{"id":81684,"date":"2026-08-12T09:54:05","date_gmt":"2026-08-12T01:54:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/calltoreason.org\/?p=81684"},"modified":"2026-08-12T09:54:05","modified_gmt":"2026-08-12T01:54:05","slug":"bugonia-2025","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/calltoreason.org\/?p=81684","title":{"rendered":"Bugonia (2025)"},"content":{"rendered":"
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This looks like another film from the strange imagination of Yorgos Lanthimos but it’s actually a remake of a South Korean one. The original director was even slated to direct this but bowed out due to health issues. The premise about two conspiracy-minded nobodies who kidnap a corporate CEO believing that she is an alien is out there but it’s nothing too crazy. Watching it feels underwhelming as it’s just three people in a remote house. I was going to write it off as being merely mediocre but then the twist drops and I’m left asking what the heck was the point of all that?<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

Teddy Gatz and his somewhat dim-witted cousin Don live in a remote farmhouse where they also keep bees. A conspiracy theorist Teddy attributes the terrible present state of the world to alien Andromedans who are killing bees and enslaving humans. He believes that he is able to identify Andromedans masquerading as humans and talks Don into helping him kidnap an alien leader to force a negotiation with their leadership. His target is Michelle Fuller, the CEO of a pharmaceutical company which is involved in manufacturing neonicotinoid insecticides. Despite their bungling, they manage to abduct her and confine her in their basement. They shave her hair and cover her skin with antihistamine cream, supposedly to prevent her from communicating with her mothership. When she wakes up, Michelle tries to talk her way out but is forced to play along. She eventually realizes that Teddy’s mother Sandy was a victim of one of her company’s medical trials and has rendered comatose as a result.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Early publicity for this film focused on Emma Stone shaving her head for this role and with her face slathered in cream, it indeed makes her look like some strange alien creature. The conspiracy angle fits our present era of misinformation and hours-long insane YouTube rants. A great scene is when Michelle tries to rationally engage with Teddy’s theories only to be stymied by how well-practiced he is from arguing on the Internet, having already considered all possible arguments. Michelle isn’t exactly a sympathetic CEO as we can see from her mixed messaging on allowing her company’s staff leave work early. But Teddy is far worse. Don is his victim as well, being persuaded to chemically castrate himself through a hormone injection, so that he isn’t at risk of being seduced by Michelle. Any possibility of Teddy coming across as a crazy and misguided but essentially harmless is shot the first time he flies into a rage and savages slaps Michelle across the face. Teddy is not the hero of this film and you are not meant to like him.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It’s okay for a while if somewhat underwhelming. However insane Teddy’s rants are, it’s just one guy who has kidnapped a woman. Don is too passive a character to meaningfully interact with the other two. A more conventional film would have focused on how Teddy latched onto his wild theories due to his mother’s suffering. But Lanthimos contents himself with flashback shots of a young Teddy looking helpless and scared as his mother declines. So what’s left is just exposition of how detailed and deep the lore Teddy comes up with can get. It’s neither interesting nor surprising. Is the takeaway then meant to condemn how pervasive and insidious conspiracy-thinking is? That would be too boring and so the film goes for the unbelievable twist that what if he was right all along? That on the surface feels like what Lanthimos usually does in reaching for the absurd. But it falls absolutely flat here as it’s too trite, too stupid and it feels awful to validate the beliefs of a man like Teddy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So what we have is a film that is not that fun to watch and on the top of it seems to have no reason to exist. I’m perplexed that it was nominated for multiple awards. I’m inclined to attribute it to the director being better known now and so the nominations are making up for lost time. This is neither creative nor truly subversive. If they had been more daring, they might have compared Teddy’s theories to Scientologists for example but they probably didn’t want to be that offensive. It’s a bad film that is sending a terrible message.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This looks like another film from the strange imagination of Yorgos Lanthimos but it’s actually a remake of a South Korean one. The original director was even slated to direct this but bowed out due to health issues. The premise about two conspiracy-minded nobodies who kidnap a corporate CEO believing that she is an alien … Continue reading Bugonia (2025)<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-81684","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-films"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/calltoreason.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/81684","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/calltoreason.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/calltoreason.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/calltoreason.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/calltoreason.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=81684"}],"version-history":[{"count":53,"href":"https:\/\/calltoreason.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/81684\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":81784,"href":"https:\/\/calltoreason.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/81684\/revisions\/81784"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/calltoreason.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=81684"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/calltoreason.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=81684"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/calltoreason.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=81684"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}