Bugonia ... perhaps one of the best of the year.

I’ve always felt that horror can be truly great and effective when there is an element of believability to it. We don’t get scared of Jason Voorhees and Freddy Krueger because they exist in realms so far out of reality that we find it easy to cheer them on as opposed to their victims. Something like Jaws, on the other hand, was so effective – and still is – because shark attacks are very real. Whereas the likelihood of most of us ever encountering a shark as big as good ol’ Bruce is slim, we can put ourselves in the unsuspecting beachgoer's shoes.

            Bugonia, starring Emma Stone, Jesse Plemons, and Aidan Delbis is often billed as a “black comedy,” though frankly, I found next to nothing about it very funny at all. Instead, I found aspects of the movie very chilling and unsettling, precisely because of the reasons I’ve already mentioned. The plot, on its surface, sounds absurd, perhaps lending itself to the classification as a comedy: two conspiracy theorists kidnap the CEO of a pharmaceutical company because they believe she is an alien out to conquer mankind. I agree. It sounds like the plot of one of the lesser episodes of The Twilight Zone. In fact though, Bugonia is an unsettling horror picture that feels all too real in the modern world, casting its lens on the post-truth, conspiracy theory-laden culture we in the United States find ourselves in. Along with some disturbing torture scenes, some surprising gore, and a couple of really sharp twists, Bugonia stood out to me as one of the best horror films of 2025.

            Teddy (Plemons), a disturbed yet intelligent young man, and his special-needs cousin Don (Delbis) have come to believe that Michelle Fuller (Stone) is an agent from Andromeda, her company poisoning their customers, killing the world’s bee population, and looking to exterminate planet Earth. Teddy (Don is driven forward and manipulated by Teddy) has devised a plan to abduct and extract the truth from Michelle, along with the means to prevent her from contacting her superiors, including shaving off all her hair and covering her with antihistamine cream.

            Sounds goofy, but it’s not. Plemons and Stone’s acting is fabulous (both were nominated for  a Golden Globe), and the scenes between the three of them in the basement where they keep her are thick with tension. Michelle tries to reason with them in as logical a manner as possible,  but Teddy is unmoved, clearly a very troubled person and quite off his rocker. Both things are eventually explained, adding complexity to a character who comes off as nothing but a madman at first.

            One of the things that makes Teddy so chilling a character is his unwavering belief that he is right. He claims to have done much “research” but never offers what he’s done (it is eventually revealed), and such unabated conviction, despite the lack of evidence and the sheer unbelievability of his claims, is as frightening as anything else you’ll see in horror today. While the internet has made information limitlessly accessible, there seems to be more ignorance than ever, often with tragic, violent results. We live in a society where ideologies and truths are crafted and reformed with the few strokes of a keyboard, and just like in the real world, Teddy sprinkles powerful arguments in with his outlandish ones. He’s not only highly disturbed but highly intelligent and well-read. Stone’s Michelle Fuller is also an indictment of the corporate culture of greed and failings of our healthcare system.

            The climax is a doozy, likely divisive, but overall, Bugonia can, like all good horror and Sci-Fi, be watched for pure entertainment or as something more, perhaps a scathing indictment of our destructive framing and reframing of what is true and what is possible in our world. A black comedy, it is not. I don’t think I laughed a single time while watching it. It is, however, a dark, superbly acted film that grapples with truly frightening concepts that we find not in our megaplexes, but on our news broadcasts.