It’s a bees-minus for Lanthimos’ latest slice of Stone-cold weirdness.
It feels a little like Yorgos Lanthimos has reached a point in his career where the bizarre has almost become the banal. For much of his filmography, his films have felt like transmissions from a parallel dimension, filled with inscrutable dialogue and inexplicable behaviours that defied categorisation but with Bugonia, that signature strangeness feels less like an alien invasion and more like a scheduled appointment. It’s a proficient, well-acted, and undeniably tense, blackly comic thriller that nevertheless feels oddly safe, trading the director’s former anarchic bite for a more linear sense of inevitability, which goes beyond its status as a remake.
A reimagining of Jang Joon-hwan’s South Korean cult classic Save the Green Planet! provides a fertile playground for Lanthimos’s distinct brand of black comedy, introducing us to Teddy, a conspiracy-obsessed beekeeper played with simmering volatility by Jesse Plemons, who has become convinced that the CEO of a pharmaceutical megacorporation is part of an extraterrestrial scouting mission plotting Earth’s destruction. Aided by his impressionable cousin Don (Aidan Delbis), Teddy abducts high-powered executive Michelle (Emma Stone) and confines her to a claustrophobic basement.
What follows is an absurdist chamber piece, oscillating between clumsily enhanced interrogation and metronomic Stockholm syndrome as sympathies and psychological power oscillate between Plemons’ and Stone’s emotional poles. It’s in the execution of these central performances that Bugonia finds its power. Jesse Plemons offers a masterclass in understated menace, playing Teddy not merely as a caricature of a tinfoil-hat lunatic, but as a man suffocating under the weight of his own terrifying logic and bringing a heavy, deliberate physical presence to the role, his quiet delivery contrasting sharply with the absurdity of his actions.
Opposite him, Emma Stone sheds the chaotic energy of her previous Lanthimos collaborations to play the straight woman, albeit one with a steely, almost reptilian resolve, navigating the shift from imperious outrage to survivalist manipulation with chilling precision. But the film finds its unexpected heart in the performance of newcomer Aidan Delbis as Don. Plucked from an open casting call to play Teddy’s neurodivergent cousin, Delbis brings a profound authenticity to a role that could easily have slipped into stereotype or functionary comic relief. As an autistic actor playing an autistic character, he imbues Don with a tenderness that acts as a vital counterpoint to the ideological cynicism of his co-stars, a specific, unvarnished honesty in his delivery that makes his character’s loyalty to Teddy feel both touching and tragic.
Yet, for all the commitment of its cast, the narrative trajectory of Bugonia feels frustratingly signposted, asking us to discern whether we are witnessing the salvation of the human race or a violent psychotic break when the answer feels obvious from the get-go. Given that its a remake, it may sound reductive to say you can see the “twist” in Bugonia coming a light year away, but even unarmed with foreknowledge from the story’s previous South Korean incarnation, you’d have to be paying very little attention for it to suprise you. It might just be Lanthimos’ most disengaged storytelling despite utterly committed perofrmances by Jesse Plemons and, of course, Emma Stone and feels like a missed opportunity to subvert the irony of the original by reversing the polarity of this remake altogether.
Ultimately, Bugonia occupies a strange middle ground, too eccentric for a mainstream conspiracy thriller audience, yet too conventional for the devotees of Lanthimos’s weird wave. It relies too heavily on the goodwill generated by its stars, and to their credit, Stone, Plemons, and Delbis are magnetic enough to sustain interest even when the story drags, finding pockets of humanity and dark humour in the script’s corners and elevating scenes that might otherwise have felt gratuitously grim or silly, or both. But for a film about the terrifying toxicity of conspiracy theories, corporate malfeasance, wealth disparity and environmental callousness, it’s surprisingly toothless, offering a perfectly adequate ride through the twisted mind of its protagonist, but never committing to drive off the edge of the cliff.
