In recent years, much fuss has been made about our foremost filmmakers’ apparent reluctance to set their films in the present day. Instead, they have flocked to the comforts of nostalgia, just as audiences have. Christopher Nolan retreated to the building of the atom bomb (and next year, ancient Greece). Quentin Tarantino still pines for a lost Los Angeles of the 1970s. Martin Scorsese hasn’t made a present-day film since 2006’s The Departed, while Robert Eggers has said, ‘the idea of photographing a cellphone is just death’. With the exception of Chloe Zhao’s Nomadland (2020) and, I suppose, Greta Gerwig’s Barbie (2023), our reigning generation of filmmakers seems wholly unequipped – or perhaps simply unwilling – to meet our present moment head on.

Until, that is, the second half of 2025, when we’ve been gifted a loose trilogy of great films by great filmmakers that feel as though they could only have been released in the second half of 2025. Each locked in urgent conversation with the here and now, they swap highbrow metaphor for a refreshingly blunt literalness. Ari Aster’s Eddington presents a queasy snapshot of the Covid-19 pandemic, treating it as the defining origin story for our present-day malaise; Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another pits militant xenophobes against burnt-out revolutionaries, exploring the widening divide between races and generations; and now, Yorgos Lanthimos’s Bugonia depicts a showdown between two immediately recognisable archetypes of our time: the rabbit-holed incel and the girlboss CEO, leaving us to determine which is ultimately more responsible for the world’s socio-political nosedive.

Michelle Fuller (Emma Stone) is head of the perfectly named biomedical conglomerate Auxolith, whose trial drugs put conspiracy-head Teddy Gatz’s (Jesse Plemons) mother in a coma, and whose pesticides may have triggered Colony Collapse Disorder in Teddy’s precious apiary. Believing that the ‘techno-enslavement and agro-corporate disintegration’ of Earth could not possibly be the work of a mere human, Teddy is convinced that Michelle is an alien – specifically, an Andromedan, an ancient race who have infiltrated humanity to sow the seeds of its destruction. With the reluctant help of his neurodivergent cousin, Don (newcomer Aidan Delbis), Teddy kidnaps Michelle and keeps her prisoner in the basement of his family home (‘Headquarters of the Human Resistance’), where he demands passage aboard the alien mothership to negotiate the Andromedans’ surrender.

What follows takes on shades of a gender-flipped Misery (1990), though Will Tracy’s script (adapted from the 2003 South Korean film, Save the Green Planet!) makes the smart decision to get ahead of the audience’s pop-psych diagnoses right out of the gate. Michelle accuses Teddy of living in an online echo chamber; she suggests that he is deeply mentally ill. Both these things are true, but they’re not what Bugonia is about. Tracy and Lanthimos seem chiefly concerned with the ineffectiveness of modern language to pin down ‘objective human truth’ and how, in the absence of truth, belief has once more become the coin of the realm. Teddy doesn’t merely think Michelle is an alien, he knows it, and the more vehemently she refutes the fact, the more she only proves it in his eyes; a tidy illustration of the self-affirming logic that has allowed so many dangerous ideas to take root and bloom in the minds of many young men in the 2020s.

Jesse Plemons as Teddy Gatz in Bugonia (courtesy of Universal Pictures Australia)

At times Michelle and Teddy seem to be communicating in different languages entirely: he speaks 4chan; she speaks LinkedIn. The language of the online conspiracy forum and the language of the corporate boardroom are utterly incompatible, but more broadly, Bugonia demonstrates that neither are fit for purpose when it comes to the business of actually connecting with a fellow human being (let alone negotiating your way out of a basement). Michelle and Teddy are each walled off in their respective echo chambers and, this being a Yorgos Lanthimos movie, it is only through acts of great violence and/or sacrifice that some common ground will ever be reached.

This is Emma Stone’s fourth collaboration with Lanthimos, and she proves herself yet again to be a generational talent without a lick of movie star vanity (essential for a role that feels at times like an Artaudian exercise, her head forcefully shaved and her skin perpetually covered in greasy antihistamine cream). Plemons makes for the perfect scene partner, bringing critical new contours to the ‘dead-eyed psycho’ part he’s been perfecting ever since his breakout role in Breaking Bad (2008-13). His Teddy Gatz is desperate, pitiful, but above all else, believable, and the film simply would not work without Plemons’s all-consuming conviction. If Lanthimos’s middling Kinds of Kindness (2024) was little more than a test run for his future work with the actor, it was well and truly worth it.

It’s always a coin toss with the Greek provocateur, and much of it comes down to the screenwriter he’s working with. Will we get whimsical, baroque Yorgos via writer Tony McNamara (The Favourite [2018], Poor Things [2023])? Or will we get cruel, sadistic Yorgos via Efthimis Filippou (Dogtooth [2009], The Lobster [2015])? Bugonia’s closest comparison may in fact be 2017’s The Killing of a Sacred Deer, in its broken male characters and its invocation of Greek mythology (bugonia was an ancient ritual whereby a swarm of bees was believed to generate from the carcass of an ox; new life from death). But while Sacred Deer reached perhaps too self-consciously for that sense of universal myth, Bugonia gets its hands dirty with the hyper-specific horrors of 2025. Just don’t expect an antidote to those horrors, or even much by way of a rallying cry. There’s none of One Battle After Another’s gritty resolve, or even Eddington’s precision satire. Bugonia’s final, breathless moments only reiterate what Lanthimos, in his own nihilistic echo chamber, has been telling us for years: that humanity is a failed experiment – a colony on the brink of collapse – and we are living through its final throes.