Why Bugonia Should Win the Academy Award for Best Picture | Oscars 2026

eMma Stone as a kidnapped, shaven-headed CEO of a pharmaceutical company who may also be the ruler of a major alien race? It tells us a lot about director Yorgos Lanthimos that Bugonia was his most straightforward film to date.

For this new version of the popular 2003 South Korean film Save the Green Planet! We’re invited into the unkempt home of beekeeper Teddy (Jesse Plemons), a paranoid conspiracy theorist whose Internet research leads him to believe aliens are poisoning his bees — and that he alone can save life on Earth from extinction. He recruits his neurodiverse cousin Don (Aidan Delpiss) to kidnap high-flying Michelle Fuller (Stone), whose company Auxolith has apparently caused Teddy’s mother some kind of irreparable harm in the past.

Stone enjoys pushing herself artistically for Lanthimos and Pogonia is no different: here we see her pass out in the back of a car while a horrified Don takes pieces of her hair with a pair of scissors (Teddy insists that she can only communicate with her alien peers through her hair). By the time she’s doused from head to toe in antihistamine cream, she looks like an alien.

Stone gives a great performance as the tough girl boss who tries to change her company’s rep through performative empathy: Feel free to leave at 5:30 p.m., she tells her employees, before reminding them that it’s not mandatory, and that they should make sure they’ve done all their tasks first. But hey, it’s up to them! Even when she’s chained up in Teddy’s basement, she quietly uses all the tricks she’s learned from top executives—reasoning, bargaining, and even faking a guilty plea. She truly believes that she can get herself out of any difficult situation by speaking the right word for the company. But the tense, sweaty Teddy Plemons is her equal: a man pushed so close to the edge that no amount of smooth talking, or even hard evidence, can dissuade him from his mission. There is no logic with this type of person. Anyone who has been on social media at any time over the past decade will recognize it well.

The film plays with our sympathies. The cold-hearted CEO is clearly no friend of ours, but then we don’t like to see her subjected to Teddy’s increasingly troubled tests either. The latter clearly has his mind clouded by grief and what is implied to have been child sexual abuse, but his absolute refusal to hear anything that doesn’t confirm his pre-existing beliefs is maddening. Only Don, who spends the film being horribly manipulated by Teddy and Michelle, has any room for doubt in his life. Considering that Lanthimos’s fictional worlds are often populated by eccentric people, he seems like a true rarity: a real human being with a heart.

Development was always coming. Teddy is revealed to have slaughtered many innocents while hunting down the Andromedans – but he’s right about Michelle. She truly belongs to a distant alien race. In fact, she is their empress. Humans only came into being because the Andromedans invented humans, as a sort of “regret” for accidentally exterminating the dinosaurs (oops!). There must be something wrong with the design, because this species seems intent on destroying itself and the planet.

Alien Stone concludes that humans are a broken flux. While it ends us all with the click of a button, we see the results back on Earth in a stunning montage of Marlene Dietrich’s Where Have All the Roses Gone: schoolchildren lie dead in their classrooms, lovers extinguished mid-coitus, and a highway of drivers tumbled dead in their cars. And yet life – The flowers, birds, and yes, bees, seem to be thriving. Nature is healing.

Lanthimos’ films often leave you wondering what you just saw and contemplating a plethora of possible explanations. Bugonia seems to be more direct. He addressed very modern ills, from corporate ecocide to people on the margins of society being sucked into the worst holes of the Internet. The only question you’ll wrestle with is not how to save humanity from itself, but whether humans are worth saving at all. In 2026, this seems particularly poignant.