At the Lido, on August 28, 2025, Emma Stone presents with Yorgos Lanthimos Bugonia in official competition at the Venice Film Festival. Louis Vuitton dress, shaved head on screen, she captivates the red carpet before an ovation of about seven minutes. A remake of Save the Green Planet!, a conspiratorial fable, the film mixes black humor and political vertigo. Venice discovers an actress who puts her image at stake.
Venice Film Festival: A Red Carpet with the Air of a Debut
Venice, August 28, 2025. She appears as one takes the floor: Emma Stone, 36 years old, crosses the bridge of the Palazzo del Cinema without forcing the effect. Louis Vuitton dress (she is an ambassador for the brand), powder pink, architectured bodice, embroidered tulle, silver spirals; a skirt volume held, almost a controlled cloud. The glamour does not overwhelm the body: it sculpts it, airs it, exposes it to the play of flashes. The image circulates, immediately, like a promise. Louis Vuitton lists the actress among its ambassadors: https://www.louisvuitton.com.
That evening, fashion is not an accessory: it sets the narrative. Clothing, for Stone, has always been a punctuation – as seen at the Golden Globes, January 2025, when she unveiled a pixie cut that traded star hair for the idea of a character. See Vogue for the appearance at the Globes: https://www.vogue.com/article/emma-stone-pixie-cut-golden-globes-2025.
Bugonia, the New Film with Emma Stone at the Venice Film Festival
Fourth meeting with Yorgos Lanthimos after The Favourite, Poor Things, and Kinds of Kindness, Bugonia is the English-language remake of Save the Green Planet! (2003) by Korean Jang Joon-hwan. Two young men, fueled by conspiracy theories, kidnap the CEO of a pharmaceutical giant – Michelle. They are convinced she is an alien tasked with destroying Earth. Cast: Emma Stone; Jesse Plemons; Aidan Delbis; Alicia Silverstone; Stavros Halkias. Context: Bugonia on: Wikipedia); South Korean film profile: Save the Green Planet!.
The filmmaker’s grammar is found: tight frames, black humor, ceremonial cruelty. The photography by Robbie Ryan, the editing by Yorgos Mavropsaridis, the score by Jerskin Fendrix, and the sound design by Johnnie Burn sharpen a sensation of almost animal proximity.
When the Ovation Measures the Shock
In Venice, the metric of applause serves as a barometer – relative, of course, but telling. Bugonia received between six and seven minutes of ovation according to the media present, a fervor that speaks as much of adherence as of disturbance. It is one of those ambivalent ovations: a mix of cinephile euphoria and astonishment, typical of a festival where the spectacular meets the crisis.
The Title as a Program: Where Do the Bees Come From?
The word “bugonia” refers to an ancient belief: bees born from the carcass of a bull. An agronomic fiction detailed by Virgil in the Georgics, taken up by scholarly tradition. The film plays with this myth of regeneration – horror brought back to the cycle, life snatched from putrefaction. It is not esotericism for the initiated: it is a metaphor. Of the earth against falsehood, of human communities facing the delirious narratives that traverse them.
An Actress Who Puts Her Image at Stake
Transformation structures the film as much as Stone’s journey. She confirmed it: she actually shaved her head in front of the camera, without digital trickery, for a kidnapping scene. The scene was filmed inside a 4×4. It was an actress’s gesture, but also a way to desacralize the star. “The first shampoo after shaving? Incredible,” she confides in her cover interview for Vogue, where we learn that she, beforehand, shaved her director, Lanthimos, as a warm-up game.
This shaving, Stone inscribes it in a broader reflection: the boundary between self and public self, the duplicity necessary for hyper-exposed existences. In Venice, she drops a small bomb in the form of a serious joke: “Yes, I believe in aliens”. It is not to flatter the film’s imagination. It is rather to recall an important point in the manner of Carl Sagan. Indeed, believing we are alone in the universe is an illusion according to her.
Between Fiction and News: The Mangione Shadow
Since Telluride, Emma Stone has highlighted a troubling collision: the plot of Bugonia and the murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO, Brian Thompson, on December 4, 2024, for which Luigi Mangione is accused. The parallel is not forced – the film is not a replica – but the climate is there: political violence, resentment against health industries, conspiratorial rhetoric.
What interests Lanthimos is less the thesis than the wandering of beliefs: how a narrative “makes a system” and ends up devouring those who adhere to it. In Bugonia, the beekeeper is not a cliché of a “dangerous madman,” but a believer in doubt, caught in a logic that closes in.
The Art of Strangeness: Lanthimos Motifs
From Dogtooth to Poor Things, Lanthimos works on defamiliarization: slowed gestures, constrained bodies, absurd protocols. Here, he integrates a managerial dimension with the CEO and an ecological perspective including bees and honey. Furthermore, the sound of hives fills the space, enriching this ecological layer. Additionally, a media dimension is added: the film is saturated with screens and fragments of messages. Moreover, flows complete this media universe. The violence does not have the spectacular complacency of blockbusters: it disturbs because it is procedural, administered, almost bureaucratic.
Faced with this, Emma Stone invents a presence both prey and director of her prey: the voice breaks, the gaze defies, irony returns like a breath. We know since La La Land (Oscar 2017) and Poor Things (Oscar 2024) how the actress knows how to shift her image. Here, she bares it, literally.
The Red Carpet as a Counter-Field
It would be wrong to separate the dress from the role. The powder pink of Louis Vuitton and the architecture of the bodice reveal a particular aesthetic. Moreover, the grace without mawkishness evokes a bold cinema. Indeed, this cinema is not afraid of beauty, even when associated with the grotesque. Fashion for Stone (and her long partnership with Nicolas Ghesquière) is not the mundane escape of a “serious” artist: it is a discipline of the frame.
What Bugonia Tells Us About Ourselves
At the heart of the setup, two gestures: telling and believing. Telling is to order the facts, tame the anxiety; believing is sometimes to submit to a fable that reassures because it explains everything. The conspiracy as filmed by Lanthimos is neither an anecdote nor a thesis: it is a contemporary affect. Bugonia exaggerates its form to expose its mechanics, and, in return, Stone provides the counter-image: a shaved, disarmed face, which holds through performance.
Final Reel
We leave Bugonia with haunting images: a buzzing of wings, a leather seat dotted with hair, a pink spiral that, a few hours earlier, swirled on the dress. In Venice, this year, style and cinema were not separated by a corridor: they responded to each other. It remains to be seen how, by October-November 2025, the fable will travel – and if the ovation, six or seven minutes no matter, shares or divides. It is the law of tales: they are always told in the present.