BUGONIA (2025): Emma Stone and Yorgos Lanthimos’ Film Gets a Nearly 7-Minute Ovation at Venice Film Festival

Bugonia Has Been Well-Received on the Festival Circuit

Emma Stone and director Yorgos Lanthimos‘ latest collaboration, Bugonia, has received terrific feedback from its film festival premiere at Venice and its showing at Telluride.

Emma Stone and Jesse Plemons are featured alongside Alicia Silverstone and others in Bugonia, a fascinating new picture based on a South Korean film called Save the Green Planet. This new Emma Stone movie, directed by her long time collaborator, Yorgos Lanthimos, received a nearly 7-minute ovation at the Venice Film Festival while at Telluride, it was said that Stone and Plemons are absolutely astonishing in their roles in the upcoming picture.

In Bugonia, Stone portrays a high-powered CEO who is kidnapped and is thought to be an alien from another planet looking to destroy Earth. Plemons serves as one of the kidnappers who is an employee of the CEO’s company. Stone has shaved her head for part of her role in the new picture and, judging from the early reviews, it seems Stone could be a contender for another Oscar nomination for Best Actress. Plemons could also be in the running for an Academy Award nod for his intense performance as a beekeeper in the forthcoming film.

Some have stated that the wildly creative Bugonia resembles the earlier Lanthimos movies like Dogtooth or The Lobster more than his more recent fare like The Favourite and Poor Things. Stone won the Oscar for her revealing work in Lanthimos’ Poor Things and, before that, scored an Academy Award nod for her “supporting work” in The Favourite. Lanthimos’ Kinds of Kindness didn’t yield Stone a nod from the Academy but she looked really cool dancing in that film which wasn’t really either of their best work when all was said and done.

This new upcoming Lanthimos picture borrows Alicia Silverstone who knows offbeat movies herself, first hand, from starring in the unusual Tribeca picture, Perpetrator, which premiered a couple of years back. Bugonia may seem like a mainstream movie when compared to that other oddity that screened at Tribeca. Silverstone plays a pivotal supporting part in Bugonia.

Focus Features clearly has a potential Oscar contender in several categories with Bugonia. Though the film will release in October, it does stand a lot of challenges in terms of marketing its complex story to mainstream audiences. For one, the movie was cited as being rather gruesome in some respects and, for that matter, the previous quirky Lanthimos films have almost always been an acquired taste. This new movie may build Oscar buzz that will help the film out at the specialty box-office and beyond. This festival buzz the film has been achieving is certainly going to work in its favor in terms of helping the picture build an audience.

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