Old School. Biblically Independent.
By Jason Adams | Film | October 23, 2025
Although the 2003 sci-fi comedy Save the Green Planet! from South Korean director Jang Joon-hwan holds up great today (if you can find a copy), retooling it for American consumption here in our current hellscape makes a whole lot of sense—especially when you see that it’s The Favourite and Poor Things director Yorgos Lanthimos behind the camera. And working from a script by Succession and The Menu writer Will Tracy, no less. A perfect fit for Lanthimos’ hilarious and cruel cinematic eccentricities, this sordidly silly tale of the white-hot nuclear fission spot where late-stage capitalism meets run-amok conspiracy theories is another masterclass in misanthropy from our finest purveyor of the stuff—just what 2025 ordered, then.
Coming hot on the heels of last year’s underappreciated Kinds of Kindness—which strangely also saw Jesse Plemons forcing Emma Stone to take a bunch of harmful tests in order to prove she’s human—this one’s called Bugonia. An insect kingdom born from dead meat, if you will—an approximate rhyme for bologna even better. Plemons plays Teddy, a part-time warehouse-worker and full-time Fox Mulder who’s fallen so far down the online rabbit hole of lizard people in power that he’s shot out the other side of the Earth and straight into one galaxy over.
To be exact, that would be Andromeda, the galaxy closest to our delicious home of the Milky Way. And that’s where Teddy’s convinced himself that Time magazine cover-woman and international business icon Michelle Fuller (Stone) hails from. Teddy actually has a lot of theories, all of which he’ll enthusiastically detail to his exhausted neurodivergent cousin Don (Aidan Delbis). (Teddy’s even done the 3D renderings, thank you very much.) But they all seem to converge upon a single idea: that Andromedans are infiltrating our world for nefarious purposes and it’s up to the two of them to stop them. Technically. Mostly him.
Just a happy coincidence one supposes that it’s the big boss-lady at Auxolith, the corporation where Teddy stuffs boxes all day, who’s turned out to be the prime focus of his extraterrestrial obsessions. Two birds, one meteor—kill your boss, save the world! And in Teddy’s defense, for her part Michelle isn’t doing a bang-up job seeming realistically human to an outside eye looking in—polished to a pale corpse-y sheen and moving without an infinitesimal gesture wasted, Stone plays this woman as a case study in Louboutin brain. Impeccably lifeless to the core. Corporate automoton.
But then it wouldn’t be difficult to buy that 99.44% of the characters that have graced any Yorgos Lanthimos picture were really outer-space creatures under their skin, would it? Has anyone ever seemed more alien than the Earth-bound family in Dogtooth? He’s got a knack for stranging up the place, so it turns out to be a kick that it’s his science-fiction movie that’s actually the most human-seeming of the bunch. And not just human-seeming, but of this precise human moment. Even if it’s based almost verbatim on a movie two decades old, the political and social stuff that’s bubbling up to Bugonia’s black surface is as right-now as anything in Eddington or One Battle After Another.
It’s the pandemic, you see. No, not that one. We’re talking CCD aka Colony Collapse Disorder. Teddy and his cousin Don, when they’re not working or contemplating the alien invasion, are recreational apiarists. Which is to say they keep bees. But something’s been making the bees abandon their queens, thereby killing their colonies, thereby threatening the entire Earth’s ecosystem. And the fact that Auxolith is a major manufacturer of neonicotinoids, an insecticide that’s gotten a lot of the blame for CCD, is what’s put the corp straight into Teddy’s crosshairs. (As an aside, you could tell me Yorgos saw the word “neonicotinoids” in this script and that’s what convinced him to make this movie. I would 100% believe that.)
Well, it’s both the neonicotinoids and also maybe the fact that Auxolith tested its harmful potions on Teddy’s mother, Sandy (Alicia Silverstone), and now poof, she’s poof. Only seen by us in surreal black-and-white flashbacks (with an unsettlingly de-aged Plemons) Sandy herself seemed to be a woo-woo Flat-Earther type (so meta-casting vegan-extremist Silverstone in the role is pretty hilarious)—she laid the groundwork for Teddy to run his rails right outta mainstream society on. Naturally, he’s gonna look to the top of this pyramid for the all-seeing eye up there in charge. To poke it.
And poke it he does. In an elaborately plotted caper, Teddy and Don tackle Michelle in her driveway, haphazardly toss her in some bushes, and finally manage to stick her with a needle after getting punched in their respective faces fifty times. Shaving her head quickly—since hair is how Andromedans communicate with their motherships—the hapless duo squirrel Michelle back to their place and chain her up in the basement. And that’s where she will remain until she acquiesces to send a message to her reigning space emperor on the forthcoming night of the lunar eclipse to quit their sh*t already and just bugger off back to where they came from.
A plan so obvious even a child could see it coming! Of course, in Yorgos’ typically absurd way, it is all presented perfectly straightforward—Teddy’s reasoning makes just as much sense as it does that we’ll be turned into animals if we can’t find romantic partners within 45 days a la The Lobster.
Bugonia does actually tackle new territory for the filmmaker though, because Teddy’s plan comes crashing straight upside the steel-wall that is Michelle. Emphatically matter-of-fact and “in charge” even when she’s insisting she’s so totally not in charge, Michelle’s the fixed point of any solar system. Everybody can’t help but spin and bumble and bow before her. She’s just one of those people. Or “people.” And so suddenly the absurd lay of Yorgos’ land slams right into an immovable object—for the first time it feels as if he’s seeing and calling out insanity for what it is. Has our lord and savior and great satirist of the world’s illogic been beaten back by how f**kin’ nutty all these m*fos be today?
Oh, you know—hardly. Bugonia is layer upon layer of reliable bonkers—he might’ve sheared the hair off the dome to look at what’s hidden underneath but you know somebody will be slathering somebody in cold cream and tossing a cheap wig on top of that for good measure. And that’s before all of that blood, black and copious, begins to spill. Like a Coens caper on an ayahuasca trip, Bugonia is a deliriously cynical romp, playfully abhorred by what it sees of Humanity and its many malcontents.
And above and beyond that it’s proof that Lanthimos has built himself one of the great movie factories in the biz—from Jerskin Fendrix’s gimme-that-vinyl-right-now score to cinematographer Robbie Ryan’s typically impeccable frames to all the shenanigans that costumer Jennifer Johnson and production designer James Price fill said frames up with, seeing what these maniacs are pooling their resources toward has become reason enough to go to a movie theater every time a new Yorgos lands.
But it’s the director’s top-liners who’ve really cracked that special Yorgos code for us. Going into Bugonia you can’t help but wonder if on a fifth outing together Lanthimos will still be able to find new prisms of Emma Stone to shine his light through—well wonder no more. Even after her well-deserved Oscar sweep for Poor Things pushed her toward all sorts of fruit-f***ing extremes, this is some hilarious top-of-the-game work from her. And she’s met full on by Plemons, the sort of leading man only a Yorgos (or one supposes a Charlie Kaufman) could totally tap into and get what it is that makes him so endlessly riveting. A whole lot of Bugonia is just these two talking, to and at and right by one another, and oh, it sings. An excellent reminder that we’ll always have good drama as long as we’ve got inspired minds who can trap a positive and a negative force inside a small space and then push ‘em together real, real hard. Fireworks!
