I would describe iconoclastic director Yorgos Lanthimos’s Bugonia as a singularly bizarre satirical thriller, except for the fact it draws its premise and characters from a 2003 Korean film called Save the Green Planet! (Jigureul jikyeora!). In both films, a conspiracy theorist kidnaps the CEO of a massive pharmaceutical company because he believes said CEO is actually a dangerous and sophisticated alien in disguise who has been sent to Earth to prepare for an invasion during an impending solar eclipse. The Korean film was done in a slapstick comic-book style that underlined the plot’s fundamental absurdity with wild visual extravagance. Lanthimos, on the other hand, treats the absurdity as he has in his previous films—with deadpan realism, which plays right into the film’s vexing quandary: Are we watching the actions of a madman or a potential savior?

The madman with a savior complex is Teddy Gatz (Jesse Plemons), who lives with his autistic cousin, Don (Aidan Delbis), in a large, ramshackle farmhouse outside a small Southern town. They make their living as bee-keepers, but have clearly spent most of their time preparing to abduct Michelle Fuller (Emma Stone), the wealthy and powerful CEO of Auxolith, a pharmaceutical conglomerate. Lanthimos spends the film’s early scenes comparing and contrasting these characters, pitting Teddy and Don’s rural, mismatched, cluttered existence with Michelle’s sleek, pampered, and rigorous lifestyle. Their kidnapping scheme is sloppy, but it works, and once they drug Michelle and get her into their car, they shave her head because Teddy firmly believes that her hair is a communication device she can use to send distress calls to her alien race in outer space. Teddy and Don take her back to their house where they barricade her in the basement, which they have been preparing for exactly this turn of events.

Teddy is kooky but determined, and Jesse Plemons plays him as a man who is so sure of what he thinks he knows that nothing else matters. His beliefs may seem ridiculous, but he follows them with such conviction that they starts to gnaw at us—the impossible, absurd, ridiculous what if he’s right? But, he couldn’t possibly be, especially when confronted with the smooth, polished logic and rationality of his captive. Shorn of her ginger locks and coated head to foot in gloppy moisturizer, Stone starts to look like an alien even as she insists that she is human. And why shouldn’t she? As rational viewers, our bias is to side with her because, after all, who wants to side with the crazed conspiracy theorist, especially one like Teddy who combines all the unsightly signifiers of poverty and ignorance?

And that is precisely why Bugonia is such a sly, skewering thriller of ideas and socioeconomic preconceptions. In adapting the original film by Jang Joon Hwan, screenwriter Will Tracy (The Menu) takes decidedly pointed jabs at every rung on the ladder, making for a profoundly uncomfortable viewing experience (which is Lanthimos’s specialty). We don’t necessarily want to identify with Stone’s character because she is clearly such a brazen, unfeeling corporate queen, incapable of viewing the world through anything other than a transactional lens. On the other hand, we don’t want to identify with Teddy and Don, who are clearly deluded and dangerous. One of the film’s most incisive pleasures is purely verbal—Teddy’s fervent insistence fueled by what we imagine was thousands of hours scouring the deepest, darkest, most paranoid pits of the Internet running headlong into Michelle’s refined corporate jargon-speak. Teddy’s words are loopy but sincere, while Michelle’s are contrived and hollow. There is no possibility of anything but conflict.

When Teddy’s techniques for getting Michelle to admit her alien nature turn painful and involve massive doses of electric shock, we are horrified by the extent to which he will take things and upended by Michelle’s growing victimhood. Her desperation first to convince Teddy that he is wrong about her and then to escape tug at our natural inclination to side with the captive, stony though she may be. But, Plemons makes Teddy so pathetic even in his moments of apparent strength, and Aidan Delbis, who is neurodivergent in real life, makes Don into such a confused and conflicted soul, that they are never really villainous. It also helps that Teddy is driven by devotion to his deceased mother (Alicia Silverstone), a drug addict whose death he blames on Michelle’s company.

To say that all is eventually revealed shouldn’t come as too much of a surprise, although the manner in which the truth arrives is so sudden, so violent, and so darkly comical in its unexpected shock that it sticks with you far beyond the pleasure of having our questions answered. Bugonia promises and delivers its own kind of alien encounter, in this case with our own culpability. Despite having begun his career with the mainstream comedy My Best Friend (2001), Lanthimos’s stature has been built on a series of dark, brutal thrillers and satires. His visual command is impressive, and Bugonia is no different, particularly in its apocalyptic denouement that is both horrifying and masochistically satisfying.

Copyright © 2026 James Kendrick

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