Film Review - Bugonia
Images courtesy of Universal Pictures.
From the fry scene in The Killing of a Sacred Deer to the baby-brained hedonism of Poor Things, Yorgos Lanthimos has always been a master of the uncomfortable chuckle - the kind that bubbles up when the dark and bizarre intersect. With Bugonia, his English-language remake of Jang Joon-hwan’s minor cult classic Save the Green Planet! (2003), Lanthimos doesn’t just adapt; he mutates and reanimates the original into something grotesquely beautiful and eerily prescient.
The setup is deceptively simple: Teddy (Jesse Plemons), a beekeeper with a head buzzing full of red-pilled delusions, kidnaps Michelle Fuller (Emma Stone), a pharmaceutical CEO he believes is an alien from the planet Andromeda. His cousin Don (Aidan Delbis), acting as a wide-eyed tagalong, assists tepidly in the basement interrogation. What unfolds is a genre-bending fever dream - part sci-fi satire, part psychological horror, part corporate takedown - all filtered through Lanthimos’ signature lens of deadpan surrealism. Stone, in her fourth major collaboration with Lanthimos, is magnetic. Michelle is equal parts icy executive and survivalist chameleon, adapting to Teddy’s delusions with unnerving precision. Plemons, meanwhile, delivers a career-high performance as a man so steeped in online conspiracy culture that he’s practically allergic to reality. His monologues - a blend of all-too-familiar conspiracy jargon, bee extinction stats, and alien lore - are delivered with a shaky conviction. It's a bit like logging onto social media and immediately being confronted with a headline that feels both shocking and mundane, forcing one to reckon with the depraved hallucination that is our current political landscape.
Where Save the Green Planet! leaned into manic energy and tonal whiplash, Bugonia is far more surgical. Lanthimos strips away the original’s chaotic pacing and replaces it with slow-burn dread, punctuated by emotional gut punches as we learn more of Teddy and Don’s upbringing and motivations. But overhead, a lunar eclipse looms and Michelle’s antihistamine-slathered face becomes a canvas for paranoia, revealing that thematically, Bugonia is a scalpel to the throat of modern delusion. It’s not just about aliens or healthcare CEOs - it’s about the echo chambers we build, the truths we cherry-pick, and the terrifying ease with which fiction becomes gospel. Teddy isn’t merely an agitator; he’s a symptom, and the film dances on a razor's edge of ambiguity, refusing to offer easy answers or clean resolutions until its final minutes.
Visually, Robbie Ryan’s cinematography is a riot of saturated reds and oppressive browns, amplifying the claustrophobia and emotional decay. The basement scenes are lit like an interrogation room from Kafka’s nightmares, while flashbacks and hallucinations bleed into the present with dreamlike fluidity. The camera lingers on twitching fingers, on cracked tiles, on the slow unraveling of sanity, and the effect is hypnotic, channeled through an unbelievably sweaty and greased up Jesse Plemons. While the aesthetics are commendable, what makes Bugonia truly sing is its volatile narrative. Just when you think you’re watching a basement thriller, it swerves into surrealism, then corporate satire, before a finale that feels like you've been taken hostage alongside Stone’s CEO. It’s a cinematic mood swing, and Lanthimos orchestrates it with glee. Even with the knowledge that comes from having seen the original South Korean film, I was constantly second-guessing where the story was leading, and just how far things would go.
In the end, Bugonia refuses the safety of well-worn genre fare and instead thrives in its own damp moral fog, pulling the viewer in slowly like a vat of honey. Lanthimos has taken a cult fable and recoded it for an era where outrage is engineered, facts are filtered, and finding common moral ground is a fool’s errand. The film is as unsettling as it is precise, a staged fever that ramps up towards violent, bloody catharsis. Bugonia is not simply a remake; it is a sharpened instrument, a film that opts to laugh at the abyss before pulling you into its orbit, leaving you rattled, fascinated, and unable to look away.
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Bugonia is screening in cinemas from Thursday the 30th of October. For tickets and more info, click here.