A high-powered CEO is kidnapped by a conspiracy theorist convinced she is an alien from Andromeda in Bugonia, the latest film from Poor Things and The Favourite director Yorgos Lanthimos now playing in Prague cinemas. This absurdist black comedy boasts two of the best performances of 2025 from Emma Stone and Jesse Plemons, and might be the director’s most accessible film to date, even if it offers more limited rewards for his most ardent fans.
In an unusual step for the director, Bugonia is a straight-up remake: of South Korean filmmaker Jang Joon-hwan‘s thoroughly surprising 2003 comedy Save the Green Planet! While that film alternated between scenes of lighthearted comedy and disturbing violence, Lanthimos mixes it all in a heady stew that results in, perhaps, a more cohesive experience dominated by the director’s trademark cynicism and deadpan humor.
The result is on par with the original film, minus one key element: that of surprise, which made the 2003 movie so memorable. Even fans of Lanthimos who haven’t seen the South Korean film will know exactly where this one is headed, because there are only two possible outcomes for the story, and only one that fits the director’s brand of sardonic irony. Unless he’s aiming to go truly subversive here.
Bugonia stars Stone as Michelle Fuller, CEO of Auxolith, a giant pharmaceutical company whose experimental drugs have led to devastating effects both on human test subjects and animal populations—specifically bees. In the film’s early scenes, she repeatedly reminds her employees that they are free to leave work a half hour early under a new company doctrine, with all the grace of an alien overlord who has no idea how to speak with the “normies.”
Plemons is Teddy Gatz, a beekeeper and conspiracy theorist who lives with his intellectually disabled cousin Don (Aidan Delbis) and believes that Michelle is an actual alien. Specifically, a member of the invasive Andromedan species who have infiltrated the human race, and will next meet with her superiors during an upcoming lunar eclipse that will allow the Andromedan mothership to surreptitiously enter Earth’s atmosphere in four days.
This is all nonsense of course, but Don is easily convinced, and the pair barely manage to kidnap Michelle, shave off her hair and cover her in antihistamine cream so she cannot telepathically contact the mothership, and chain her up in the basement. As Teddy tries to convince her to allow him to board the mothership during the eclipse and negotiate a truce with humanity, Michelle must work out a path of escape.
There’s a distorted logic to Bugonia that takes a perverse enjoyment in Michelle’s captivity and torture. Teddy is quite obviously deranged, yes, but there’s an underlying theme that this representative of Big Pharma is getting what’s coming to her regardless. Still, in the face of utter lunacy, we cannot help but side with Michelle as she comes to terms with her situation and sows the seeds of doubt.
Do we side with the madman crusading for justice or the level-headed embodiment of corporate evil? There’s a level of contemporary politics to Will Tracy‘s adaptation of the original film that is not lost on us, and Lanthimos cannily plays with our sympathies—especially in scenes between Teddy and a local police officer played by Stavros Halkias that turn unexpectedly dark.
But the film belongs to the interplay between Stone and Plemons, and both actors are utterly compelling in roles that would not traditionally attract our sympathies. Lanthimos has clearly found a muse in Stone, who has been rewarded with multiple Oscar nominations for her work in his films, and here she creates what might be her most complex performance yet. She’s matched by Plemons, who puts in uncannily subtle work as the unlikely protagonist who we come to empathize with over the course of the movie. Delbis, too, is unforgettable in his film debut.
But if there’s one issue eating at the heart of Bugonia, it’s that it doesn’t earn its ending in the way that the more playful original film did. Despite Lanthimos’ absurdist approach, this is a more grim and serious-minded movie, and its final scenes play as a kind of sick joke instead of the more offbeat comic tones of Save the Green Planet! Still, the sick joke certainly better aligns with the state of the world in 2025.
While much of the movie is confined to a single setting, Bugonia has a striking, distinct look thanks to cinematographer Robbie Ryan’s claustrophobic 4:3 composition and use of nostalgic, barely-functioning VistaVision cameras that were also utilized in One Battle After Another and The Brutalist. Jerskin Fendrix’s unusually complex orchestral soundtrack adds another layer of complexity that belies the intimate two-person drama at the heart of the film, while hits from Green Day and Chappell Roan also feature—and Marlene Dietrich’s rendition of Where Have All the Flowers Gone puts the perfect cap on Lanthimos’ ironic joke.
Despite the more grounded tone and lack of surprise, Bugonia affirms Lanthimos as one of cinema’s great provocateurs—able to twist even the most outlandish material into something disturbingly human and frighteningly relevant; while this may not rank among his best work (that would be The Killing of a Sacred Deer, according to this reviewer), it tops last year’s Kinds of Kindness in overall effectiveness. By the end, Bugonia may leave viewers questioning who the real aliens are—and whether the joke’s on them, or on us.
