Bugonia Movie Review

Bugonia Movie Review

Bugonia is an audacious swing from director Yorgos Lanthimos and yet ANOTHER showcase for why Emma Stone is rapidly entering the conversation about the greatest actresses of her generation.

A reimagining of the cult South Korean film Save the Green Planet!, Bugonia balances absurdity with existential dread. The premise is bizarre, even confrontational, yet the film never collapses under its own strangeness. That steadiness is largely due to Stone. She plays her role with a razor’s edge. She is calculated, emotionally layered, and just ambiguous enough to keep audiences unsettled. In a Lanthimos film, performances can easily tip into caricature, but Stone refuses to let that happen.

What makes her work here extraordinary is her control. Like she understands tone at a molecular level. In one moment, she’s icy and unreadable; in the next, she reveals a flicker of vulnerability that reframes everything we thought we knew. It’s not loud acting. It’s precise acting. She doesn’t beg for attention in surreal set pieces, instead she anchors them alongside the brilliant Jesse Plemons.

Across her collaborations with Lanthimos and beyond, Stone has demonstrated fearless range: comedy, tragedy, satire, musical spectacle, psychological drama. In Bugonia, she synthesizes all of it. There’s confidence in her stillness, intelligence in her timing, and a complete absence of vanity in how far she’s willing to go.

Great actresses don’t just disappear into roles, they instead elevate the material and with Bugonia she isn’t just meeting the film’s ambition; she sharpens it. If this trajectory continues, the “best ever” conversation won’t feel hyperbolic. It’ll feel inevitable.

BUGONIA is out now on DVD, Bluray and 4K UHD. Shop more new release DVD and Blu-Ray here at Sanity now!

Ryan Unicomb (@itsryanunicomb on Instagram) wrote this blog post for Sanity!