Movies

Peter Suderman | 10.31.2025 10:04 AM

As movies that diagnose the modern condition go, you can't do much better than Yorgos Lanthimos' Bugonia. Lanthimos has always been cold and caustic, proffering oddball metaphors for the absurd state of existence. But those fantastic metaphors have often been a little too on the nose, and his coldness has sometimes read as self-satisfied smugness. In Bugonia, his absurdist streak finally seems to have landed somewhere in the vicinity of the real world. Or maybe the real world just caught up. 

The movie follows two young men, Teddy Gatz (Jesse Plemons) and Don (Aidan Delbis), as they plan and execute a plot to kidnap a corporate CEO, Michelle Fuller (Emma Stone).

Disheveled and disturbed, there is clearly something wrong with both men: Don is what press materials describe as neurodivergent, and he looks up to Teddy. Teddy, meanwhile, is clearly intelligent and possessed of a wild-eyed intensity. But after doing his research on........

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