This Unhinged Thriller With 87% on Rotten Tomatoes Is a Near-Perfect Sci-Fi From Start to Finish

1 week ago 9

Published May 17, 2026, 1:03 PM EDT

Jeremy has more than 2500 published articles on Collider to his name, and has been writing for the site since February 2022. He's an omnivore when it comes to his movie-watching diet, so will gladly watch and write about almost anything, from old Godzilla films to gangster flicks to samurai movies to classic musicals to the French New Wave to the MCU... well, maybe not the Disney+ shows.
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Honestly, Yorgos Lanthimos seems most in his element when he’s doing some kind of sci-fi or vaguely fantastical film. That comes about from his style generally being surreal (or, to put it a bit more crudely, weird), and so when he’s dealing with something that’s a bit removed from reality, things just click a little better. Fans of The Favourite, Dogtooth, and Kinds of Kindness might disagree, though. As for fans of Bugonia… maybe. Why maybe? It’s not a movie that really wants you to know for sure what all the genres are, technically speaking, that it falls into throughout, and that’s one of the things that makes it interesting and exciting.

It’s best defined as a darkly comedic thriller, and the central question is whether someone is an alien or not, and what they are (or aren’t) more or less defines whether Bugonia is also a sci-fi movie. Confused? Possibly, if you’ve not seen the movie for whatever reason, and if you're also not familiar with Save the Green Planet! (2003), a South Korean movie that Bugonia’s a remake of. So Lanthimos’ 2025 film isn't entirely its own thing, when that South Korean film exists, but Bugonia is still interesting and worth talking about, albeit it’s best to talk about it in a way that doesn’t entirely give away the mystery. To paraphrase the one guy who is Tame Impala, the less you know, the better.

The Main Premise of 'Bugonia'

Emma Stone, bald, sits in front of a free-standing light in Bugonia

There are three main characters in Bugonia, with a conspiracy theorist named Teddy (Jesse Plemons) being the one to kick things off, narratively. He believes a CEO named Michelle Fuller (Emma Stone) is actually an alien, so he gets the help of his cousin, Don (Aidan Delbis), to kidnap her. They manage to, but only just, and then she’s held in a basement while Teddy tries to get her to admit that she’s actually an alien disguising herself as a human, a bit like David Bowie's character in The Man Who Fell to Earth. Teddy can’t know for sure, and Don has his doubts, but the former is adamant, and there’s your movie.

She swears she’s not an alien, of course, and then tension (and, again, some dark comedy) builds as the end of the movie inevitably approaches.

As a viewer, you're in a position where you'll probably feel like what Teddy thinks is preposterous, and so his dedication to the rather absurd cause is sometimes funny, but then there are things about Michelle that are odd (not necessarily her music taste, though… plenty of people probably listened to little else but Chappell Roan’s “Good Luck, Babe!” when it first came out). She swears she’s not an alien, of course, and then tension (and, again, some dark comedy) builds as the end of the movie inevitably approaches, and answers get revealed. Or, they might not. This is Yorgos Lanthimos. Anything goes when it comes to a movie of his, and that really helps Bugonia stay interesting throughout.

The Highs and (Occasional) Lows of 'Bugonia'

Not that Bugonia looks cheap (and it really wasn’t), but it feels a little in line with a bottle episode you might see on an older TV show, which were episodes done with fewer sets and cast members than usual, often to save money. See Breaking Bad’s “Fly,” for maybe the best-known fairly recent example. Bugonia has plenty of scenes just in the house that Stone’s character is confined to, and so the writing and acting here do so much heavy-lifting, for probably obvious reasons. The three main cast members are all more than up to the task, and seeing their dynamics shift throughout, while your own thoughts about the whole situation might be changing at the same time, is often thrilling.

Bugonia isn't perfectly paced, though, and maybe if you expect it to end one way, and then it does eventually end that way, you won’t really be surprised. She could be an alien, she could be a human, or the movie could end without you knowing. Those are the three options, so you could well guess ahead of time, but the movie still does enough of a dance in some weird gray zone between all these possibilities throughout to stay mostly engaging. It’s not quite as novel or visually eye-catching as the other sci-fi/dark comedy Lanthimos and Stone collaborated on earlier (Poor Things, which really showcased previously unseen range for Emma Stone), but it’s not too far off quality-wise. Both movies were recognized at the Academy Awards, too, for what that might be worth.

How 'Bugonia' Compares to the Other Films of Yorgos Lanthimos

Teddy (Jesse Plemons) riding his bike with headphones on in Bugonia

The 87% Bugonia has on Rotten Tomatoes, from critics, feels well-deserved. It’s also one of those movies that audiences felt roughly on the same page with (or on?), because it’s got an 84% on the same site, from users who aren’t critics. Maybe this speaks to Bugonia being one of the more approachable Lanthimos films, though it could also be the case that people don’t really go out of their way to see a movie like this unless they're on board with something that could be odd. If you had to show a Yorgos Lanthimos film to someone who’d never seen one before, though, Bugonia could be your safest bet.

Bottle episodes – or bottle movies – are always intriguing, or at least kind of admirable, and one that keeps a level of tension high for most of the runtime is even better. Bugonia does that alongside being funny at times (it’s not a laugh-a-minute comedy or anything, it should be stressed), and also while flirting with the idea that it might or might not be a science fiction movie. A man and his cousin want to find out the truth, a powerful and resourceful woman wants to convince them she’s a wrong tree that they're currently barking up, and then, as a viewer, you're watching the whole thing from a distance, not always feeling sure about whom to believe. It’s a good time, and a bit of a bad/uncomfortable time, and a film ultimately worth watching, all at once. Multitudes contained.