One of 2025’s best thriller movies is available to watch now

The Irish claustrophobic thriller stars a two-time Oscar winner.

Partly funded by Irish production company Element Pictures, the film is a reunion of two-time Oscar-winner Emma Stone and director Yorgos Lanthimos (The Favourite, Poor Things). It sees the actress play Michelle Fuller, an ambitious, high-powered CEO of a major pharmaceutical company, who finds herself abducted.

The culprits: amateur apiarist and conspiracy theorist Teddy Gatz (Oscar-nominee Jesse Plemons, also reuniting with Lanthimos after Kinds of Kindness) and his younger autistic cousin, Don (newcomer Aidan Delbis).

Radicalised by climate change and a string of personal tragedies, Teddy has become convinced that aliens are covertly living on Earth, manipulating humanity from the shadows with sinister intentions.

Believing Michelle is one of these "Andromedans", he and Don kidnap the CEO, hold her in their basement and shave her head (so that she can't communicate with her mothership, an explanation Teddy reveals with no other context for maximum comedic effect).

Teddy's ultimate goal is for Michelle to arrange a meeting between him and her Andromedan leaders.

Anyone even vaguely keeping up with modern cinema would assume heading into Bugonia that it's going to be dark and twisted, given everyone involved in it behind the scenes.

The biggest name that emerged from the Greek Weird Wave film movement, Lanthimos has made making viewers feel uncomfortable part of his brand, with his past work also including Dogtooth, The Lobster and The Killing of a Sacred Deer.

On top of this, Bugonia is written by Will Tracy (the darkly funny and bloody thriller The Menu), produced by Ari Aster (Eddington, Hereditary and Midsommar, all of which have a thick mean streak), and is a remake of the notoriously out-there South Korean flick Save the Green Planet!

Bugonia is indeed extremely disturbing. What's most impressive about it, though, is that it's also compulsively watchable. In fact, it's perhaps Lanthimos' most mainstream effort to date.

This is because for much of its running time, the movie is a three-hander thriller, where Don, Michelle and Teddy are constantly trying to suss each other out.

Thanks to the brilliant, complex performances at its centre, Bugonia at times feels like watching great theatre. Plemons is a live wire; his character is volatile but also capable of intelligence and of eliciting sympathy. Stone, too, is gloriously enigmatic as her mysterious CEO.

Though the standout might be Delbis, who is utterly heartbreaking. Wordlessly, the newcomer expresses that Don knows deep down his loved one's plan is doomed before it's even been put in motion, yet feels powerless to intervene because Teddy is all he has left in this world.

The first two-thirds of Bugonia evoke memories of other claustrophobic thrillers with possible world-altering stakes like 10 Cloverfield Lane, Coherence or Retreat.

Yet it also feels like the best version of that nifty subgenre, because those other films don't have $50 million budgets, Lanthimos' typically operatic direction or multiple Oscar winners and nominees working on them.

Also, Bugonia is more timely than those other movies in terms of its themes. The main narrative drive of the film is the psychological war game between a conspiracy theorist and an uber-wealthy CEO, with Tracy's script having great fun constantly shifting audience allegiance between these characters.

Teddy's alien theory does sound absolutely insane, and it's horrible to watch Michelle in distress after being kidnapped (Don and Teddy donning Jennifer Aniston masks and then struggling to subdue a martial arts-practising Michelle establishes early on the film's effectively queasy blend of dark comedy and horror, which it never lets up).

Yet, there is something inhuman in the way Michelle treats her employees in her introduction scene. This is when she tries desperately to appear as if she cares about her workers' mental health, even though she really just wants to work them to the bone so that her company can meet its quotas. Plus, Teddy is broadly right when he points out all the wrongs of the modern world.

The great joke of the film is that even if Stone's CEO isn't an alien, she might as well be to someone on the margins of society like Teddy, which is probably why conspiracy theories like this are born.

Eventually, Bugonia's claustrophobic thrills reach a fever pitch. This is before Lanthimos and Tracy deliver a jaw-dropping, shocking final act that sees the pair land on some conclusions about humanity that are so bleak and despairing that they come all the way back around to being bracing and funny.

Whether or not you fully vibe with Bugonia and its themes, it is hard to deny how compelling, powerful and unique it is for a Hollywood movie.

Bugonia is in cinemas in Ireland and the UK now.