Director Yorgos Lanthimos and Writer Will Tracy on the Blurred Morality of “Bugonia”
The title of Yorgos Lanthimos’s newest psychological thriller, Bugonia, refers to an ancient Greek belief that bees are born from the corpses of cows. In the film, protagonist Teddy (Jesse Plemons) keeps bees, but it’s a minor hobby compared to his main passion, which, as it develops on-screen, is as curious, revolting, and belief-beggaring as bugonia’s original ancient meaning. Teddy is absolutely certain that Earth is under the control of an alien race called the Andromedans, and right here in his rundown house in the American heartland, he is determined to do something about it. With his cousin and roommate, Don (Aidan Delbis), Teddy kidnaps Michelle (Emma Stone), the CEO of a bioengineering pharmaceutical company, and the entity Teddy believes to be the Andromedans’ local representative.
Convinced that Michelle has a plan to cause planetary armageddon via colony collapse disorder, Teddy and Don chain their captive up in their basement, shave her head—Teddy is certain that Andromedans communicate through their hair—and slather her anti-alien lotion. By way of testing her alien powers, Teddy tortures Michelle while Don, the film’s moral heart, protests. Michelle, steely and focused even in desperate circumstances, tries to reason with her captors. What gets her out of the basement isn’t her power of persuasion but Teddy’s belief, after a hideous round of electric shocks, that not only is Michelle an alien, she’s alien royalty. The cousins relocate her upstairs, and Teddy, via spaghetti and grocery-store wine, tries to treat Michelle according to her perceived regal status.
Teddy is a deeply complex villain who behaves monstrously but is also gradually revealed by Lanthimos and writer Will Tracy (Succession, The Menu) to be sorrowfully pitiable. “I don’t think the movie would make much sense or be of much interest if he were just crazy or wrong or stupid or immoral,” Tracy said. “Look, he does some bad things and he’s not right about everything, but he’s right about a lot, and identifies a lot of symptoms correctly.” It’s odd, for example, that the underemployed Teddy has a house, decrepit though it may be, all to himself; it’s eventually revealed that he used to share it with his opioid-addicted mother, Sandy (Alicia Silverstone). Don is now all the family Teddy has left, and the two young men are deeply, credibly bonded. “I don’t think the film would work if you didn’t feel at some point some empathy for Teddy’s character. It also comes through Don’s character and their relationship. You see the love between them,” Lanthimos said.
Teddy and Don rarely leave their home, which the production built from scratch in the English countryside, and the house itself helps uncover their past. “It was unlikely we’d ever find a house that suited every situation we needed,” Lanthimos said. “We decided to build the house and the basement so we could make something that felt real, and so we could maintain some continuity while filming, because the film takes place in a very short period of time.” The basement is bleak, the ground floor is filled with relics of Teddy’s former life with his mother, and in the attic, there’s a brief glimpse of an anonymous, absentee father as Teddy and Don pull a dated pair of men’s suits from a box of old clothes to put on to meet their captive. By building the house the characters needed, Lanthimos said, “you could be very meticulous about the environment around them and what it stirred up.”
The more Michelle tries to reason with Teddy, the stronger Teddy’s vociferous insistence that she is an alien becomes. At the same time, the reality of Teddy’s sad life builds up, and his conspiracy theories start to come off more sympathetic than lunatic. The blurred morality lines are intentional. “I don’t think it’s the main point of the film to figure out who is right and who is wrong,” said Lanthimos. Instead, Bugonia challenges audiences to focus on the dynamics between its tiny cast and their changing perceptions of one another, revealing certain truths about human nature and how each one of us perceives the world. “Even the nicest people can do horrible things if the circumstances are correct,” Lanthimos said.
Featured image: (L to R) Aidan Delbis as Don, Jesse Plemons as Teddy and Emma Stone as Michelle in director Yorgos Lanthimos’ BUGONIA, a Focus Features release. Credit: Atsushi Nishijima/Focus Features © 2025 All Rights Reserved.
