Film
Yorgos Lanthimos’s latest film, Bugonia, remakes a South Korean B-grade comedy into a war of words on contemporary delusions.
By Anthony Carew.Emma Stone and Jesse Plemons get political in Bugonia
The last movie I saw in cinemas before the great 2020 lockdown was Downhill. An awful Hollywood version of the brilliant 2014 Swedish film Force Majeure, this defanged do-over rewrote Ruben Östlund’s deeply uncomfortable satire of male vanity as a warm-hearted Will Ferrell comedy, in which dads are loveably hopeless but trying their best.
As the Covid-19 pandemic shuttered local theatres for months with no end in sight, I found myself considering a nightmare scenario for any self-respecting cinephile: what if the last film I would see in a cinema was an American remake?
“American remake” suggests the worst impulses of Hollywood: a lack of original ideas, profit-motive decision-making, an ongoing desecration of the cinematic art form. Where clueless suits misread a source text and remove anything original or provocative to render a forgettable corporate product.
It doesn’t have to spell disaster, though. This century it has produced two Best Picture winners: Martin Scorsese’s The Departed, a remake of the 2002 Hong Kong action film Infernal Affairs, and Sian Heder’s CODA, based on the 2014 French farce The Bélier Family. The latter especially marked a huge improvement on a cringey original, offering a persuasive counter to the remake’s bad name.
There’s also one of my favourite moments of cinematic bafflement: Austrian auteur Michael Haneke re-creating his own 1997 film Funny Games shot-for-shot a decade on, revisiting its audience-baiting exercise in cruelty for the American viewers his original was indicting.
Bugonia is another successful example. The 10th film for the hugely accomplished Greek filmmaker Yorgos Lanthimos, it’s an unlikely, at times unrecognisable, update of Jang Joon-hwan’s 2003 comedy Save the Green Planet! Zany, silly and filled with evocations of low-rent B-movies, the definitely original original delivers a brilliant one-line premise: a conspiracy theorist kidnaps a pharmaceutical industry chief executive who he believes is an alien.
Bugonia retains that set-up but strips away much of the original’s cluttered, chaotic narrative, including an entire B-grade B-story about investigating police officers. With a sense of inspiration, it instead finds resonance in some initially half-baked themes, bringing them into a new light two decades on.
Its deeply flawed protagonist, Teddy (Jesse Plemons), is a walking sign o’ the times: the kind of guy who spent the pandemic doing his own research. Living on a rural property with his sidekick cousin Don (Aidan Delbis), Teddy is a monastic figure who lovingly tends to his hives of bees, crunches conspiracy-theory podcasts and works scanning packages at a dispatchment warehouse for a chemical conglomerate named Auxolith.
He’s sure Auxolith’s chief executive, Michelle Fuller (Emma Stone, in her fourth collaboration with Lanthimos), is an alien from Andromeda who is due to make contact with her intergalactic mothership at an imminent lunar eclipse. With the days to the eclipse counting down (quite literally, in intertitles), Teddy fast-tracks a plot to kidnap the alien and force “it” to make contact with the Andromedan emperor, so he can step in and “negotiate [their] species’ withdrawal from Planet Earth”. Of course, he insists – to Don, and mostly to himself – that he’s not out for personal glory but rather to save humanity from its “techno-enslavement and agri-corporate degradation”. He just wants to Make Earth Great Again.
After juxtaposing Teddy’s shambolic farmhouse with Fuller’s glittering ultra-modernist home and business-park workplace – a series of glass boxes inside glass boxes – Bugonia’s opening act bounces from a comic kidnapping sequence into what will define the film: a stand-off between two characters – and two actors – in a remote basement.
After shaving her hair because it serves as a GPS tracker for the aliens and smearing her in antihistamine cream to suppress her alien powers (“we’re just trying to level the playing field”), Teddy and Don wait for Fuller to wake up. It doesn’t take long for her to clock the situation and aggressively pursue a resolution. She’s a master negotiator, able to work people’s emotions and keep a dialogue flowing. Whether that’s because she’s a chief executive or an Andromedan is up for (ongoing) debate.
As Teddy and Fuller go head-to-head, Bugonia works best as a showcase of the talents of Plemons and Stone, who go through an ever-shifting dramatic dynamic and range of emotions. Their dual/duelling lead performances are fully realised late in the second act, when they sit down for what Teddy hopes will be a “nice dinner”.
Some homemade shock treatments have revealed to Teddy that Fuller is actually Andromedan royalty. Serving up a meal and the honorific of “Your Highness”, he’s hoping their dialogue can be more cordial. Things get testy when the topic turns to colony collapse disorder (CCD). Bugonia, as its title suggests, uses bees as a leitmotif, opening with colour-soaked close-ups of flowers as Teddy narrates us through the beauty and purity of pollination. At dinner, he laments that the bees are dying, just as humanity is failing, only for Fuller to counter that levels of CCD have been decreasing: “You want the bees to be dying, so that it can all be my fault.”
The dinner table is a familiar setting for heated conversations, manners falling away when ideological divisions surface. You can cut the tension with a knife, though that’s not the screenplay’s weapon of choice. While Save the Green Planet! was a work of slapstick, Bugonia is a war of words. Will Tracy’s script is full of monologues, broadsides, debates. When an early discussion turns thorny over Teddy mispronouncing the word “shibboleth”, it foregrounds its love of language.
Tracy is a new writer for Lanthimos, which is notable given how much his filmography has been shaped by his co-authors. He’s mostly worked with compatriot Efthymis Filippou – perhaps the definitive voice of the Greek weird wave – who writes deadpan, absurdist interrogations of the human condition. Lanthimos’s two biggest films, The Favourite and Poor Things, were written with Australian Tony McNamara, in which the normally staid conventions of the period piece are profanely upended.
Tracy cut his teeth at The Onion and Last Week Tonight with John Oliver before moving to drama with Succession, a CV that suggests a solid grounding in satire. However, his first feature screenplay, for 2022’s The Menu, delivered an eat-the-rich satire that wasn’t particularly incisive. In Bugonia, it’s hard to locate where the satire is supposed to sit.
In certain readings, that can be admirable. Teddy, Don and Fuller are all complex, often contradictory humans. By never making any specific party the butt of jokes – whether they’re a galaxy-brained captor or an insincere chief executive desperately cycling through modes of spin – Tracy is out to play both sides, or at least not pick one.
Many of the hallmarks of Lanthimos’s films are here: power, control, storytelling and how all three are used to shape and often distort reality. When Fuller, as the dinner turns hostile, says “lies, truth – what’s the difference?” I was reminded of his fourth film, Alps, in which performed fiction holds more emotional power than inhabited actuality.
There is daring in Bugonia: in Jerskin Fendrix’s bonkers, brassy, bombastic score, used as ironic counterpoint; in Robbie Ryan’s Vistavision-shot cinematography; and, most notably, in Stone’s all-out performance. Her shaved head and varied humiliations evoke cinema’s seminal depiction of a prisoner under prejudiced interrogation, Carl Theodor Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc.
Yet, in a year in which two other American films by big-name directors – Eddington (which also starred Stone) and One Battle After Another – engage with the toxic state of an ultra-militarised, divided United States, there’s something almost coy about the way Bugonia hovers over hot-button topics.
Eddington’s obnoxiousness didn’t play well for many viewers, but even detractors admire how its auteur, Ari Aster, utterly went for it. Bugonia’s Teddy may be a familiar figure from pandemic discourse, but ultimately you wish that Tracy went deeper into the discomfort of his dinner-party arguments, that the film sank further into the mire.
Largely confined to a single location, Bugonia could have been a movie that revelled in the social warping and disorientation of pandemic living. Back when many people lost their minds down conspiratorial rabbit holes, when failures to share the same reality derailed debate, and when some film critics lived in fear that they’d never get to sit in a cinema again.
ARTS DIARY
THEATRE The Talented Mr Ripley
Arts Centre, Naarm/Melbourne, until November 23
LITERATURE OzAsia Festival Weekend of Words
Venues throughout Kaurna Yarta/Adelaide, November 7-9
INSTALLATION Nell: Face Everything
Heide Museum of Modern Art, Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung Country/Bulleen, until March 1
CULTURE Telstra NATSIAA
Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory, Gulumoerrgin/Darwin, until January 26
MUSICAL Pretty Woman: The Musical
Lyric Theatre, Meanjin/Brisbane, until November 23
LAST CHANCE
ARCHITECTURE Sydney Open
Buildings throughout Gadigal Country, November 2
This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on October 29, 2025 as "Alien nation".
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