Back with his third feature in three years, Yorgos Lanthimos reunites with some familiar faces on this darkly comic kidnap thriller, notably his recurring female lead Emma Stone, co-star Jesse Plemons and cinematographer Robbie Ryan. A first ever remake project for the prolific Athenian mischief-maker, Bugonia is an English-language update of Korean writer-director Jang Joon-hwan’s Save The Green Planet! (2003), a screwball sci-fi satire with a vaguely political edge, which won prizes and warm reviews worldwide. Lanthimos and screenwriter Will Tracy have softened Jang’s madcap Looney Tunes tone, leaning more into the Greek director’s signature bleak absurdism and adding a more contemporary culture-wars spin, though they retain at least some of the original film’s wild slapstick energy and cheerfully gory splatter violence.
Bugonia world premieres in competition in Venice this week, returning Lanthimos and Stone to the festival that launched Poor Things (2023) to Oscar-winning glory and big commercial returns. Their fourth collaboration inevitably feels like a minor work by comparison, with a sluggish two-hour runtime that drags a little in its early stages, although energy levels pick up again for the enjoyably unhinged, gonzo final act. Backed and distributed by Universal’s indie division Focus Features, with horror maestro Ari Aster credited as producer, it should enjoy healthy box office and awards buzz following its late October release. Only tangentially related to the plot, that new title refers to ancient folkloric rituals in various Mediterranean cultures, rooted in the belief that bees were spontaneously generated from the bodies of dead cows.
Stone gives great ice-queen diva as Michelle Fuller, the high-achieving, hyper-focussed, cold-blooded CEO of a US-based pharmaceutical company. Behind her grudgingly woke messaging about workplace diversity and corporate ethics, Michelle lives an insulated life of wealth and privilege in her high-tech modernist mansion, cheerfully profiting from her company’s dubious track record of poisoning customers with untested medicines and endangering the world’s bee population with pesticides.
Plemons, meanwhile, radiates volatile Unabomber-style intensity as Teddy, a scruffy amateur bee-keeper and low-level warehouse employee in Fuller’s company. A series of personal tragedies have pushed Teddy into the toxic underworld of online conspiracy theories, where The Matrix is real and “colony collapse disorder” afflicting bees is a warning about the looming fate of humankind. This has led him to the deranged conclusion that his boss is actually an extra-terrestrial overlord from Andromeda, part of a clandestine alien plan to enslave and destroy all life on Earth. A resentful worker bee plotting against the queen, he has cast himself as the human race’s messianic saviour, a cult leader without a cult following.
Enlisting his suggestible, emotionally fragile cousin Don (Aidan Delbis) as an accomplice, Teddy kidnaps Fuller and chains her up in the basement of his remote farmhouse. The duo’s wild ransom demands involve beaming up to space for a peace summit with the Andromedans, a bizarre fantasy which the captive CEO initially treats with contempt, then with qualified empathy for Teddy’s damaged mental state. But as her kidnappers become increasingly violent and unstable, Michelle engages the duo in a high-stakes psychological battle of competing realities, playing along with Teddy’s alien story just long enough to steer him towards an explosive, blood-splattered showdown.
Screenwriter Tracy has notched up some prestige credits including Succession and the culinary horror comedy The Menu (2022), as well as creating HBO’s starry political satire miniseries The Regime (2024). His Bugonia script is peppered with timely observations on post-truth culture wars and incel resentment, but it feels a little light on actual jokes for such rich subject matter. There are plenty of bleak laughs here, but there could have been more.
Bugonia also contains echoes of Misery (1990), which make sense as Jang’s original film was partly inspired by the Stephen King thriller. The final audacious plot twist is not hard to predict, even for viewers unfamiliar with Save the Green Planet! But at least this late narrative gear change, which expands the story by millions of years to include the death of the dinosaurs and other mass extinction events, allows Lanthimos and his production designers a wildly creative final spree, ending this relatively modest three-hander on a delirious crescendo of tragicomic excess. Credit is also due to Delbis, a young novice actor on the autistic spectrum who holds his own very well against two much more experienced and neurotypical co-stars.
Handsomely shot on lustrous 35mm film by Lanthimos regular Robbie Ryan, whose work with the director has earned him two Oscar nominations to date, Bugonia looks fantastic. Though his freewheeling kinetic style is slightly cramped by the story’s main basement location, Ryan still finds room for some impressively dynamic mobile shots and luscious hi-res close-ups of flowers and bees. A handful of crisp monochrome flashback scenes, heavily stylised with surreal horror imagery, are particularly strong. More of these would have been very welcome, especially as they feature an under-used Alicia Silverstone as Teddy’s sickly mother. Also back on board is Poor Things and Kinds of Kindness composer Jerskin Fendrix, aka Joscelin Dent-Pooley, whose muscular score alternates between ominous drones and purposely nerve-jangling orchestral fanfares.
Director: Yorgos Lanthimos
Screenplay: Will Tracy
Cast: Emma Stone, Jesse Plemons, Aidan Delbis, Stavros Halkias, Alicia Silverstone
Cinematography: Robbie Ryan
Editing: Yorgos Mavropsaridis
Production designer: James Price
Music: Jerskin Fendrix
Producers: Yorgos Lanthimos, Ed Guiney, Andrew Lowe, Emma Stone, Ari Aster, Lars Knudsen, Miky Lee, Jerry Kyoungboum Ko
Production companies: Element Pictures (Ireland), Fruit Tree (US), Square Peg (US), CJENM (South Korea)
World sales: Universal
Venue: Venice Film Festival (Competition)
In English
120 minutes
