2025's Most Shocking Alien-Invasion Comedy Is Now on Netflix

There’s probably someone out there who saw Bugonia and thought, “oh my God, how did they know?!” Conspiracy thinking is embedded into internet culture, which means that there’s virtually no limit to how outrageous peoples’ beliefs can become online. In a “post-truth” world, the human brain’s tendency towards recognizing patterns has become a liability, as fragments of truth combine with flat-out lies — which is exactly what this movie is about, actually.

Within the world of the film, cousins Teddy (Jesse Plemons) and Don (Aidan Elbis) have created a worldview they’ve cobbled together from internet forums and personal traumas. They believe that the world is run by an alien species known as the “Andromedans” who have disguised themselves as ordinary people in order to more effectively execute the experiments they’ve been conducting on human beings for millennia. (They’re also systematically wiping out all the honeybees, which is obviously bad.)

“Ordinary” is a relative term, however, when applied to someone like Michelle Fuller (Emma Stone), the high-powered CEO of the pharmaceutical conglomerate that Teddy blames for putting his mother into a coma years earlier. He’d tell you as much, if he ever stopped babbling about gamma rays controlling his thoughts and the importance of chemical castration. Teddy also works for the company, which makes it complicated indeed when he and Don kidnap Michelle and chain her to a cot in Teddy’s basement.

The setup is harrowing, but director Yorgos Lanthimos plays Bugonia as a comedy, albeit a very dark one. This is the kind of movie that makes you gasp and giggle at the same time: Without spoiling anything, the film’s biggest laugh is accompanied by a moment of shocking gore. This tension is perhaps best embodied by stand-up comedian Stavros Halkias, whose supporting role as a cop who’s known Teddy since childhood is both uncomfortable and ridiculous.

The comedy continues to build along with the brutality, before the bubble pops, literally, in an outrageous finale that gives Bugonia great rewatch value. Entire Reddit threads are devoted to discussing when and how viewers picked up on where Lanthimos and screenwriter Will Tracy were taking the story, a lens that’s very entertaining when viewing the film multiple times.

But that’s not the biggest surprise here.

Now, this might sound like a crazy thing to say about a movie where a man wearing a tinfoil hat tortures a woman with electric shocks while Green Day plays in the background, but compared to its source material, Bugonia is relatively tame. Although they differ in plot, especially in that all-important final act, Bugonia is based on a South Korean thriller called Save the Green Planet!, a hidden gem from director Jang Joon-hwan that was one of those “if you know, you know” movies until Arrow Video put it out on 4K UHD disc earlier this year.

Put succinctly, Save the Green Planet! leans more heavily on the horror and torture scenes than Bugonia — which, again, is primarily a comedy. It was also released in 2003, shortly before the internet took over nearly every aspect of modern life. At that time, fringe conspiracies were a little more, well, fringe, and the film, and the ending in particular, play completely differently as a result.

Really, the best way to watch both of these movies is together: As a pair, Save the Green Planet! and Bugonia reveal so much about the impact of the internet on 21st-century history. (Bugonia would also make a compelling double feature with Eddington, 2025’s other black comedy about conspiracy culture, directed by Bugonia producer Ari Aster and also co-starring Stone.) Even on its own, however, Bugonia is a film with a lot to say about how we got here, and the way we live now.

Bugonia is now streaming on Netflix.