with a deep dive into Michelle Fuller and a collection of articles and files tied to the plot. It also linked to a LinkedIn page for the fictional company Auxolith.

  Two billboards, one in Los Angeles and one in New York City, advertised Auxolith. Each was then vandalized, reading "ANDROMEDAN FILTH" and "JOIN THE HUMAN RESISTANCE."

  On the 20th of October, four days before the limited release, the Culver Theater in Los Angeles held a free advance screening for bald audiences. A barber was on hand to shave the heads of anyone who wanted to get in.

  The title card, posters and credits came from Vasilis Marmatakis, a Greek graphic designer and longtime Lanthimos collaborator. He used a custom digitization of Churchward Roundsquare, a geometric typeface by the Samoan-born New Zealand typographer Joseph Churchward. Marmatakis found it in the archives of the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa and digitized it with permission from Churchward's family.

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• 7. Release and Box Office

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  Bugonia premiered in the main competition of the 82nd Venice International Film Festival on the 28th of August 2025. Its theatrical rollout in the United States began with a limited release on the 24th of October, through Focus Features. A wide release followed on the 31st of October, after an earlier plan to open on the 7th of November. Universal Pictures released it in Ireland on the 31st of October, and CJ ENM released it in South Korea on the 5th of November. Alongside digital screenings, select theaters showed it in 35 mm.

  The film arrived on video on demand on the 25th of November 2025. Releases on DVD, Blu-ray and Ultra HD Blu-ray followed on the 23rd of December.

  In the United States and Canada, Bugonia opened against Regretting You and Chainsaw Man - The Movie: Reze Arc. Projections put its opening weekend at around $3 million to $4 million. It earned $1.8 million on its first day of wide release and finished the weekend with $4.8 million.

  Its final tally was $17.7 million in the United States and Canada and $25.9 million in other territories, for a worldwide total of $43.5 million. Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave it an average grade of "B" on a scale running from A+ to F.

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• 8. Critics and Awards

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  David Rooney of The Hollywood Reporter praised Stone and Plemons for matching the director's idiosyncratic sensibility. He called Robbie Ryan's VistaVision cinematography "spectacular" while admitting the film is "by no means Lanthimos' best work." Owen Gleiberman of Variety called it a "heady and gripping experience" and named Plemons's the film's "most extraordinary performance."

  Alissa Wilkinson of The New York Times found a "demented riff on Spielberg." She added that "This is not really Lanthimos's weirdest film, and it's not his funniest or his most fun either. It's mostly kind of sad."

  Dana Stevens of Slate was harsher. She called the film "unremittingly grim" and argued that Lanthimos is "less a misogynist than a misanthropist." Donald Clarke of The Irish Times praised the three central performances and Ryan's "fabulous" cinematography. Even so, he judged the film "mid-ranking" among Lanthimos's work and said "there is not much substance at the centre."

  Many critics measured Bugonia against Save the Green Planet! Hoai-Tran Bui of Inverse called the remake "restrained," more inspired by the original than a copy of it. Stevens observed that a conspiracy-driven premise "hits different" now, since social media has helped such theories spread.

  Isaiah Colbert of Gizmodo preferred the original, which did not "wait to get weird." He still saw both films as "anxiety-laden time capsules." Natalia Keogan of The A.V. Club said the remake "squanders every opportunity" to update its themes. Kayleigh Donaldson of Pajiba found Teddy less sympathetic than Lee Byeong-gu. She noted the original destroys the whole Earth while the remake kills only humans, and wrote, "maybe the planet does need saving from us, at any cost."

  Plemons and Stone were both nominated for their performances at the 83rd Golden Globe Awards and the 32nd Actor Awards. At the 98th Academy Awards, Bugonia received four nominations: Best Picture, Best Actress for Stone, Best Adapted Screenplay for Tracy and Best Original Score for Fendrix. Its long awards listing also includes the BAFTAs, the Critics' Choice Movie Awards and the European Film Awards. The Academy ceremony on the 15th of March 2026 is the latest date in that listing.

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