Crew
Director – Yorgos Lanthimos, Screenplay – Will Tracy, Based on the Film Save the Green Planet (2003) Written by Jang Joon-hwan, Producers – Ari Aster, Ed Guiney, Lars Knudsen, Jerry Kyoungboun Ko, Yorgos Lanthimos, Miky Lee, Andrew Lowe & Emma Stone, Photography – Bobbie Ryan, Music – Jerskin Fendrix, Visual Effects Supervisor – One of Us, Special Effects Supervisor – Jonathon Barass, Prosthetic Effects – Millennium FX (Designer – Kate Walshe), Production Design – James Price. Production Company – Element Pictures/Square Peg Cinema/Pith/Fruit Tree Enterprises.
Cast
Emma Stone (Michelle Fuller), Jesse Plemons (Teddy Gatz), Aidan Delbis (Don), Stavros Halkias (Casey), Alicia Silverstone (Sandy Gatz), Vanessa Eng (Corey), Charita ‘Mo Ma Cherri’ Jones (Tina)
Plot
Teddy Gatz is a production line worker who maintain his own apiary. Aided by his cousin Don, he abducts Michelle Fuller, the CEO of a pharmaceutical corporation. They place her in the basement of Teddy’s home. Teddy explains that he knows that she is the member of an alien race from Andromeda They shave her hair and cover her body with antihistamine cream to prevent her signalling for help. Teddy wants her to take him to a meeting with the Andromedan emperor in four days’ time during the lunar eclipse. Michelle ridicules what he is saying and warns him that the authorities will be coming for him. Teddy keeps pressuring her to confirm what she is, even to the extent of torturing her.
Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos has become a critical favourite in recent years. His second film Dogtooth (2009), a bizarre deadpan comedy concerning parents that have kept their children imprisoned at home their whole lives with they only imagining the outside world, gained festival attention, although his follow-ups Attenberg (2010) and Alps (2011) had more mixed receptions. Lanthimos bounced back with The Lobster (2015), his first English-language film, a bizarre, blackly funny film set in a future where people are required to be in relationships at threat of being transformed into animals if they do not meet their life partner, and The Killing of a Sacred Deer (2017) in which Barry Keoghan places a curse on Colin Farrell’s family.
With his next film, the historical drama The Favourite (2018), his first pairing with Emma Stone, Lanthimos was nominated for an Academy Award Best Director. Their next collaboration was Poor Things (2023), a comic take on the Frankenstein story, which ended up on most Best of 2023 lists, receiving multiple nominations at the Academy Awards, including nominations for Best Film, Best Director and Best Actress (Emma Stone). Lanthimos followed this with the anthology Kinds of Kindness (2024), a return to the deadpan black comedy of his roots.
With Bugonia, Lanthimos conducts an English-language remake of the South Korean film Save the Green Planet (2003) in which an inept loser kidnaps the CEO of a corporation while insisting on what seems the deluded view that the CEO is an alien. I had watched Save the Green Planet earlier and Bugonia follows this quite closely. There are one or two changes such as changing the gender of the CEO, while the kidnapper’s girlfriend becomes his autistic cousin here. There is also the elimination of the investigating police detective who here is replaced by Stavros Halkias as the slow-witted deputy. Lanthimos soft pedals some aspects such as the torture scenes. And there is more of an elaborate ending here involving a cupboard that teleports up to the mothership, and much more of a bleak finale.
The craziness of the premise had its edge taken off it for me by watching Save the Green Planet earlier. Everything may well be different for audiences going into Bugonia with no prior knowledge of the story. The set-up of the seeming lunatic with the abducted corporate CEO in their basement insisting that the CEO is an alien despite all apparent evidence to the contrary seems suited to Yorgos Lanthimos’s sensibilities. That said, Bugonia is one of the most straightforward films that Lanthimos has made. There is the odd surreal scene like the vision of Alicia Silverstone as Jesse Plemons’ mother floating up into the air and having to be tethered down in front of corporate headquarters. At other times, such as the scenes of Emma Stone moving through her corporate offices reassuring people they don’t have to stay after 5:30, Lanthimos’s hand feels clumsy.
In comparison to either his earlier films, or for that matter Save the Green Planet, it feels like Lanthimos’s deadpan blackness has gone soft. It is almost as though Lanthimos seems wary of embracing the full manic pitch of Save the Green Planet, the very thing that you thought he would have a field day with. Earlier Lanthimos films like Dogtooth and The Lobster revelled in this bizarre deadpan banality. Bugonia, by contrast, plays most scenes almost straight. The deadpan delivery is there but sanded down. What emerges instead is a strangely polite film that never seems willing to have full confidence in its own premise or push into the kind of black absurdity that has defined Lanthimos’s best work.
It could also simply be that since Save the Green Planet was made (2003), wackadoodle conspiracy theory has so much entered the mainstream in the form of the resurgence of Flat Earthers and anti-vaxxers to the popularity of people like Joe Rogan and Alex Jones giving voice to all the craziness out there that it may be a case of Poe’s Law making it impossible to make this satire any longer. Today a man who believes the head of a corporation is a shapeshifting alien no longer feels like the lunatic fringe; he feels like someone with a popular YouTube channel. This seems to put Bugonia in an awkward place – it wants to parody crazy beliefs but the rest of the world has outpaced it.
That isn’t to say that Bugonia doesn’t work. A Yorgos Lanthimos film is always a pleasure to watch. Emma Stone has become Lanthimos’s new muse with this making his fourth film in a row that she has starred in for him. She has a great line in corporate speak and her no-nonsense level-headedness through most of Jesse Plemons’ demands that shows her on top form. Jesse Plemons too seems to have no joined Lanthimos’s regular ensemble – this is his second Lanthimos film in a row. He gives a fine performance, even if it is one where he gives the impression of having slept in the same suit and not showered right throughout shooting. When the film edges into cosmic bleakness in its last act, it is the performers who carry it there rather than the filmmaking.
(Nominee for Best Actress (Emma Stone) at this site’s Best of 2025 Awards).
Trailer here