Bugonia ★★

Two people kidnap an affluent individual, convinced they are an alien who is destroying the world.

This wild premise of Bugonia and its original source material, the Jang Joon-hwan film Save the Green Planet!, offers a million different directions its story, themes, and genre could take. Save the Green Planet! leans into horror, thriller, and black comedy, and has as leads a conspiracy-obsessed man and his circus-performer girlfriend who live in the mountains. Bugonia, on the other hand, leans more heavily into black comedy and is set in the suburbs and follows Teddy (Jesse Plemons) and his autistic cousin Don (Aidan Delbis).

Teddy is a beekeeper and works for Auxolith, a pharmaceutical company. He believes that the company is responsible for the decline in bee populations through their production of pesticide, causing colony collapse disorder in which worker bees disappear from a hive, abandoning the queen and eventually leading to eventual death and collapse of the hive. Given the destructive impact of Auxolith products, Teddy believes – through study – that the company’s CEO Michelle Fuller (Emma Stone) is an alien intent on destroying humanity. With this understanding, there is nothing he won’t do to prevent this, even chemical castration to prevent sexual urges (“distractions”). Teddy’s ambitions seem as pure lunacy and his desperation leads him to kidnap Michelle.

Teddy and Don’s preparation for this kidnapping begins Bugonia, introducing the regular exercise and rituals done in support of their believed higher purpose. We see Teddy’s discipline and Don’s skepticism about what they are about to do. We also see Don’s self-doubt that Teddy explains is the result of mechanisms the aliens have implemented to subdue and pacify humanity. Don relies on Teddy and it is tragic that he may be misguided by Teddy. Unlike brothers Connie and Nick in Good Time, where it is clear that the flawed Connie cares for his developmentally disabled brother, Teddy’s motivations seem more self-serving and he refuses to grant Don input over decisions. This regrettably also has the effect of minimizing the significance of Don’s character.

Apart from his belief that Michelle is an alien, Teddy and Michelle have an interconnected past. Auxolith not only is the place of Teddy’s employment, it is the company that left Teddy’s mother, Sandy (Alicia Silverstone), comatose as a result of testing a new drug. Bugonia reveals this connection between Teddy and Michelle through gorgeous black-and-white, orchestral-driven flashbacks that recall Lanthimos’ and cinematographer Robbie Ryan’s work in the second segment of Kinds of Kindness. It is these flashbacks that most clearly exhibit Lanthimos’ directorial presence within Bugonia.

Bugonia is a logical choice for the Greek auteur to direct, with black comedy and surrealistic tendencies, but his influence within the film is not felt in the writing; Lanthimos did not pen the film. The discussions between Teddy and Michelle are not deadpan, their movement not stilted, and a spaghetti dinner between the two is practically begging for a callback or a play on the spaghetti scene with Barry Keoghan’s Martin in The Killing of a Sacred Deer but doesn’t. As bizarre as the premise is for Bugonia, the film is more ‘normal’ than some of Lanthimos’ outings and the torture scenes taken from the original are toned down, possibly to be more palatable to audiences. Bugonia doesn’t notably stray from Save the Green Planet! despite sharing a story that brims with creative possibility. The most commendable aspect of Bugonia instead is in its acting where Jesse Plemons portrays the disciplined, measured hostility of Teddy’s character impeccably and Emma Stone continues to be willing to deliver physical acting performances in her fourth collaboration with Yorgos Lanthimos. 

Bugonia has the right director, right actors, yet doesn’t assert its originality apart from its final few minutes. Even so, the lead-up will be all too familiar for fans of the cult classic Save the Green Planet!. With themes of conspiracy, truth, inequality, and propaganda, this story’s sociopolitical ideas are apt for reexamination in a contemporary remake, yet Yorgos Lanthimos stays too close to the original subject matter to justify his remake.