Style hawkeyes will have seen it: As Michelle Fuller, Bugonia‘s unusual CEO character played by an in-form Emma Stone, stomps towards her desk in among the movie’s early scenes, she sweeps previous seating plans of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s iconic Barcelona chairs. They’re difficult to miss with their cantilevered steel bases, signature blocky leather cushions and late mid-century corporate splendour. Initially, they’re black. As Michelle gets closer to her glassed-in office, they’re white.From Michelle’s
expert environment to her ultra-modernist home, design pieces by significant names like van der Rohe, Frank Lloyd Wright, Jan Bocan, and more can be discovered throughout Bugonia. By the end of the movie– when (spoiler alert) we learn that Michelle is indeed the alien she’s feared to be, and the factor for humanity’s termination– one may think that director Yorgos Lanthimos and production designer James Rate were intentionally toying with the concept of vaunted versus embodied humankind by means of the sets. The tip seems to be that this masked extraterrestrial character utilizes style in part as evidence of her credibility, yet the things she surrounds herself with carry a chilly reserve and an efficient immaculateness. Inhuman in their stature and presentation, they’re hints that Michelle may be overcompensating.
Michelle’s glass-clad workplace in Bugonia Photo: Atsushi Nishijima/Focus Features.
© 2025 All Rights Reserved. “I would practically liken the pieces we included to trophies,” Rate informs AD. “You could take these examples as pinnacles of human civilization. A lot so that Yorgos wasn’t keen on us even having recreations.”
Michelle, then, seems to have collected these items as a kind of physical emphasize reel of human imagination– and for that reason, as subtle self-validation of her humanity. Yet the irony is that as soon as had, trophies become static, and even cold, things. In attempting to appear human through idealization, she includes … well, something of a chill to the room. (This isn’t a dig at these pieces, however an observation of her exaggeration.)
Bugonia occurs in 2025, however Price drew motivation from midcentury sci-fi classics consisting of Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 work of art 2001: A Space Odyssey, with its Devil chairs and Saarinen tables, and the 1965 British spy motion picture The Ipcress File for some of its more minimal sets (together with all of its inverted villainy, a topic which remains in constant flux in Bugonia).
Michelle in her high-end health club
Image: Atsushi Nishijima/Focus Features. © 2025 All Rights Scheduled.