Emma Stone in “Bugonia.”
Focus Features/Atsushi Nishijima
Bugonia — Emma Stone’s alien invastion satire from director Yorgos Lanthimos — expands to a wide release in theaters on Friday. What are Rotten Tomatoes critics saying about the film?
Bugonia marks Stone’s fourth feature film collaboration with the filmmaker, following The Favourite (2018), Poor Things (2023) and Kinds of Kindness (2024). Poor Things earned Stone her second Best Actress Oscar after her previous win in the category for 2016’s La La Land.
Rated R, Bugonia was released in select theaters on Oct. 24 and xpands to more than 1,700 venues on Friday. The logline for the film reads, “Two conspiracy-obsessed young men kidnap the high-powered CEO of a major company, convinced that she is an alien intent on destroying planet Earth.”
Bugonia also stars Jesse Plemons, Aidan Delbis, Stavros Halkias and Alicia Silverstone.
As of Wednesday, Bugonia has earned an 88% “fresh” rating from Rotten Tomatoes critics based on 147 reviews. The RT Critics Consensus reads, “Emma Stone and Jesse Plemons are at the top of their game in Bugonia, a bonkers entertainment that applies director Yorgos Lanthimos’ whip-smart method to modern society’s madness.”
In addition, audiences on RT gave Bugonia an 82% “fresh” score on RT’s Popcornmeter based on 100-plus verified user ratings. The RT audience summary for the film is still pending.
What Are Individual Critics Saying About ‘Bugonia’?
Amy Nicholson of the Los Angeles Times is among the top critics on RT who gives the film a “fresh” rating, writing, “Bugonia is a hilarious movie with no hope for the future of humanity. What optimism there is lies only in the title, an ancient Greek word for the science of transforming dead cows into hives, of turning death into life.”
Jake Coyle of The Associated Press also gives the film a “fresh” rating on RT, writing, “By the time Bugonia reaches its unforgettable finale, it’s made chillingly clear just how feeble any such movement might be, and the movie’s apocalyptic air of resignation, of fait accompli, sounds a chastening death knell.”
Kyle Smith of the Wall Street Journal is also a fan of Bugonia, writing on RT, “The story is pointedly not for everyone, but I enjoyed its twisted deviltry.”
Among Bugonia’s detractors on RT is Barry Hertz of the UK’s Globe and Mail, who takes aim at Yorgos Lanthimos in his “rotten” review, writing, “The longer that Lanthimos is able to get away with such antics, the poorer the entire cinematic ecosystem becomes. Save the planet? Let’s start small and simply save our time.”
G. Allen Johnson of the San Francisco Chronicle isn’t a fan of Bugonia, either, writing in his “rotten” review summary on RT, “So we’re set up for a darkly comic tale of the need to rein in corporate malfeasance versus the dangers of social media disinformation. The problem is, Lanthimos has no interest in exploring issues, just raising them.”
Austin Whittaker of the Austin Chronicle is also among the top critics on RT who gives Bugonia a “rotten” review, writing, “It’s the excellence of execution that obfuscates that Jang’s wild but pointed tragicomedy has lost its incisiveness in translation, its blunderbuss now loaded with feathers rather than buckshot.”
Bugonia, which is currently playing in limited release, expands to theaters nationwide on Friday.