‘Bugonia’: Read The Screenplay For Yorgos Lanthimos’ Film In Which A Conspiracy Theorist Holds Humanity’s Fate Hostage
Deadline’s Read the Screenplay series spotlighting the scripts behind the awards season’s most talked-about movies continues with Bugonia, Focus Features‘ dark social satire written by The Menu and Succession scribe Will Tracy and directed by Yorgos Lanthimos.
The film premiered at the 82nd Venice Film Festival and has since been nominated for Best Feature at the Gotham Film Awards. Starring Emma Stone, Jesse Plemons and Aidan Delbis, the film is an English-language adaptation of the 2003 South Korean dark comedy Save the Green Planet!
Bugonia centers on two young, conspiracy-obsessed men, Teddy Gatz (Plemmons) and his neurodivergent cousin Don (Delbis). Convinced that the Earth is secretly ruled by a malicious alien species known as “Andromedans” who are actively destroying the planet (symbolized by the vanishing honeybee population), the cousins decide to take extreme action. They kidnap Michelle Fuller (Stone), the high-powered CEO of the pharmaceutical mega-corporation Auxolith, where Teddy works as a low-level employee. Teddy firmly believes Michelle is an alien in disguise, intent on global destruction. The men chain her in their basement, shave her head to prevent alien communication, and attempt to force her to contact her mothership to negotiate the saving of humanity. The tense, bizarre standoff that ensues is driven by the clash between the captors’ feverish paranoia and the CEO’s corporate sociopathy, culminating in shocking violence and a twist ending that validates the captors’ seemingly unhinged fears.
The film’s central protagonist, or perhaps anti-hero, is Teddy, a working-class man warped by personal tragedy and a descent into conspiratorial thinking fueled by online echo chambers. His primary motivation is a deeply personal one: His mother, played by Alicia Silverstone, was left comatose after participating in a clinical trial for an Auxolith drug, making his kidnapping of Michelle a form of desperate revenge intertwined with his self-proclaimed mission to save the world. While Teddy acts monstrously —kidnapping, torturing, and ultimately killing — his actions are rooted in genuine albeit misguided pain and a desire to make sense of a world where he feels powerless and exploited. He is portrayed as both a dangerous fanatic and a pitiable victim of late-stage capitalism and misinformation.
Bugonia functions as a razor-sharp, dark satire that brilliantly dissects several major anxieties of contemporary society, with its core themes revolving around conspiracy and misinformation, class warfare, moral ambiguity, and profound social alienation. In classic Lanthimos style, the film refuses to offer easy moral judgments or a clear protagonist, instead using its narrative framework to comment on the dysfunctional systems that govern modern life. The narrative strategy ensures the audience is left in a state of unsettling oscillation, forcing them to confront the moral gray areas of its characters and the real-world pressures that shape their actions.
The film’s strength lies in its ethical opacity, which acts as a powerful commentary on how political and economic structures can isolate individuals to the point of turning them into antagonists. We are simultaneously asked to feel sympathy for the broken, exploited Teddy while feeling disgust for his actions, all while regarding the cold, manipulative Michelle with a mix of fear and condemnation. This deliberate ambiguity is the film’s central thesis, illustrating how systemic exploitation and estrangement ultimately lead individuals to internalize conflict and turn against their peers rather than challenging the forces that truly oppress them.
Read the screenplay below.
