BUGONIA is the 2025 movie from director Yorgos Lanthimos, who just did POOR THINGS in 2023 and then KINDS OF KINDNESS in 2024. I can’t even keep up with the guy! This one’s a little different because it’s a remake of the 2003 South Korean film SAVE THE GREEN PLANET!. By all accounts it’s great, but I still haven’t seen it, so calculate that in if you’re trying to figure out how much you’ll like this.

I assumed it was a situation like Spike Lee’s OLDBOY where producers were trying to do the English language version for some reason and found an auteur to do it, but it turns out this would’ve been original director Jang Joon-hwan remaking his own movie if he hadn’t gotten sick and handed the reins (and the script by Will Tracy [THE MENU, former editor in chief of The Onion]) over to Lanthimos. Jang is still an executive producer, along with Ari Aster and others.

Nevertheless it feels very Lanthimos, and reunites him with Emma Stone and Jesse Plemons, plus his team of cinematographer Robbie Ryan, editor Yorgos Mavropsaridis, composer Jerskin Fendrix and production designer James Price. I wouldn’t consider it a work-for-hire.

The story concerns a pair of outsiders, Teddy Gatz (Jesse Plemons, OBSERVE AND REPORT) and his trusting autistic cousin Don (Aidan Delbis), as they kidnap prominent pharmaceutical CEO Michelle Fuller (Emma Stone, EDDINGTON) and keep her locked up at their secluded farmhouse. They believe she’s an alien from Andromeda, and that they only have a few days to convince her to bring them to speak with their emperor on the mothership when it arrives to invade during the lunar eclipse.

Teddy seems like a smart guy who has climbed so far into so many rabbit holes he’ll never see the light of day again. He speaks very confidently about what they’re up to (it involves the disappearance of bees), how they communicate (through their hair, so they shave her bald), how to identify them (which involves subtle physical characteristics that could apply to almost anyone). Don has a hard time keeping up and sometimes seems skeptical, but he loves his cousin and will do anything for him.

So they prepare for the abduction through diet, exercise, and more. It seems semi-somewhat harmless until Teddy is convincing his cousin to chemically castrate himself. Don understands what he’s giving up and is sad about it but goes along anyway. Okay, I’m starting to not like this Teddy.

Their training is intercut with Michelle’s daily rich person routine – smoothies, kickboxing, yoga. Teddy wants to be prepared for a technologically superior enemy, but what we see is class difference. I like the contrast between her clean, minimalist mansion and his old, cluttered, very lived-in house. It’s clear that this is a home with some family history even before Don references better times when there were more people there. It made me depressed, actually, reminding me of that feeling from my parents’ house – and in a different way my own apartment – that there’s so much old stuff that I don’t know how to get rid of.

Anyway, they do it. They sneak up on her in her driveway. This is a dark subject matter but very funny. She’s been established as a horrible phony, making a disingenuous corporate video about the importance of diversity, boasting about a new policy that no one has to stay past 5:30 while passive-aggressively encouraging everyone to stay past 5:30, saying good morning to her terrified minions with that painfully forced smile that Stone is so good at. But also she’s a woman being jumped by a couple of psychos so it’s thrilling when she puts up a real good fight. Fuck those guys. But they get her.

They keep her locked up for days, often alone as they watch on a nannycam from upstairs. But each day they’ll go in, dressed in their ill-fitting suits like they’re going to a job interview or making a backyard movie where they’re homicide detectives. And this poor lady wakes up bald, covered in antihistamine cream, captive in “the headquarters of the human resistance.” After she gets her bearings she confidently offers her “best guess of how the next 48 hours are likely to transpire,” including the authorities launching “a statewide manhunt using all of the methods at their disposal” because “my company is a key job creator and economic engine of the region” and her status as “a high profile female corporate executive” adds “a certain, you know, politicized optics to this.”

But Teddy isn’t fazed, because “nothing you say is true” and “you’ve aided your species in the techno-enslavement and the agro-corporate disintegration of planet Earth, okay?”

I love that even tied up in a basement Michelle never gives up the polite corporate speak, saying stuff like “Could we have a dialogue about this, please?” and “Let’s just unpack the problem here” and “I hear where you’re coming from, I do, and I respectfully disagree” and “I think that we maybe got off on the wrong foot, and I would love to keep the conversation going, please.” I guess if it works in business it might work in kidnappings.

There’s a little bit of backstory shown in stylized, dreamlike flashbacks that seem like Teddy’s perspective. He remembers his mom Sandy (took me a second to recognize her as Alicia Silverstone, BATMAN & ROBIN) getting all fucked up from some kind of fanciful experiments. And it seems they actually encountered Michelle before, when she visited them to acknowledge some kind of class-action-lawsuit-worthy fuck up and “apologize” on behalf of the company but without really changing anything, as far as I could tell. That’s how Teddy was radicalized, I guess.

Of course there are a couple directions this story could go, and I didn’t know which it would be. But I liked the idea that if he’s just crazy, and she’s just a CEO, then he’s wrong but also kind of right about her and her company and the world. Right for the wrong reasons.

If you’ve enjoyed Lanthimos’ recent output and don’t have feelings against the idea of remaking SAVE THE GREEN PLANET!, I definitely recommend this one. It’s very funny, tense and stylish, it speaks a little to the current fucked up state of things (but not in an on-the-nose sort of way), it has two more top notch performances by Stone and Plemons, and the handful of other actors around them also pull their weight. Strong work all around. And if you’ve already seen it I invite you to step into the

BUGONIA SPECIAL SUPER SPOILER ZONE

Like I said, there’s kinda two ways we can play this: either she turns out to actually be an alien or she doesn’t. The joke you see coming or the grimmer notion that what you see is what you get and a damaged victim is doing fucked up shit to a human being. It certainly plays it like she’s not an alien, and throughout the movie I had my fingers crossed that it would stay that way. Much of the humor comes from the “oh jesus” looks she gives when Teddy spews tidbits and lingo about the Andromedan invasion, and her awkward attempts to play along with his scenarios. I’m not sure how to reconcile her as faking that, and I like the idea that an ordinary CEO now resembles an alien invader enough that it isn’t that important of a distinction. She’s still inhuman, her company still put his mom in a coma, collapsed bee colonies, impoverished the community, endanger the future of the earth, why does it matter that she doesn’t come from space? In fact, isn’t it kind of worse that she doesn’t? But if you’ve seen BUGONIA or SAVE THE GREEN PLANET! you know that she does turn out to be an Andromedan, and although I’m not sure I wouldn’t have preferred a non-alien ending I did very much enjoy the playfully drawn out reveal (“I forgot something. Just really quickly. One second”), the goofy details of the alien culture (their big furry outfits), and unexpected complications like “even though he was right about the aliens he also killed numerous humans like a serial killer or the alternate ending of I AM LEGEND” and “even though they are secret alien infiltrators they’re in fact trying to save the humans, but change their mind and end them in part because of his efforts.” Also, I kinda like the joke that being around humans for too long turned her into an asshole. Turns out the joke isn’t that a CEO is like an alien. It’s that aliens hate them too.

One question: what’s with the part where the Andromedan says, “There are only two human subjects remaining and the likelihood of success is zero. Because of who they are a decision needs to be made.” Who are the two? Stone and Lanthimos? Salt ’n Pepa? I think I missed something there.