Rent Bugonia (2025)

Paranoia, Panic & a Proper Eye-Opener! - Bugonia review by griggs

After nearly a month off the big screen thanks to shingles in my eye — and ordeal I wouldn't wish on my worst cinematic enemies — there was something darkly appropriate about returning to the very room where Kubrick shot the Ludovico Technique in A Clockwork Orange. Sitting there with my hourly eye drops, blinking like poor Alex DeLarge mid-rehab, felt almost too neat a parallel. And in its own twisted way, Bugonia was the perfect re-entry: a film about paranoia and pressure, watched in a space famous for forced viewing. Sometimes the cinema gods really do enjoy a theme.

There's a real confidence humming through this one — the sort of film that knows exactly where it is going even when its characters look lost. You feel the Save the Green Planet! bones beneath it, but Lanthimos bends them into something cleaner and stranger, threading modern paranoi through a story that keeps its wit close at a hand.

Emma Stone dives into the madness with real bite, while Jesse Plemons give the film its quiet, unsettling pulse. Together they set the tempo — sharp one minute, surprisingly tender the next. It works.

What makes Bugonia click is how lightly it wears it oddness. Instead fog the broad theatrics or knotted structures of Lanthimos' recent films, it opts for something leaner: a story that keeps turning sideways just when you think you've found your bearings. None of those shifts feel cheap: the film's grip is too steady for that.

By the end, it's anxious, funny, and oddly warm — a conspiracy tale that winds you tighter while letting you laugh at the tension. A strange little machine, humming beautifully.

Surreal Conspiracy Dark Comedy - Bugonia review by GI

Emma Stone and Jesse Plemons are excellent in Yorgos Lanthimos' conspiracy surreal thriller that taps deep into the plethora of zany conspiracy theorist ideas that litter the world and in particular the USA; from flat earthers to scientologists to deep state, it's all sort of referenced here in subtle and in some obvious ways. This is a dark comedy that explodes in shocking ways and concludes in a way you'll either have guessed, be surprised by or reject completely. Stone plays Michelle, an icy CEO of a big Pharma corporation who has a self focused regimented life and is one day kidnapped by two has beens, Teddy (Plemons) and Don (Aidan Delbis), with Teddy especially convinced that Michelle is an alien and is responsible for the fate of his mother (no spoilers!). They shave her head believing hair is the way she communicates with her spaceship which is due to arrive in a few days. Teddy is a beekeeper and believes Michelle's species are responsible for their decline and hence the slow death of the planet. But Michelle is very clever and to escape her predicament plays her own mind games against her two abductors. The film is a little laboured in the middle section as the main protagonists verbally spar with each other but in many ways the wait is worth waiting for if you can deal with how the film plays out. There is though little doubt that this is a really interesting and original film that fans of this director will be familiar with. I'm sure a second viewing is required to seek out the clues that are no doubt littered throughout.