LFF Review: ‘Bugonia’
Bugonia is the kind of film that should, by all accounts, collapse under the weight of everything it is trying to do. It is angry, absurd, occasionally grotesque and almost aggressively unsubtle, tackling paranoia, conspiracy and the increasingly fractured way people perceive the world around them. In the hands of a less assured filmmaker, it could have easily become exhausting. Thankfully, Yorgos Lanthimos knows exactly how far he can push it before pulling everything back from the edge.
At the center of the film is Jesse Plemons, delivering what is easily the best performance of his career. Plemons has always been particularly good at playing men whose outward stillness masks something much more complicated underneath, but Bugonia gives him the opportunity to push that quality somewhere darker, stranger and considerably more volatile. He is completely compelling, finding a surprising amount of humanity in a character who could have easily become little more than a vehicle for the film’s ideas.
What makes the performance work so well is how seriously Plemons takes him. There is no winking at the audience, no attempt to soften the absurdity of what is happening around him. Every fear, every conviction and every increasingly extreme decision feels completely real to the character, and Plemons commits to that reality so fully that the film is able to follow him into increasingly ridiculous territory without losing its emotional grounding. It is a fascinating, deeply layered turn from an actor who somehow continues to find new corners of himself to explore.
Emma Stone, meanwhile, goes in almost the opposite direction. Her performance is big, theatrical and occasionally close to scenery-chewing, but that excess is precisely what the film needs. Stone understands the heightened world Lanthimos is operating in and leans into it with complete abandon, turning what could have been an overwhelmingly broad performance into something enormously entertaining. There are moments where she seems to be operating on an entirely different frequency from everyone around her, but rather than disrupting the film, that tension only makes it more unpredictable.
That unpredictability is one of Bugonia’s greatest strengths. Lanthimos moves between bleak comedy, psychological thriller and outright absurdism with a confidence that makes tonal shifts which should feel jarring somehow work. A scene can move from genuinely unsettling to laugh-out-loud funny and back again without ever completely breaking the spell. It is an incredibly difficult balance to pull off, particularly with material this heightened, but Lanthimos has long understood that discomfort and humor often work best when sitting directly beside one another.
The film is considerably less subtle when it comes to its ideas. At times, Bugonia comes dangerously close to saying exactly what it means and then repeating it just to make sure everyone in the audience has heard. Its social commentary can be heavy-handed, and there are moments where the screenplay teeters so close to becoming on-the-nose that it threatens to flatten some of the ambiguity that makes the story interesting in the first place.
But Lanthimos repeatedly saves it from tipping over. His direction gives the material enough strangeness, tension and formal control that even its most obvious ideas rarely feel completely inert. There is always something slightly off-kilter happening in the frame or in the rhythm of a performance, something that complicates what might otherwise have been a blunt statement. He understands that the film is at its best when it allows the audience to sit in the discomfort rather than simply explaining it away.
Bugonia may not be Lanthimos at his most restrained, but restraint is hardly the point. It is messy, provocative and deliberately abrasive, a film constantly threatening to become too much before somehow finding its footing again. Anchored by a career-best Jesse Plemons and an appropriately unhinged Emma Stone, it is an audacious balancing act that works far more often than it doesn’t.
Rating: 4/5
Bugonia screened at the 2025 BFI London Film Festival.
