There is a body bound at the center of the frame. Emma Stone, CEO of a pharmaceutical multinational, is immobilized in a bare room, under the harsh light of improvised lamps. Her captors—Jesse Plemons and a young accomplice—observe her with the fanatical certainty of those who have deciphered the secret code of reality: she is not human, she is an alien come to destroy the Earth. In this vulnerable body, exposed, stripped of its power, Yorgos Lanthimos inscribes the fundamental question of Bugonia (2025): who is really the alien? Who is foreign to life?
This image – bound body, scrutinizing gaze, vacillating truth—is a threshold. Not in the banal sense of a boundary to cross, but in the sense I sought to articulate in the book The Basalt Threshold, recently published: the threshold as an ontological space where certainties collapse, where identity decomposes, where cinema itself reveals itself as a practice of the limit. Stone’s body is not simply a prisoner; it is the place where a metaphysical war is fought between those who claim to know (the conspiracists) and those who embody power (the CEO), while the truth of life—that which pulses, which breathes, which exists before and beyond all narration—remains unspeakable, removed, murdered.
Bugonia—a remake of the Korean Save the Green Planet! (2003)—is not just the latest chapter in Lanthimos’s filmography. It is the culmination of a trajectory that has made cinema an instrument for measuring our distance from life, for mapping our extraordinary competence in producing death. Death of relationships, death of desire, death of potentialities, death of the present. We have become masters of this funereal art, perfect executors of a necrophilic protocol we call normality. And simultaneously, dramatically, we are illiterate with respect to life—incapable of inhabiting it, of recognizing it, of letting ourselves be traversed by its vulnerable and unpredictable forceTo understand Bugonia, it is necessary to retrace the territory Lanthimos has excavated film after film, constructing what we might define as a cinema of radical threshold. Not a cinema that represents the threshold, but that is threshold: a device that destabilizes, that forces the viewer to dwell in the unbearable, that refuses narrative consolation to offer instead the experience of the limit.
DOGTOOTH (2009) inaugurates this research with crystalline violence. The family as architecture of death: a father who creates an alternative linguistic and perceptual universe to imprison his children within the domestic enclosure. Here Lanthimos shows for the first time his fundamental intuition: power does not need explanations, it operates through the saturation of space and language. The bodies of the children are bodies trained for death—death of curiosity, of the desire for elsewhere, of the very possibility of imagining an outside. The threshold is the boundary wall of the house, but also the limit of the sayable: every word has been redefined, every gesture codified. Life is what lies beyond, inaccessible, unpronounceable.
In ALPS (2011), Lanthimos radicalizes the intuition: not only can bodies be controlled, but mourning itself can be commodified. A group of people offers to replace the dead, to perform them for family members who cannot accept the loss. Here death becomes performance, product, service. There is no longer even the space of authentic grief: even mourning is colonized, even the end is neutralized through its simulated repetition. The threshold between life and death dissolves into a continuum of surrogates, of presence-absences that allow neither farewell nor encounter.
THE LOBSTER (2015) brings this logic into the universe of affective relationships. In a dystopian but all-too-recognizable future, singles are obligated to find a partner within 45 days, on pain of transformation into an animal. Lanthimos constructs a perfect metaphor of our era: love as social obligation, the couple as administrative norm, solitude as crime. But the stroke of genius is showing that even rebellion—the community of “loners” in the woods—replicates the same normative violence, only with inverted sign. There is no outside, no elsewhere. The threshold is everywhere and nowhere: every space is colonized by the same logic of control, by the same incapacity to let life be in its irreducible singularity.
THE KILLING OF A SACRED DEER (2017) is perhaps Lanthimos’s most disturbing film, the one that most directly touches the sacrificial nucleus of our civilization. A surgeon must choose which member of his family to sacrifice to atone for an ancient guilt. The narrative is apparently mythological—the echo of Euripides’s Iphigenia is explicit—but the mise-en-scène is glacial, contemporary, clinical. Lanthimos shows how sacrifice is not an archaic residue but the very structure of our present: to maintain order, to preserve the system, someone must always be expelled, eliminated, transformed into a scapegoat. The bourgeois family, with its perfect symmetries and robotic dialogues, is an altar where the murder of life is consumed daily. The threshold here is the moment of choice, the impossible instant in which the father must decide who to kill. But the real death has already occurred, long before: it is the death of the possibility of loving without calculation, of existing without debt.
THE FAVOURITE (2018) shifts the gaze to politics and power, but the diagnosis remains identical. In Queen Anne’s court, three women compete for influence and control in a game where love is indistinguishable from manipulation, where vulnerability is a weapon and where every gesture of care conceals a project of domination. Lanthimos films aristocratic bodies as already dead bodies, masks executing a danse macabre in the palace corridors. The queen herself, with her physical fragility and emotional dependence, perfectly embodies the condition of power: powerful and powerless at once, capable of deciding others’ lives but incapable of inhabiting her own.
POOR THINGS (2023) seemed to announce a turn. Bella Baxter—a Frankensteinian creature with an infant’s brain in an adult woman’s body—traverses the world with a virgin gaze, discovering sexuality, pleasure, independence. For the first time in Lanthimos, something like a line of flight appears, a possibility of rebirth. But the attentive eye reveals that even here death is always present: Bella is literally constructed from pieces of corpse, her freedom is possible only because she has no memory, no history. And the ending, with its return to a form of medico-scientific control, suggests that authentic life remains an unreachable horizon, a promise the world cannot keep.
It is in this trajectory that BUGONIA inserts itself as a point of synthesis and radicalization. The film—presented at the 2025 Venice Film Festival—takes up the plot of the Korean film but transforms it into a device for diagnosing the present. A CEO of a pharmaceutical multinational is kidnapped by two conspiracists convinced she is an alien come to destroy the planet. The premise is apparently simple, almost genre thriller. But Lanthimos, faithful to his method, transforms every element into a philosophical question.
Who is the alien? The question resonates throughout the film like a Zen koan that cannot be resolved because every answer generates others. The CEO certainly embodies a form of alienness: she is the human face of pharmaceutical capitalism, of that system that patents life, that transforms health into merchandise, that decides who can live and who must die based on the ability to pay. Her elegant, controlled, performative body is the body of neoliberal power – a body that has erased every trace of vulnerability, that has constructed itself as an efficient machine in service of profit. In this sense, yes, she is alien to life: her existence is entirely dedicated to death (death of care as relationship, death of health as common good, death of the very idea that some values cannot be monetized).
But her captors are no less alien. Lanthimos films them with a ferocious compassion, showing how contemporary conspiracism is not simply individual madness but a symptom of collective collapse. Jesse Plemons plays a man who has lost every anchor to the real, who lives in a parallel universe where every causal connection has become possible, where everything is a sign of something else. He is not stupid, not irrational in the classical sense: he has simply developed another rationality, another regime of truth. And this makes him dangerous, because his violence is armed with internal coherence. He tortures the CEO’s body with the certainty of one who is saving the world, with the determination of one who has finally deciphered the conspiracy.
Here Lanthimos touches the heart of our time. Conspiracism is not the opposite of neoliberal capitalism, it is its perfect complement. Both produce the same alienation, the same incapacity to inhabit the present, the same death of relationships. The CEO kills through the abstraction of the market, through decisions made in boardrooms where concrete bodies are reduced to data, to statistics, to profit margins. The conspiracists kill through the abstraction of paranoia, through narratives where others are always masks, simulacra, threats. In both cases, what dies is the possibility of encounter, of recognition, of shared vulnerability.
Torture thus becomes the moment of truth in the film. Not in the sense that it reveals who tells the truth and who lies, but in the sense that it shows the only thing that unites all the characters: the incapacity to dwell in life. Emma Stone’s bound body is the body we have all become—prisoners of narratives (of market, conspiratorial, ideological) that prevent us from feeling, from breathing, from existing beyond assigned identities. The question “are you an alien?” is actually the question that contemporaneity poses to each of us: are you still capable of life or have you become an automaton, an executor of protocols, a fragment of a system you don’t understand but that completely traverses you?
The Alphabet of Death and the Illiteracy of Life
What Bugonia stages with particular clarity is something that all of Lanthimos’s cinema has always intuited: our era has developed an incredible competence in the management of death, in all its forms. We are literate with respect to death, we have perfectly learned its grammar.
We know how to kill relationships: through ghosting, phubbing, the reduction of the other to a digital profile to swipe. We have transformed encounter into a selection process, love into an algorithmic match, friendship into a network to manage. The Lobster did nothing but bring this logic to its conclusion: in a world where relationship is administrative obligation, the only difference between humans and animals has already been erased.
We know how to kill the present: through performance anxiety, compulsive multitasking, continuous projection toward future goals that always shift further away. Our time is colonized by deadlines, notifications, artificial urgencies. We don’t inhabit the present, we traverse it like a corridor toward a future that never arrives. Dogtooth showed this death of time in its most extreme form: an eternal circular present where nothing can truly happen because nothing can truly change.
We know how to kill potentialities: through the precarization of existence, the reduction of life to human capital to be valorized, the imperative of resilience that transforms every failure into individual responsibility. We are asked to be entrepreneurs of ourselves, to optimize every aspect of our existence, to transform even rest into investment (self-care as deferred productivity). Poor Things explored this dimension by showing how even liberation can be reabsorbed by the system, how even rebellion can become merchandise.
We know how to kill truth itself: through informational fragmentation, the creation of epistemic bubbles, the proliferation of alternative narratives that no longer dialogue with each other. We no longer live in a world of discussed facts, but in archipelagos of incommensurable truths. The conspiracism of Bugonia is the most dramatic expression of this condition: an entire regime of truth constructed on delirious but internally coherent connections, impermeable to any contrary evidence.
And finally, we know how to kill the planet: through extraction, combustion, accumulation. The pharmaceutical capitalism that Bugonia stages is only one of the forms of this systemic murder—health reduced to merchandise is specular to air reduced to resource, to water reduced to private property, to life itself reduced to substrate to exploit.
We are masters of all this. We have elaborated techniques, protocols, justifications, narratives. Death—in all its declensions—has become our distinctive competence, what we do best.
And paradoxically, precisely this competence makes us illiterate with respect to life. We no longer know how to be in a relationship without possession, without project, without guarantees. We no longer know how to inhabit the body when it doesn’t perform, when it is simply vulnerable, fragile, needy. We no longer know how to be in uncertainty without immediately seeking theories that neutralize it. We no longer know how to listen to silence, how to dwell in waiting, how to let things happen without controlling them.
Life – the real one, the one that pulses beyond all codification – has become foreign to us. Alien. And it is here: the Cinema as Threshold: Beyond the Alphabet of Death, the cinema of Lanthimos, and Bugonia in particular, reveals its most radical force.
It offers no solutions, proposes no consolatory ways out. But precisely for this reason it operates as an authentic threshold—in the sense I sought to articulate theoretically in the book The Basalt Threshold, speaking of immersive cinema, of the vulnerable body of the spectator, of the experience of the limit.
Threshold-cinema is not a cinema that represents crisis, it is a cinema that is crisis, that cracks our perceptive and cognitive certainties, that forces us to dwell in the unbearable. When we watch Bugonia, we cannot identify with any character, we cannot take refuge in any safe moral position. The CEO is monster and victim together. The conspiracists are fanatics and desperate together. There is no right point of view, no truth on one side to adhere to. This impossibility of stable positioning is precisely what makes the film a philosophical experience and not simply a story. We are forced to feel our own alienation, to touch our incompetence with respect to life. The discomfort we feel watching Bugonia is not due to explicit violence (which is certainly there), but to something deeper: the recognition of being ourselves, to some extent, those aliens that the film stages. We too participate in the alphabet of death, we too are illiterate of life.
But there is something more. In the very moment the film exposes us to this unbearable truth, something moves. The threshold is not only a place of blockage, it is also a place of possible transformation. Dwelling on the threshold—accepting not knowing, not having ready answers, being vulnerable—is already a form of resistance to the alphabet of death. It is already a way of escaping the logic of control, of performance, of violent certainty.
In The Basalt Threshold, I argued that the cinematic spectator is not a disembodied subject observing from afar, but a sensitive body that is involved, that is touched, that is transformed by the filmic experience. Immersive cinema—and Lanthimos’s is profoundly so, even when it seems cold and distant—operates at a pre-reflective, corporeal, affective level. Even before understanding what Bugonia means, our body has already reacted, has already contracted, has already opened.
This somatic reaction is already a form of knowing—a knowing of vulnerability, a knowing of the limit. And it is a knowing that the alphabet of death cannot codify. Because death works through abstraction, generalization, the reduction of the singular to the universal. Life, instead, is always singular, unrepeatable, excessive. The vulnerable body is precisely what resists codification, what does not allow itself to be completely translated into protocol or algorithm.
Looking retrospectively at Lanthimos’s path, Bugonia appears as the point where all lines converge. It is not a harmonic synthesis—Lanthimos is too rigorous to offer pacifications—but it is a moment of maximum intensity, where the questions that have traversed all his work concentrate with particular violence. The question of family (Dogtooth), of the couple (The Lobster), of sacrifice (The Killing of a Sacred Deer), of power (The Favourite), of rebirth (Poor Things)—all these questions return in Bugonia in the form of a single, simple, devastating question: is encounter still possible?
Is it still possible to recognize the other as other, without immediately transforming them into threat, into object, into projection?
Lanthimos’s answer is never explicit, but his cinema itself embodies it: encounter is possible only if we accept dwelling on the threshold, renouncing certainty, exposing ourselves to vulnerability. There is no encounter without risk, no relationship without the possibility of being wounded. And our era, in its obsession with control and security, has precisely eliminated this possibility. We have built a world where we can interact, communicate, exchange, but not encounter. Because true encounter requires exiting the alphabet of death, becoming illiterate again—not in the sense of ignorance, but in the sense of a willingness not to know, to let ourselves be surprised, to be transformed.
Bugonia brings this intuition to the limit. The CEO and her captor are incapable of encountering each other because each has already decided who the other is. She sees him as a madman, a loser, social residue. He sees her as an alien, a threat, a symbol to eliminate. In between, between these two gazes that reciprocally annul each other, the vulnerable body—that bound, exposed, suffering body—silently screams a truth that neither can hear: we are all human, we are all mortal, we are all infinitely fragile.
But this truth, in the world that Bugonia reflects (and which is our world), cannot be said, cannot be heard. It has become literally unspeakable. The alphabet of death has erased the words to say it.
Bugonia offers no redemption. It does not suggest that awareness of alienation is sufficient to overcome it. It does not promise that recognizing our competence in death will automatically make us competent in life. Lanthimos is too honest, too ruthless, too faithful to the truth of the present to offer such consolations.
But this refusal of consolation is itself a form of resistance. In an era where everything must be resolved, where every tension must be neutralized, where every question must find a definitive answer, Lanthimos’s cinema insists on the necessity of dwelling in questions. The threshold is not a place to cross quickly to arrive somewhere. The threshold is the very place where we must learn to stay.
Remaining on the threshold means accepting uncertainty, contradiction, the impossibility of stable positions. It means renouncing the fantasy of total control (the CEO’s fantasy) and the fantasy of absolute truth (the conspiracist’s fantasy). It means recognizing that we are all, to some extent, aliens – to ourselves, to others, to life itself.
But perhaps – and here Lanthimos’s cinema opens to a minimal, almost imperceptible hope – perhaps precisely this recognition is the first step toward a new literacy. Not the alphabet of death we know so well, but an alphabet of life we have yet to learn. An alphabet made of accepted vulnerability, of inhabited uncertainty, of risked encounter. An alphabet we can never completely master, because life always exceeds all codification, but that we can at least try to stammer.
Bugonia leaves us there, on the threshold, without answers but with a clearer question: what are we willing to risk to return to living? What are we willing to lose—what control, what certainty, what identity—to become capable of encounter again?
These are questions that cinema cannot resolve. But it can do something more important: it can make us feel, in the body, the urgency of posing them. And in the era of the alphabet of death, even just this is already a form of life.