James Y. Lee
Before we talk about Bugonia, we need to talk about its much-underrated source material—Jang Joon-Hwan’s pitch-black Korean comedy, Save the Green Planet!
It’s 2003. South Korea is still reeling from the disastrous consequences of the 1997 Asian Financial Crisis. A country whose modern history has been racked by war, democratic crises, and the general malaise of hundreds of years of colonial oppression, has been forced to deal with the economic consequences of a catastrophic devaluing of their currency and the shuttering of numerous corporate tentpoles. The ensuing economic disaster has rendered thousands unemployed, leaving the country with a culture forced to emphasize nothing but ruthless, self-destructive productivity as a means of recovery. Is it any wonder, then, that with a loss of stability, security, and faith in institutions so severe, that a film like Save the Green Planet! released at that time?
That film—which starred Shin Ha-kyun as a woefully traumatized, horrifically delusional man who imprisons and tortures a pharmaceutical executive, convinced that he is a ruling alien invader—is a dark comedy dripping to the bone with sardonic misanthropy. With zany, hilarious gusto, it creates a hopelessly bleak world in which our conspiratorial convictions about the forces in power may not be so far-fetched, and in which the cruelties inflicted on us by the capitalist system are unstoppable enough to warrant a worldview in which none of us are any better off being “free,” much less alive.
It’s 2025. Donald Trump has been sworn in once again as the President of the United States of America. A country whose modern history has been racked by the rise of fascism, an irreversibly all-ruining global pandemic that severed our tether to a shared reality, and the general malaise of the onset of threatening AI technologies, is now on the brink of total self-annihilation, and shows no sign that it will ever turn back to normalcy or sanity within any of our lifetimes. Is it any wonder, then, that with a loss of stability, security, and faith in institutions so severe, that a film like Yorgos Lanthimos’s Bugonia is releasing right now?
Lanthimos’ Americanized update of Save the Green Planet!, at first glance, seems like his participation in a well-trodden tradition; the spoiling and dilution of international films’ merits as a result of corporate interests in anglicizing them for audiences unwilling to turn on subtitles. But even a cursory look at the team behind it, and the sensibilities they trend towards, reveal Bugonia‘s existence as a miraculous meeting of minds.
It’s frankly no wonder that Lanthimos—the mind behind the picaresque euphorias of Poor Things, as well as the vengeful perversities of The Killing of a Sacred Deer—is the perfect fit for a boundary-pushing black comedy like Save the Green Planet!, whose many bizarre idiosyncrasies match well with Lanthimos’ artistic mission. And it helps that on Lanthimos’ producing team are none other than Ari Aster—who gave the most piercingly accurate diagnosis of the disease that’s claimed America with Eddington (2025)—and Emma Stone, whose championing of independent films of all flavors opts well with her incessant collaboration with Lanthimos ever since The Favourite (2018).
The end result is, without any doubt, Lanthimos’ finest film yet—one that fires on all cylinders to create the most wryly sadistic, morbidly hilarious, and furiously hopeless cinematic experience of his entire career. The laugh-out-loud horrors of Save the Green Planet! have been refined, specified, and enhanced within an inch of their life here, seamlessly incorporating the anti-science conspiratorial thinking of the post-COVID era, the existential threat of modern American billionaires, and allusions to the traumas of the opioid epidemic.
The changes made to Jang’s film are conscious ones, which further amplify the real-world dimensions of its hilariously image-conscious satire, and amp up the raw terror of its most horrifying scenes, handily the most sickening and unwatchable in Lanthimos’ entire filmography. And most crucially, Bugonia maintains the seething rage of its predecessor, charged with the same despairingly misanthropic hatred that makes a compelling argument for choosing annihilation over any amount of more years in our dystopian present moment. It is Lanthimos in pure form, totally in his element.
Where Kang Man-shik was the big pharma exec and suspected alien in Save the Green Planet!, Bugonia‘s first major change is altering the gender. Here, her name is Michelle Fuller (Emma Stone), CEO and figurehead of pharmaceutical company Auxolith, who’s used her status as a female corporate executive to present herself as a more compassionately progressive fixture. She enforces her employees to stop all work at exactly 5:30pm. She espouses beliefs about diversity in the workplace, even as she forgets scripted lines about that espousal while filming promotional videos. Her name and face are all over magazines featuring business magnates of her caliber as the next new horizon for scientific advancement.
And where Lee Byeong-gu was the self-proclaimed unlikely savior of Earth in Save the Green Planet!, Bugonia takes his beliefs and transplants them straight into the terminally-online conspiratorial thinking of the 2020s. Here, his name is Teddy Gatz (Jesse Plemons)—and his partner in literal crime is not his girlfriend, but his neurodivergent cousin, Don (Aidan Delbis, in a stunning new discovery), whose loyalty to Teddy results from how deeply Teddy has insulated them from the rest of the world. The two of them are beekeepers, one of the plethora of contributing factors to Teddy’s anger towards corporate magnates like Michelle. The bees are steadily dying off, and he blames it on not just the avarice of billionaires, but his belief that Michelle is here as part of an Andromedan invasion to subjugate all humankind and ecologically destroy the Earth they live in.
So Teddy brings Don along for the only answer the former deems necessary—kidnap Michelle and demand that she bring them to the Andromedan mothership to negotiate the terms of humanity’s survival, before a lunar eclipse arrives in four days. Teddy chemically castrates himself and Don to resist the potential of sexual temptation. They stalk the location of Michelle’s home, and—in one of the most hilariously staged cinematic abductions of recent memory—wrestle with a CEO unwilling to go down easily before barely tranquilizing her. They shave off her hair, which Teddy is convinced is a device through which she can telepathically communicate with her fellow Andromedans. And they chain Michelle to the bed of the basement in their home—which, at first glance, seems too large for someone as isolated as Teddy to meaningfully afford.
It turns out that Teddy also has personal history with Michelle. The house he and Don live in was bought by settlement money, handed by Auxolith to Teddy after his mother, Sandy (Alicia Silverstone), was poisoned by one of the company’s treatments. It’s a terrible and clinically bureaucratic process depicted in black-and-white flashbacks, where Sandy’s comatose state is portrayed by her levitating like a balloon, barely tethered by the IVs hooked up to her body. Teddy’s conquest to exile the Andromedans from Earth is not merely driven by conspiracy and delusion; it’s also driven by a deeply primal, furiously vengeful rage. In his eyes, the Andromedans have not only killed off the bees he cares for—they are also in the process of killing off his family.
That wildly tense dynamic is what defines the confrontation between Teddy, Don, and Michelle that ensues; a chamber-piece-like series of verbal and physical duels that define the bulk of Bugonia‘s tightly-wound story. From the first major spar they undergo, it becomes immediately clear that these are characters siloed off into irreconcilable worldviews. Teddy’s dialogue is rich with paranoia and obsession, containing a layered amount of knowledge and research on pure fiction, whose conviction about the reality of fantasy makes him amusing to watch as he postures intelligence about unintelligible esoterica.
Meanwhile, Michelle’s approach to her abduction is no different than the corporate sort of diplomacy she would regularly engage with in business deals and meetings. Her words are filled with clinically delivered office jargon and politically oriented negotiation that only becomes sharper and smarter over time, all while using her female presentation to provoke both profound discomfort and deep sympathy. This kind of deep specificity makes Bugonia a deeply hilarious affair, amid all of its morbidity—the humor that screenwriter Will Tracy (The Menu) derives from these characters is pointed, frequent, and surprising enough to make this, by a long shot, Lanthimos’ funniest film in a line of work defined by absurdist comedy.
Lanthimos and Tracy have synergized here to deliver a fantastically well-tuned tonal balance, and it helps that their cast are perfectly keyed into how to bring it to life. Stone’s performance here is one of her most potent hours yet, clued into the near-sociopathic frequency with which CEOs and billionaire executives like Michelle are isolated from their humanity yet posture human values all the same, giving them access to a skillset oriented towards clinical, presentable manipulation that Stone executes perfectly. Delbis’ work as a new discovery is absolutely astonishing; Don’s role in the tense standoff of Bugonia almost serves as an audience-proxy conscience, questioning the morality of Teddy’s abduction as their methods steadily become more violent and abhorrent. To that extent, Delbis, himself an autistic actor, plays Don with an awkward compassion that endears him fast to the audience—and eventually allows him to expertly pull off one of the most devastating, shocking, and heartbreaking scenes of any film this entire past year.
But it’s Plemons who emerges from this stellar chamber ensemble as having delivered his finest hour as an actor so far. The long-acclaimed character actor has fully hit his stride with Bugonia, after a long streak of stunning, disquieting characters often contending with how much humanity they have left to preserve. However unconscionable Teddy’s methods become, Plemons also clues into his personal agony so well that you can read every inch of traumatic sadness on his face, seconds before he leaps headlong into a terrifying act of violence. This is a man driven by a potent degree of anger, antisocial and awkward enough to be deeply funny at times, but he also swiftly turns to desperation. As Teddy’s plan begins to run away from him, and Michelle becomes harder and harder to get a proper handle of, the pivot that Plemons undergoes—from confident delivery of delusion, to unsettling expressions of vengeful anger, to tragic impulsivity—makes for an unforgettable performance textured with the sadness of extremism in our modern era.
And what a formally exciting film Bugonia is to witness as well; the third film of this caliber in only two years to have been shot in the now-revived VistaVision format, and presented in a distinctly boxy 1.50:1 aspect ratio. Lanthimos may have toned down his penchant for significant visual experimentation with wider lenses, but it also means his focus on composition, helped by the work of cinematographer Robbie Ryan, has been similarly refined. There’s not a wasted shot in this entire film, with wide shots delivering some fantastic scenery, close-ups that give this amazing cast their time to shine, and perfectly clinical ways to depict the contrasting settings of the Auxolith offices and Teddy’s home. Certain moments of violence and torture are made all the more horrifying for the discretion in framing that Lanthimos exercises—while others are almost comically portrayed in all of their blood-soaked brutality, making for an experience that leans with purpose into both the pulpy and the profoundly disturbing.
The holistic experience of Bugonia is a deeply unpleasant one—defined by how willing it is to peer straight into the abattoir of human instinct that’s defined the trauma of our present moment, and to come out the other side seriously questioning humanity’s worth. Conspiracy as a device to make sense of the horrors of the world is not a new development, but the extent to which people have dug themselves into online rabbit holes is what makes it a tragedy of specifically modern creation. Meanwhile, the wealth disparity deliberately fostered by the greediest among us shows no signs of closing any time soon, permitting the rich to commit one atrocity after another in service of their unquenchable greed and avarice. One cursory look at Michelle and Auxolith’s crimes serves as a potent reminder of the likes of the Sacklers—corporate entities with human masks pretending to serve human interests. Is it any surprise that people like Teddy would view the heads of these corporations as aliens, even as those beliefs are founded on manipulative misinformation? Is there truly anything human about them, really?
Those devoted to Save the Green Planet! will be delighted to learn that Bugonia follows its story with relative faithfulness—with a conclusion that is just as much excitingly strange and hilarious as it is deeply nihilistic and sad, flavored here with Lanthimos’ penchant for the absurd and surreal. A series of quiet final shots—the best of any this year thus far—cement the horrible tragedy of Bugonia‘s events while bringing the entire sordid affair full circle. It ensures that Bugonia is dedicated to preserving the misanthropic spirit of Jang’s film; one defined by cruelty and violence, by the suffering we are willing to inflict on each other, by the pain that drives us toward that suffering. As difficult to watch as it may be, Bugonia is nothing if not utterly necessary. It is one of the rare, proper acknowledgements that the times we live in are defined by this terror, this ugliness, this deep hopelessness, and it can no longer be ignored. Teddy is driven by conspiracy, but he is absolutely right about one thing in particular; nothing short of the entirety of mankind is at stake.
