A remake of Save the Green Planet!, a South Korean movie from 2003, Bugonia fiddles with details and genders but tells essentially the same story – conspiratorially minded eco-warriors kidnap a chemical industry boss convinced that there’s an alien invasion imminent and use torture to extract the vital details that will save planet Earth.
Jang Joon-hwan made the original and was all lined up to direct this English-language remake but in the end Yorgos Lanthimos stepped in, bringing in his favourite actress, Emma Stone, to play one of the leads. Now the chemicals boss man is a biopharma boss lady, and the kidnappers are a boggle-eyed dude (Jesse Plemons) and his autistic cousin (Aidan Delbis), whereas it was boyfriend and girlfriend first time out. In both cases the aliens in questionable question are Andromedan – is Michelle (Stone) really a creature from another planet destroying the planet’s eco-system through her company’s indiscriminate use of chemicals?
In short, how mad are Teddy (Plemons) and Don (Delbis)?
You could ask the same question about Lanthimos. In what’s essentially a chamber piece acted out by three people, one of them tied to a chair, the director brings in the big guns of expansive movie-making. Shooting on film – on VistaVision (big and wide and very filmic) – and using the superb lighting cameraman Robbie Ryan to provide the lush cinematic looks, Lanthimos deploys Kubrick glides as if this were a remake of Paths of Glory and we were out on the battlefield – maybe we are. VistaVision is currently a bit of a fad – The Brutalist and One Battle after Another both used it – but even though the aesthetic pluses of mega-celluloid are a touch oversold, this is undoubtedly a good looking film. Let’s enjoy the VistaVision moment while it’s here.
It’s also a maddeningly even handed film. On the one hand and on the other all the way through. Teddy is bonkers, a proper, mouth-breathing conspiracy nut who knows all the terminology because he’s read it on the online forums. On the other hand he does have a point – use of neonicotinoids is implicated in the spread of Colony Collapse Disorder. And if the bees go, as Teddy believes they will, we’re toast.
Then there’s Emma Stone’s performance as Michelle – a lip-service queen hymning diversity and work-life balance in scenes set at her big pharma company, but really a driven monomaniac saying whatever’s necessary to get things done. But at least she’s trying, and lip service is better than no service at all?
This is Stone’s fourth time out with Lanthimos (fifth if we include the 2022 short Bleat). She brings the goods. That’s her having her head shaved for real as Michelle is prepped for the electrocution session that will make her talk. Endless close-ups with a hyper-shallow depth of field, talking the whole time as the very verbal Michelle – smart as a whip – tacks this way and that in an attempt to frighten Teddy and Don, or win them over, or whatever. Desperation etched into her face, eyes fluttering with fear, Stone is highly convincing.
It’s all quite mad and unnecessary really. Gothically excessive, as the crazily OTT score by Jerskin Fendrix reinforces, especially once things shifts out of banter and into splatter for the movie’s last half hour or so.
There are moments of very dark humour all the way through, most obviously in the recurring character of Casey (Stavros Halkias), a fleshy, over-friendly cop who used to be Teddy’s babysitter and now wants to apologise for something that took place all those years ago. We can all surmise what.
Through it all it teases us with our own prejudices about conspiracy theorists – nuts? Or are we all being a touch smug and elitist?
But it saves the best for the very last. This movie may be half an hour too long and it may be too grandiloquent by half, but at least it ends on a really good joke.
Bugonia – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2026
