Why Bugonia should win the best picture Oscar | Oscars 2026
ANDmma Stone as a kidnapped, shaven-headed prescribed drugs CEO who may additionally be the ruler of an alien grasp race? It says rather a lot about director Yorgos Lanthimos that Bugonia was arguably his most straightforward movie so far.
For this remake of the cult 2003 South Korean film Save the Green Planet! We had been invited into the unkempt house of beekeeper Teddy (Jesse Plemons), a paranoid conspiracy theorist whose web analysis has led him to imagine that aliens are poisoning his bees – and that solely he can save life on Earth from extinction. He enlists his neurodivergent cousin Don (Aidan Delbis) to kidnap high-flying Michelle Fuller (Stone), whose firm Auxolith appears to have prompted Teddy’s mom some sort of irreversible hurt in the previous.
Stone enjoys pushing herself artistically for Lanthimos and Bugonia was no completely different: right here we see her knocked unconscious in the again of a automobile whereas a panicking Don takes chunks out of her hair with a pair of clippers (Teddy insists that she will be able to solely talk along with her alien friends by way of her hair). By the time she’s been doused from head to toe in antihistamine cream she appears to be like like, properly, an alien.
Stone is excellent as the cut-throat lady boss attempting to show her firm’s rep round with performative empathy: be happy to depart at 5.30pm, she tells her workers, earlier than reminding them that this is not obligatory, and that they actually should make sure that they’ve accomplished all their duties first. But hey, it is as much as them! Even when tied up in Teddy’s basement, she calmly deploys each trick she’s discovered from prime CEO-ing – reasoning, bargaining, even faking an act of contrition. She actually believes she will be able to get herself out of any sticky scenario with the proper corporate-speak. But Plemons’s pressured, sweating Teddy is his match: a person pushed so near the edge that no quantity of smooth-talk, and even arduous proof, can dissuade him from his mission. There is not any reasoning with this kind of particular person. Anyone who’s been on social media at any level in the final decade will acknowledge him solely too properly.
The movie toys with our sympathies. A chilly-hearted CEO is clearly not our good friend however then we do not like seeing her being subjected to Teddy’s more and more unhinged exams both. The latter has clearly had his mind scrambled by grief and what’s hinted to have been childhood sexual abuse, but his sheer refusal to listen to something that will not verify his pre-existing beliefs is frustrating. Only Don, who spends the film being horribly manipulated by Teddy and Michelle, has any room for doubt in his life. Given that Lanthimos’s fantastical worlds are so usually populated by stilted oddballs he looks like an actual rarity: a real human being with a coronary heart.
The twist was at all times coming. Teddy is revealed to have butchered a number of innocents in his hunt for Andromedans – however he is proper about Michelle. She actually does belong to a distant alien race. In reality, she’s their empress. Human beings solely happened as a result of the Andromedans invented them, as a “sorry” for unintentionally wiping out the dinosaurs (oops!). Something should have gone unsuitable with the design, although, as a result of this species appears hellbent on the destruction of themselves and the planet.
Humans, concludes Alien Stone, are a busted flush. As she terminates us all with the flick of a swap we see the outcomes again on Earth in a surprising montage set to Marlene Dietrich’s Where Have All the Flowers Gone: schoolchildren lie useless of their classroom, lovers have been extinguished mid-intercourse, a motorway of useless drivers slumped of their vehicles. And but life – the flowers, the birds and, sure, the bees – appear to be thriving. Nature is therapeutic.
Lanthimos’s movies usually depart you questioning what you have simply seen and pondering a complete variety of doable interpretations. Bugonia appears extra direct. It addresses very trendy illnesses, from company ecocide to the folks on society’s fringes being sucked down the worst wormholes of the web. The solely query you are left wrestling with will not be save humanity from itself, however whether or not human beings are actually value saving in any respect. In 2026, that appears a very poignant one.
