The bees are dying, the executives are talking, and the joke may be on us.
Is Bugonia a place? A character’s name? Apparently it has something to do with Greek mythology and bees. I’ve always thought that if the human race died out, it would have something to do with colony collapse disorder. I just never imagined it could happen—or look quite like this.
Emma Stone plays Michelle, an executive at a vast, vaguely defined conglomerate—something like Amazon filtered through the pharmaceutical industry. She delivers corporate edicts that sound humane while being quietly coercive, the kind of language designed to make people work harder for less while thanking management for the privilege. Stress is treated as a given. Burnout is reframed as responsibility. Somewhere in the background, the bees are dying.
There’s enough good in Bugonia to almost compensate for Yorgos Lanthimos’s increasingly questionable sense of humor. The film has the shape and texture of something very familiar—procedural, paranoid, vicious. With only minor adjustments, it could easily pass for a season of Fargo. The score and cinematography are immaculate, and the performances are absurd in ways that still feel recognizable. Everything seems carefully built. It might even feel like a masterpiece—right up until it decides not to be one. But what’s the fun in that?
The Oscar buzz around Stone feels less about nuance than about her continued commitment to being Lanthimos’s most pliable collaborator. Yes, she really shaved her head for this. The film flirts with weighty ideas—mental illness, institutional power, corporate systems managing human behavior—in ways that feel unnerving and recognizable. But it keeps shifting, nudging, testing how much disbelief the audience is willing to suspend.
The whole thing plays like a meticulously structured Upright Citizens Brigade sketch that refuses to announce where the joke is—or when it’s over. I understood what it was doing. I admired the confidence. This could have been No Country for Old Men or The Silence of the Lambs. I just couldn’t shake the feeling that it was laughing at a version of the movie I would have liked better.
Bugonia is handsome and deeply committed to its own logic. In real life, we probably already know these characters. Whether we recognize them as such is another matter.
7.5/10
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