Maybe I have just been living under a rock, but in the last few years I have been appalled to realise just how common it is to use the word “alien” to describe immigrants. It is such an explicitly dehumanising term matched in its obvious implicit hatred by its brazen shamelessness.
As far as I can tell, this word has been used politically to describe immigrants or foreigners since as early as the 14th century, and has been used in the United States as early as the country’s inception with the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798. That this word has become so common in 2025, no longer carrying nearly as much cultural weight or code-breaking aggression, is so indicative of just how far American foreign policy has gone down the moral drain. For every person who is shocked and appalled by this use of the word “alien,” there seems to be at least one counterpart who relishes the opportunity to wrap their mouth around the slur as a way of asserting political or ideological dominance.
I was in a particularly bad mood for this reason the day I saw Yorgos Lanthimos’ new film Bugonia, and it was into this frustration and desperate fury that the film sank its razor sharp satirical incisors. An adaptation of a 2003 Korean black comedy-horror film Save the Green Planet, it follows two socially isolated conspiracy theorists who kidnap the CEO of a pharmaceutical company – convinced she is an alien. Jesse Plemons and newcomer Aidan Delbis play the paranoid and high strung cousins with a deliciously provocative combination of empathy and repulsion, while Emma Stone continues her fruitful collaboration with Lanthimos with perhaps her most accessible performance in a Lanthimos vehicle as CEO Michelle.
Plemmons and Delbis’ cousins Teddy and Don are not simply insane conspiracy theorists with no link to reality – something that evolves into a brilliantly zany
punchline of a final act. But rather they are a product of their environment, and they are driven to label Stone’s Michelle as an alien because of the perceived danger her alien identity poses to the world. You don’t have to have a PHD in social sciences to figure out the subtext at work here.
Where Bugonia was at its best for me was in its numerous “interrogation” scenes between Teddy and Michelle once Teddy and Don have successfully kidnapped Michelle and chained her to a bed in their basement. It is the sort of narrative device that is normally reserved for trashy slasher films – a woman held against her will in a basement by two men who are willing to physically torture her. And yet in this setting it becomes a darkly hilarious reflection of contemporary political discourse.
It would be too simple to label Michelle and Teddy as “left” and “right”, even though plenty of people have already rushed to do so pretty hamfistedly. The aforementioned punchline of an ending that I will not spoil goes the extra mile to make sure that interpretation holds no water. But regardless, what plays out in that basement is a maddeningly incongruous argument based on a fundamental lack of an agreed upon version of reality. Teddy says that she is a member of an alien race who has been part of a years-long conspiracy to weaken the human race through the infrastructure of big pharma. Michelle, rightfully scared for her life but also much smarter than Teddy, calmly attempts to engage in rational discourse. Teddy has done his own research, so nothing Michelle could say to him would ever even make a difference. Michelle pleads to Teddy’s inner humanity. Teddy has his pride wounded and resorts to violence, both verbal and physical.
And so it goes around, and around. And around.
In an article I wrote on my Substack about Ari Aster’s new film Eddington I examined the way that film portrays what happens to culture and community when there is no longer an agreed-upon version of reality to hold us to common decency. Bugonia
continues that conversation, shifting the lens from communities to individuals. What chance do any of us have of engaging with people who subscribe to hateful and misanthropic views of immigration when it seems to be a rigged encounter from the start? How do we address first the fundamental need to reaffirm the dignity and inherent value of every single human being when others seem so intent on disassembling it? Bugonia hints at empathy and communication as being a way forwards, but seems to instead be more interested in holding the absurdity and insanity of the current moment up to the light to reflect the true sadness it holds.
To say that it is one of Yorgos Lanthimos’ more accessible films isn’t really saying a whole lot, given that it is in comparison to macabre and extreme satire joints like Dogtooth, The Killing of a Sacred Deer and the brilliant Poor Things. The performances are provocative and bold across the board (including an outrageous appearance from comedian Stavros Halkias), and it is a brutal and hilarious conspiracy thriller that truly pulls none of its punches. It truthfully and yet sardonically exposes something really dark at the heart of western colonial culture, before taking its premise and turning it on its head in shocking and outrageous fashion in the final act.
Jonty writes about film, narrative and culture on his Substack, “Postcards from the Abyss”.
