BUGONIA

A tale of bees, billionaires, and breakdowns — just another Tuesday in the corporate hive mind.

Bugonia is what happens when you let Yorgos Lanthimos drink cold brew and watch The X-Files while reading Fast Company. It’s a sci-fi dark comedy in the same way that swallowing a beehive is a “spa treatment.”

In this film, Jesse Plemons plays a man named Teddy who is either:
a) a beekeeper
b) a conspiracy theorist
c) a philosophy professor on sabbatical
or d) all of the above, with untreated seasonal allergies.

Teddy becomes convinced that Michelle (played by Emma Stone in full Glossier war paint) is not just a pharmaceutical CEO but an alien. You know, because she has power, charisma, and a Wi-Fi signal so strong it bends spoons. So naturally, he kidnaps her. As one does in a free market.

From what we gather, the film includes scenes where characters stare into the middle distance while muttering things like “The hive must protect the queen,” which is either a metaphor for late-stage capitalism or an actual instruction from Beyoncé.

The trailer is scored with Green Day’s Basket Case because nothing says “psychological thriller about alien corporate espionage” like a 1994 pop-punk breakdown. It’s perfect. It’s chaotic. It’s giving millennial burnout with a side of propolis.

Behind the scenes, Yorgos tried to film a dramatic 70-corpse pileup on the steps of the Acropolis, but Greek officials—who apparently draw the line at alien mass murder near priceless ruins—politely told him to buzz off. So the shoot relocated to a beach, which is historically where most humans have also gone to experience both enlightenment and heatstroke.

Emma Stone, meanwhile, struts through this movie like she’s on a runway made of quarterly earnings reports and broken dreams. She speaks only in cryptic one-liners that may or may not have been pulled from Slack threads and marketing decks. It’s not acting—it’s a TED Talk for emotionally unavailable space monarchs.

Is Bugonia a thriller? A satire? A veiled attack on Elon Musk? Nobody knows. But early festival viewers reportedly walked out whispering, “I think I’ve been pollinated,” which is either high praise or a lawsuit.

3.75 out of 5 combs full of existential jelly.
Come for the bees, stay for the stone-faced metaphors, leave with an allergic reaction to capitalism.