The Wildest Sci-Fi Remake Of The Year Is A Completely Unpredictable Genre Mish-Mash

The bees are dying. That’s the ecological crisis that drives Teddy (Jesse Plemons) to kidnap high-powered CEO Michelle Fuller (Emma Stone), shave her head, and chain her in his basement. She’s a member of the Andromedan alien race, you see, and this is the only way he can gain an audience with their emperor and persuade them to leave their planet. Never mind that Teddy has no evidence of said alien incursion, except for what he learned from random YouTube users and conspiracy theory podcasts. Never mind that Teddy may be nursing a personal grudge against Michelle for a botched medical trial that put his mother (Alicia Silverstone) in a coma. He’s trying to save the world.

For much of Bugonia, the darkly comic new sci-fi thriller from Yorgos Lanthimos, you wrestle with how you feel about Teddy, played with a shuffling, angry awkwardness by Plemons. With his long, stringy hair and clearly deranged belief about aliens living among us, he should come off as the worst kind of tinfoil-hat conspiracy theorist, a representation of the rotten core of our post-2020 paranoid society. And yet, Plemons gives one of his gentlest performances so far, as a man who genuinely believes he’s trying to save humanity, even if it means he has to kidnap and torture a woman to do it. It’s a remarkable tonal balancing act from Lanthimos, who perfectly weaponizes his brand of unnerving filmmaking to make the most unpredictable, genre-bending movie of the year.

Bugonia is technically a remake of the South Korean sci-fi black comedy Save the Green Planet! but it feels more loosely inspired by Jang Joon-hwan’s madcap 2003 movie. Lanthimos and screenwriter Will Tracy follow the broad beats of the original, but shave down some of its wilder excesses, honing the story to a fine, sharp point that ultimately cuts deeper. It’s undeniably a Lanthimos movie, one that’s unpleasant and cruelly funny, but that’s also surprisingly restrained compared to the deranged hyperviolence of Save the Green Planet! While it’s mildly interesting to think about the alternate timeline where Green Planet director Jang Joon-hwan got to remake his own movie under producer Ari Aster as originally intended, the specific alchemy that the collaboration between Lanthimos, Stone, and Plemons produces makes for a singularly captivating experience.

Bugonia begins, aptly, with the bees that Teddy carefully tends to on his farm — the survivors of colony collapse disorder, which Teddy believes was brought on by the pharmaceutical company where he works, and which is headed by Michelle Fuller. It’s just one of many things that he blames on Michelle and her company’s practices: the ruthless work environment under which he slaves, his family and friends dying, and even the slow global economic collapse. He’s spent years collecting evidence that Michelle is part of a wider conspiracy to bring about the end of humanity, scouring every workplace malpractice controversy she’s involved with and every Instagram photo that she posts. Finally, he’s collected enough to launch his mission and, with the help of his impressionable, dim-witted cousin Don (Aidan Delbis), he successfully kidnaps and imprisons Michelle.

Lanthimos playfully toes the line between belief and disbelief, never quite letting the audience know what to expect. Teddy’s every action seems absurd: he makes Don shave Michelle’s head because “her hair is a transmitter,” and he slathers Michelle’s skin in antihistamine cream to dull her alien powers. The reasons he outlines for Michelle being an alien — her protruding ears, shorter cuticles, narrow feet — seem arbitrary at best, and his militant treatment of his only living family member feels needlessly harsh. But Emma Stone, in another all-time great performance, gives off a sinister presence that feels purely evil. In a turn that at first feels like Stone’s American Psycho riff (especially in an early scene that intercuts her strict morning routine with Teddy and Don’s training regime) transforms into something more malevolent. Even as a prisoner chained to a bed in Teddy’s basement, Michelle manages to immediately suck all the air out of the room, intimidating both Teddy and Don as soon as she talks. It’s no wonder that Stone has collaborated with Lanthimos five times — the two of them have managed to harness Stone’s abilities in ways that no other director could’ve dreamed of.

But despite Stone threatening to steal the movie from its lead, Bugonia inarguably belongs to Plemons. The actor, who was easily the best part of Lanthimos’ anthology film Kinds of Kindness, has never been better. He’s tender and restrained, but with a simmering resentment that occasionally comes out in bursts of anger.

The film is at its best when it’s a two-hander between Teddy and Michelle, the two of them verbally sparring until their mutual hatred reaches a boiling point. Their scenes are tense, but Lanthimos films them with such a wry distance that he manages to draw some chuckles out of our unease; in fact, Bugonia may be his funniest movie since The Favourite. It helps that, in terms of gore and shocks, Bugonia is surprisingly subdued. But while Bugonia might be rather subdued, even sterile, for Lanthimos (and especially compared to the brutality of the original South Korean film), it is incredibly emotionally violent.

Michelle’s words cut harder than anything Teddy can do to her, and surreal black-and-white flashbacks only serve to highlight how much pain has been inflicted on him. And just as the film’s emotions and pain roil under the surface, so too does the audience’s discomfort with where our sympathies lie. We know what Teddy is doing is wrong, but is he also kind of right in what he accuses Michelle and the larger corporate machine of doing to our world? Does Michelle know more than what she lets on? Bugonia withholds its answers until the end, when it unleashes a wild, absurd climax that feels more bizarre than anything Lanthimos has done before.

Bugonia premiered on August 28 at the Venice Film Festival. It plays in a special limited engagement on October 24 before it opens in theaters nationwide on October 31.