Yorgos Lanthimos doesn’t seem to know how to tell a cookie-cutter, happy-ending Hallmark story to save his life and that’s a good thing. I loved his modern fairy-tale take in 2023’s Poor Things, where Frankenstein’s monster is protected from societal cruelty and allowed to figure out who or what she is using reason and the scientific method. Genius storytelling. 2024’s Kinds of Kindness threw out the single narrative structure and told three separate stories in the same “universe,” but where the same actors play different characters in each story and nothing goes well for any of them (except the one character who is in all three stories). I heard someone say that this year’s Bugonia is a fourth Kinds of Kindness story, but filled out into its own feature film length presentation. That works. It has the same simple, grounded in reality but somehow warped and under the surface boiling paranoia from the previous film. 

A conspiracy-theory believer and his special needs cousin abduct the CEO of a local pharmaceutical corporation because they want the CEO to tell her space alien overlords to leave planet Earth and return control of the planet to humans. It’s less fairy tale than Poor Things and less graphic than Kinds of Kindness, but still you know when obsessive people go from thoughts to actions, that this is not going to end well. After watching the movie I looked up the word Bugonia and, per Google AI, it refers to the Ancient Greek belief that bees could be spontaneously generated from the carcass of a dead cow or bull. That fits. The movie does a great job making you question what is really happening and what is paranoid delusion. I know more than a few skeptics who would wish that this whole story was real. Enjoy(?).

[Movie viewed on 2025-11-04 at Cinemark Orleans]

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Tags: 2025 movies, Bugonia, Emma Stone, weird cinema, Yorgos Lanthimos

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