Dispatches from AFI Fest 2025: Bugonia
By Joshua Silva, Edited by Amanda Mayoras
Every year the fall film festival season closes with AFI Fest, where for a few days the Chinese Theaters in Hollywood intersperse their usual fare like Tron: Ares and Black Phone 2 with some of year’s most prominent arthouse films. I was lucky enough to catch eight films that screened this year, the first of which was Yorgos Lanthimos’ Bugonia.
Though the film has already released in theaters it opened AFI Fest’s Special Screenings the day before its initial release. It stars Emma Stone and Jesse Plemons, who form the central dichotomy: the former Michelle Fuller, is a rich CEO who epitomizes functioning smoothly within capitalist society. The latter, Teddy, has cast himself out of society in favor of an insular lifestyle of self-defense against the corrupting forces of corporate America, which he just so happens to attribute to evil aliens, “the Andromedans.” Fuller has sold Teddy’s mother a drug that rendered her comatose, so Teddy kidnaps her, demanding that she tell her alien overlords to leave earth.
The film wrings out a tension between the suffering indirectly wrought by the rich but “sane,” and the more direct suffering wrought as retribution by the “insane” Teddy. Lanthimos initially lets you relate to both, finding pathos and contempt in either character depending on who has the upper hand, the lines between perpetrator and victim never so clear. We root for a reconciliation between the two, one impeded by Teddy’s stubborn insistence that Michelle is an alien with her own language. When Michelle inevitably cannot communicate in that language, any negotiations further deteriorate — perhaps an allegory for the trite platitude that “we’re just not listening to each other” in political discourse. But how could we? When mass death at the hands of corporations has been fully rationalized into the fabric of American politics? When you have no voice in the political landscape, it becomes easy to start hearing voices of your own…
The film raises this question but does not really explore it; in fact it does the opposite, whittling down Teddy’s complexity through a series of actions and reveals that only tell you, “hey, this guy who you thought was crazy? He’s actually even crazier.” And whatever social commentary remains completely collapses during the eye roll-inducing ending (the greatest reminder that this was penned by the writer of The Menu), wherein it’s revealed that Michelle Fuller actually is an alien. In theory the reveal that Teddy’s paranoia was valid could make the audience further empathize with those labeled conspiracy theorists, but the twist is so far-removed from reality and played for absurdism as to not seriously engage with Teddy and his mental illness.