Bugonia resonates with absurd films that reflect a crooked world – 11/27/2025 – Illustrated

Yorgos Lanthimos’s appetite for the eccentric has become the DNA of his films, populated by weird characters who seem out of this world. It is curious that his new film, “Bugonia”, uses extraterrestrials to denounce that there is no greater anomaly than contemporary society.

The film comes in the wake of other productions by renowned directors released in the last year that also use absurd narratives to break down the current political crisis. These are extreme stories that portray evils such as mass misinformation fueled by technology or the rise of authoritarian personalities.

Examples of this are “Eddington”, by Ari Aster, which shows the chaotic escalation of violence in a peaceful town in the United States, and “No Other Choice”, by South Korean Park Chan-wook, in which a laid-off worker decides to kill all his possible competitors for future job vacancies.

The plot of “Bugonia”, based on the 2003 South Korean film “Save the Green Planet!”, revolves around Teddy, played by Jesse Plemons, a frustrated man who lives with his cousin in a small, humid American town. He’s always sweaty and riding his bike back and forth while listening to podcasts about conspiracy theories.

Teddy is convinced that so-called “andromedans”, superior creatures from another planet, are infiltrating humans to destroy Earth. The belief is reinforced by the echo chamber in which he finds himself on the internet, an endless spiral of content that reaffirms his ideas machine-gunned on his cell phone screen by the algorithm.

Teddy’s target is Michelle, Emma Stone’s character, an executive at a giant pharmaceutical company who camouflages her calculation with corporate speeches about diversity. Teddy, who shows several signs of mental illness, believes she is an alien and kidnaps her with the help of his cousin.

The goal is to make Michelle confess her true identity, so she can take the two to their alien leaders — which, of course, doesn’t go as planned. In captivity, the businesswoman is subjected to physical tests and discussions that seem to lead nowhere, while she tries to come up with a strategy to escape.

The bulging eyes of Stone, who shaved his head for the film, match the eccentricity of Lanthimos’ characters. Not by chance, “Bugonia” is her fourth film with the director, after “The Favorite”, “Types of Kindness” and “Poor Creatures”, which guaranteed her her second Oscar for best actress, in 2023, for her portrayal of Bella Baxter, a Frankenstein woman who comes back to life with the brain of a baby and begins to defy gender conventions.

If the creation of inadequate protagonists and bizarre plots to reflect on deviations in our world is nothing new, “Bugonia” perhaps contains one of the Greek director’s most decipherable and explicit political messages.

“I don’t love the individualism that has spread throughout the world,” says Lanthimos, via video call. “We need to be more cautious about how we obtain information and what we decide to believe. We may not agree, but sometimes other people can tell truths that we don’t want to see.”

In “Bugonia”, for example, Michelle confronts Teddy at one point saying that sometimes bad things happen without explanation. He is terrified.

For Lanthimos, the search for easy answers in technology by people like Teddy is, in reality, a desperate attempt to anchor themselves in something tangible in these dark times. “Things are moving in an uncertain direction, and that’s scary. It’s comforting to convince yourself that the problem is one specific thing,” says the director. On this rollercoaster, films do not offer definitive answers, but they encourage people to reflect, he adds.

Fantastic elements help to purge collective anguish without weighing down the atmosphere. “Political allegories have always existed, but they return with more force in moments of crisis like the one we are experiencing, in which the extreme right is shaking democracy”, says Pedro Butcher, a film specialist and professor at ESPM, the Higher School of Advertising and Marketing.

In this area there are also titles such as “Uma Batalha Pós a Outra”, a strong candidate for the Oscar, and the Brazilian “The Secret Agent”, which also use extreme stories to make political comments. The first shows the actions of a revolutionary armed group that faces the American status quo, painted as a project for a failed world, while Kleber Mendonça Filho’s film narrates a persecution during the military dictatorship filled with urban legends.

The absurd also exposes real aberrations of our times. Butcher uses as an example the investigation opened last week in Italy, to investigate the participation of Italians in a type of “human safari” that allegedly took place in the 1990s, during the Bosnian war. The suspicion is that Europeans paid to travel to Sarajevo to shoot, positioned as snipers, at other civilians during the conflict.

If the episode is proven, it is as if life is imitating art. In “Bacurau”, also by Mendonça Filho, there is an identical scene, in which foreigners shoot the residents of Bacurau as if they were playing a video game. As Teddy insists on seeing in “Bugonia”, sometimes there is nothing more bizarre than the real.