Bugonia

While some directors spend their lives crafting love letters to the worlds they create, Yorgos Lanthimos has developed a fine line in cinematic hate mail to humanity. We have few redeeming qualities in his eyes, which makes him a solid choice for this remake of Jang Joon-hwan’s Save The Green Planet!, adapted by Will Tracy whose back catalogue mostly includes telly work like Succession and The Regime. Who are mad men and who is sane is a matter of debate in this, sometimes uneven but blackly comic tale of crack-pot kidnap and corporative malice.

Teddy (Jesse Plemons in a sweaty, anxious performance) is a conspiracy nut, who has disappeared so far down the rabbit hole it’s almost a surprise he hasn’t made his way back. He loves bees, though, tending hives at the back of his house with his easily led cousin Don (Aidan Delbis, an actor on the autistic spectrum whose performance is every bit as compelling as that of his more famous co-stars). Teddy offers the younger man long lectures on colony collapse and a host of other theories in between keep-fit routines.

The queen bee in his real world is the head of the Big Pharma corporation where he works a menial job. Emma Stone’s Michelle is the sort who knows how to deliver a message to her employees about going home on time while simultaneously making it absolutely clear that nobody should move. Fit in mind and body, if not in morality, she’s kidnapped by Teddy because he believes she is from Andromeda, whose mission is to destroy humankind. It’s a bonkers and highly detailed theory that also requires her head to be shaved and her to be slathered in cream – just one of many absurdist flourishes.

Mostly playing out as a chamber piece in Teddy’s basement, it becomes a psychological battleground as Teddy becomes increasingly violent in a bid to elicit a confession from his captive at the same time as she tries to find a chink in his mental armour. At the same time, we are increasingly invited to fill in the blanks as backstory is cautiously revealed. There’s also a lot of soft targeting going on here, from corporate greed to red pill popping but the way the screenplay shifts sympathies is slick.

If you’ve wondered what it might be like to watch Misery – one of the inspirations for Save The Green Planet! – for tragicomic laughs, then now is your chance but the fact the grim outweighs the grinning feels like an imbalance. It’s also a shame that an unsettling subplot involving Teddy’s former babysitter Casey, who is now a cop (Stavros Halkias) isn’t given a little more room to breathe.

The scoring from Jerskin Fendrix brings the big guns and the brass while A-list cinematographer Robbie Ryan finds invention even in the close-quarters environment. Never lacking in freewheeling energy, the problem for Lanthimos is that the very thing which makes him predictable is his unpredictability. Whether being able to see what is coming matters to you or not is likely to heavily influence how much you feel the sting of Bugonia’s arguments.

Reviewed on: 08 Oct 2025