Bugonia (2025)

R.  Like many Yorgos Lanthimos movies, this is a movie full of content.  While Poor Things was incredibly sexual, this movie is more about violence, torture, and other taboo subjects.  There is nudity, but not in the context of sex.  There is some discussion of rape and there is a lot of language in the movie.  But this is so much about gore, especially a visceral suicide.  Once again, Lanthimos is here to make you squirm.

DIRECTOR:  Yorgos Lanthimos

Let's see if I can knock out a blog during the Super Bowl.  Big surprise, I'm not much into sports.  I know.  A lot of people get their personality entirely based on not liking sports.  I have to admit that I might be one of those people.  But if I have a few minutes, I mind as well try to stay ahead of this self-imposed stress. 

I wasn't ready to like this movie.  I really wasn't.  I was one of the few people who really loathed Poor Things.  Everyone else was all about that move and then there was me, watching Emma Stone get sexually exploited for the sake of condemning sexual exploitation.  I like weird stuff.  Sometimes, Lanthimos just seems to take it too far.  Like, I liked The Lobster and The Favourite, but The Killing of a Sacred Deer and Poor Things burned me out so much.  Yes, I liked Bugonia, but I'm worried it might be because I was so prepped to loathe the movie.  That's probably not the healthiest attitude when going into a film.  

I do have to admit that part of it comes from the fact that I don't want to put any real thought into this movie.  Bugonia is about something, but I still have to unpack it.  I had to look up the meaning of the title.  I mean, as much as I tend not to jump on board a lot of Yorgos Lanthimos's stuff, I do have to admit that it is pretty complex.  Apparently, the title Bugonia comes from an ancient belief that bees came from rotting cattle corpses.  I don't know how accurate that is.  But I want to use that information to shape what could be an analysis of the film.

We've seen the archetypes before.  It's not like we haven't had stories where there's a misinformed nutjob who is capable of hurting an innocent person.  I mean, I'm a big fan of The King of Comedy, so I have at least some place where I can start discussing this.  As much as this is Emma Stone / Michelle's story because she has the most to lose (kind of) from a narrative perspective, it feels like we're meant to be attached to Teddy.  Teddy is the first person we meet.  Maybe it's because I'm male that I found Teddy to be the avatar.  But I also feel like it's Teddy who shifts the most as a character.  Teddy, from moment one, has very little to lose.  He's in a house that is falling apart.  He's taking care of his cousin.  In that taking care of his cousin, he's also given a sense of order and control.  From his perspective, he's doing the right thing.  As crazy as it sounds, Teddy genuinely believes that Michelle is an alien who is going to destroy the earth, mainly because of his own experience of colony collapse disorder.  There's a reveal that Teddy has killed before.  From an outside, audience perspective, that murder makes him seem like he's completely insane.  After all, Teddy even acknowledges that those previous killings were often misinformed. 

But as the story progresses --and Teddy becomes more and more unhinged --we start to realize that Teddy was right the entire time.  I mean, it is definitely a lightswitch moment.  For a lot of the story, we have to wonder if Michelle actually is insane, not because it is terribly telegraphed or anything, but because I can't imagine the story ending differently.  And once Michelle gets in that closet and beams herself up to the mothership, the reveal that Teddy was right the entire time is joyful, but also somewhat troubling of a message.  Okay, I don't know if there is anything in the story that justifies what Teddy does.  Michelle does murder the entire planet.  Teddy is right the entire time. But it doesn't change the fact that Teddy comes across as an extremist.  He, throughout the piece, comes across as more unhinged as he gets closer to his goal.

So let's unpack that.  Teddy is right.  The entire thing with Michelle is an alien conspiracy to destroy the people of Earth.  Okay.  It means that Teddy, as a character, is in a place of desperation.  None of this is mental illness.  Instead, he knows that the entire human race is doomed unless he does something drastic.  He doesn't want to kidnap anyone.  He doesn't want to hurt anyone.  But he also knows that if he doesn't intervene, everyone, including Don is dead.  He has killed and made mistakes, but is confident that he has the Queen or Princess of these aliens in his captivity.  We don't know why he knows this.  That means that the message of the story, maybe only inadvertently, is that we should do anything to stop existential threats.  See, that might lead into some gross ways of thinking.  I'm sitting here, typing away, thinking of my own limited activism against what I'm also viewing as an existential threat to humanity.  But I'm also nonviolent.  Teddy doesn't come across as great in this.  He tortures Michelle.  He hits her when she mouths off to him.  He's pretty darned gross, outside of his love for Don.  

Now, this is becoming a bit of a recurring theme in storytelling nowadays.  But usually the message is a little bit more overt.  I can't help but make everything about Andor.  Luthen Rael, I guess along with Saw Guerrera, are these two revolutionaries who understand that their lives don't amount to a hill of beans when it comes to dealing with a threat to democracy.  Rael has a great speech saying that his life is forfeit for the sake of the cause.  He does gross things.  But the thing about Rael, there's never any doubt.  The story of Andor is never one of doubt.  We know that the Empire if awful and that the Death Star is on the horizon.   He witnesses and can cite all of the atrocities that the Empire has already caused.  When he goes all in on taking down the Empire, it's in response to the Empire drawing first blood.  Bugonia has a little bit of a Minority Report thing going on.  Teddy knows that the aliens are going to be hostile based on nothing.  It almost introduces the notion of doubt.  Maybe people from outside the horrors --the nonpoliticals --view people are certain of the rise of fascism.

Which makes me think that this is about religious extremism.  I hate quoting Louis C.K. because he's super gross, but he has a bit about religious fervor, especially when it comes to abortion.  He says that he understands that they are right, but it ultimately doesn't change his mind.  (I'm intentionally taking all of the bit out and leaving us just with the takeaway.) Teddy, by all intents and purposes, does everything that he does in the movie out of a blind faith.  It doesn't matter that he's right.  Him being right is almost a wild coincidence.  It's a little bit of The Good Place.  If we treat this as a story about Teddy and religious extremism, then we can only look at his being right as being secondary to his actions.  After all, the odds on him being right are absolutely absurd.  Maybe that's my bigger, more counter-to-the-text takeaway.  This is my own moral code being woven into her (per usual).  Teddy does awful things in the name of saving the world.  But he doesn't really have to.  Ultimately, his behavior is what drives Michelle to kill everyone.  We don't know if she would have destroyed the planet had Teddy not done what he did.  But even if he had that knowledge, the torture and murder of others is objectively wrong for Teddy.  Yeah, there's circumstance.  But we're treating this entire thing as a black-and-white narrative.  Yeah, there are other things that might have been harder to pull off to save the world.  But he would have held onto his own soul.  Teddy is not a good dude and the movie makes that clear.  When he blows up, it's comical because we kind of want to see that happen to him.

Here's my thoughts on the whole matter.  It feels like the movie ends with Michelle being a hair alien because that's the most fun and most weird ending that Yorgos Lanthimos could give it.  Everything else would have been disappointing.  But in terms of "Why did I just watch that?", I have questions.  Yeah, the performances are great.  Yeah, I had a good time.  But the themes are really muddy.  It seemed more like a fun experiment than saying anything that adds to society.  Maybe not every movie needs that.  But with the buildup that this movie presents, I kind of want to talk about this as a piece that needs to be dissected.