The Greek director delivers his driest and most paranoid film, supported by a haunting soundtrack by Jerskin Fendrix that turns silence into menace.
By LoffMusic Editorial Staff
After the baroque exuberance of Poor Things, Yorgos Lanthimos returns to his rougher roots. In Bugonia, an adaptation of the South Korean film Save the Green Planet! ( 2003), the filmmaker dissects with a scalpel technological paranoia, media conspiracy and the fragility of human communication.
The result: a dark, grotesque and deeply contemporary satire, starring Emma Stone and Jesse Plemons, where dialogue is a weapon and music, a battlefield.
The absurd as a mirror
Bugonia begins as a kidnapping film and ends up as a study in misinformation and ego.
Two paranoid young men – Plemons and Aidan Delbis – kidnap the head of a powerful biotech company (Stone), convinced that she is an alien sent to destroy the planet.
In that delusional premise, Lanthimos finds fertile ground for his obsession with miscommunication.
The director avoids general shots: the camera clings to faces, to looks, to discomfort.
Everything happens in gestures. There is no empathy, only surgical observation. And what he shows is not pretty: a fractured, narcissistic society that no longer distinguishes between truth and spectacle.
As The Guardian wrote,
“Bugonia is a cruel parable about the digital age, where insanity is no longer measured by what you believe, but by how many likes you get for believing it.”
Music as an invisible threat
The soundtrack, composed by Jerskin Fendrix, is one of the keys to the film.
After his work on Poor Things and Kinds of Kindness, the British composer returns to collaborate with Lanthimos, but here he takes his style to a more claustrophobic extreme.
Fendrix himself commented in Variety that the director asked him for “four basic sensations: bees, basement, spaceship and contained fear.”
From that premise emerged a score full of buzzing strings, dislocated percussion and electronic breaths, a mix reminiscent of both György Ligeti and Jonny Greenwood, but with a tone more biological than orchestral.
According to IndieWire,
” Bugonia’ s sound design and music are so invasive that at times you feel like the film is breathing down your neck.”
Every pause, every silence, every creak reinforces the feeling of confinement. The music does not accompany; it locks you in with the characters.
Criticism and international reception
The film, which premiered at the Venice Film Festival 2025, has divided the critics, something usual in the Lanthimos universe.
- Little White Lies describes it as “an absurd, uncomfortable and fascinating bombshell”.
- The Washington Post calls it “a morally ambiguous piece of clockwork.”
- On Metacritic, it accumulates a 71/100, with a consensus of “generally favorable”.
Emma Stone’ s performance – in her fourth collaboration with the director – has been widely praised. Rolling Stone underlined that “Stone moves between martyr and monster, with an emotional precision that chills the blood”.
A film that compels you to watch (and listen).
Beyond its conspiratorial plot, Bugonia works as an X-ray of the present.
Lanthimos turns digital chaos into black comedy, and fear of algorithms into existential farce.
Between nervous laughter and electronic buzzes, the film poses an uncomfortable question:
“What happens when we no longer distinguish the human from the programmed?”
And, although it offers no answer, the echo it leaves sounds as clear as the buzzing sound that opens its first scene.
Bugonia does not seek to please; it seeks to shake.
It is cinema for those who enjoy risk and discomfort.
A dramatic comedy as grotesque as it is lucid, where the music of Jerskin Fendrix works as a mirror of the mental noise of our era.
Lanthimos confirms that his cinema, halfway between cruelty and beauty, remains the most fertile ground of contemporary auteur cinema.
“The apocalypse comes not with explosions, but with notifications.”
And Bugonia demonstrates this with surgical precision.
