Yorgos Lanthimos returns with the wickedly entertaining and timely abduction thriller Bugonia, a ravishing concoction of deranged paranoia and inspired aesthetics that does justice to the landmark Korean cult classic on which it is based, while also charting its own disturbing course.
The Greek cineaste reunites with his Kinds of Kindness actors Emma Stone and Jesse Plemons, here playing a pharmaceutical CEO and the conspiracist who kidnaps her. Plemons is Teddy, a warehouse packaging worker and amateur beekeeper in middle America who is convinced that aliens from Andromeda live among us and are actively plotting the demise of the human race.
Teddy believes that pharmaceutical company CEO Michelle Fuller (Stone) is one of those Andromedans. With the help of his cousin Don, he plots to abduct her and force her to get him an audience with the emperor of Andromeda before the lunar eclipse in three days' time.
Aside from the location shift, the biggest changes in this adaptation are its gender flips, with the CEO character boldly switching from male to female, which creates a different power dynamic between kidnapper and kidnapee, and adds a different edge to the torture that ensues. Screenwriter Will Tracy also makes the inspired choice of turning the kidnapper's doting girlfriend in the original into his credulous male cousin.
Even among the famed genre mashes of Korean cinema, Save the Green Planet is famous for gleefully switching between genres. Soon-yi, the girlfriend character (played by Hwang Jung-min), allowed romantic comedy and melodrama to coexist alongside horror, thriller, comedy, sci-fi and more.
By contrast, Bugonia is more consistent in its tone and Teddy's interactions with his cousin underpin this film's deeper dive into the psychology of conspiracists. Like a cult leader but with only one follower, Teddy tries to fill his younger cousin with confidence, while filling his mind with crackpot conspiracy theories. He also assures Don that everything they are about to do is out of love: he wants to save him from the looming alien threat. But first, Don needs to clear his mind and focus. This involves submitting to chemical castration, an early squirmy moment that also prepares us for what's to come.
While Teddy successfully manipulates Don, he has far less sway over the confident Michelle, who, after being messily abducted outside her sleek mansion, defiantly stands up to him. This, despite being chained up in a dank basement, with her head shaved and her skin covered in anti-histamine cream -- Teddy's measures to prevent her from signalling to her alien comrades for help.
The film also focuses its outlandish ideas and scenarios with baroque and engrossing mise-en-scène. Poor Things composer Jerskin Fendrix's gripping and abrasive score underscores the chaos whorling in Teddy's mind during the many scenes of him furiously pedalling around the countryside, while Robbie Ryan provides vivid wide angle photography, captured on VistaVision cameras -- a 50s technology currently in the midst of a revival, which also includes The Brutalist, One Battle After Another and a host of major 2026 films.
While this update does a lot to change the details of Jang's deliriously entertaining original film, it turns out to be a surprisingly faithful adaptation, an intense cocktail of horror and social commentary born out of trauma and despair, served up with a twist of twisted black comedy.
Bugonia explores how we consume and obsess over information, distorting it to suit our own purposes and ultimately divides ourselves. Teddy may be trying to prove that Michelle is an alien, but whether or not she is, the fact that there is any doubt shows us just how alien we have become to one another. The truth may be out there, but what does it matter if we can't find it here?