If you’ve lingered on social media long enough, you’ve probably met the new prophets of paranoia. Their sermons range from Tucker Carlson’s cabal of hummus eaters to Candace Owens’s theory that Jeffrey Epstein was a Mossad agent, to COVID-19 vaccines laced with mind control. Conspiracies aren’t new, but in an age where outrage is monetized and engagement equals credibility, delusion has gone more mainstream than ever.
Yorgos Lanthimos’s Bugonia, his latest collaboration with Emma Stone, asks what makes such fantasies so alluring — and when exactly delusion curdles into danger.
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Stone plays Michelle Fuller, the imperious CEO of a pharmaceutical giant. She begins each morning with an American Psycho–style routine: assiduous skincare, sprinting, sparring. She speaks corporate jargon as if it were a native tongue. “No one should feel pressured to overwork,” she assures her employees — before adding, with the most insincere smile conceivable, “but if people still have work to do, they should absolutely stay and continue to work.” Stone makes no attempt to humanize her, portraying Fuller as the embodiment of everything political leftists love to demonize in executives and billionaires.
Meanwhile, far from Fuller’s manicured estate and Mercedes G-Wagon, Teddy (Jesse Plemons) and Don (Aidan Delbis) scrape by on the fringes. Plemons gives Teddy a haunted intensity that’s both terrifying and sympathetic; he could walk into any psych ward with this paranoid performance and be admitted on sight. A warehouse worker and amateur beekeeper, Teddy is convinced that aliens have infiltrated humanity and are orchestrating its demise. He imagines himself as Roddy Piper in John Carpenter’s They Live — the lone man who can see the truth.
Conspiracy theorists are often dismissed as idiots, but Bugonia shows why that dismissal is dangerous. Even intelligent people can be seduced by false premises — sometimes to make sense of chaos, sometimes to deflect blame. Once a smart mind commits to a bad idea, intellect doesn’t save it; it fortifies it. Every inconsistency spawns another, ever more abstract rationalization to patch the logical gaps. Teddy’s mind is one such hive — self-sustaining, airtight, and lethal to outsiders.
Don, his trusting cousin, is the film’s tragic soul: kind but intellectually stunted, reminiscent of Lennie from John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men. Teddy manipulates him with missionary zeal, even convincing him to chemically castrate himself to “ward off distractions.”
“Are you ready to be free?” he asks before injecting him. It’s one of the film’s most disturbing moments — how Teddy’s righteous conviction commands such absolute trust from Don despite the absurdity of his demands.
When Teddy becomes convinced that Fuller is an intergalactic alien disguised as a human, he enlists Don to abduct her. They shave her head so she can’t use it to “signal for help” and imprison her in their basement, demanding that she arrange an audience with her alien emperor (Teddy never explains how he concluded the aliens were ruled by a monarchy). At this point, the film could go one of two ways: either Fuller kills her deluded captors in cathartic fashion or she turns out actually to be an alien. I won’t spoil which, but Lanthimos earns the reveal.
The tension rests entirely on the shifting dynamic between Teddy and his hostage: How is Fuller supposed to convince Teddy that she isn’t an alien? It’s like imagining Candace Owens abducting Brigitte Macron and demanding the first lady of France admit she’s secretly a man.
Composer Jerskin Fendrix’s score amplifies the atmosphere. His sweeping, operatic crescendos could score a space opera, yet applied to Bugonia — essentially a minimalist interrogation drama — they plunge us into Teddy’s perspective, where his basement truly is a war room for humanity’s survival.
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Lanthimos’s attention to detail is another testament to his precision as a filmmaker. Before each interrogation with Fuller, Teddy and Don — despite their disheveled, off-the-grid appearances — change into suits and ties, convinced they’re addressing interstellar royalty. Fuller’s sarcastic attempts to reason with them (“Sure, I’ll call my ship”) add brief flashes of uneasy humor that offer welcome respite from the film’s otherwise relentless tension.
Not everything lands. A tertiary subplot involving a local police officer and his connection to Teddy’s childhood trauma feels underdeveloped and could have been excised without loss. But these are minor distractions. Plemons’s and Stone’s performances are Oscar-worthy, and Delbis’s naive devotion is profoundly heartbreaking. Together, they make Bugonia a bleakly funny and unsettling study of what happens when faith, paranoia, and righteousness fuse into something indistinguishable from religion.
Harry Khachatrian (@Harry1T6) is a film critic for the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. He is a software engineer, holds a master’s degree from the University of Toronto, and writes about wine at BetweenBottles.com.
