"Bugonia" is the film about conspiracy theories that tells our story Emma Stone and Jesse Plemons star in Yorgos Lanthimos' film

Let’s start right away by saying that Bugonia, the new film by Yorgos Lanthimos presented in competition at the Venice Film Festival 2025, is a remake of the Korean title Save the Green Planet! from 2003 directed by Jang Joon-hwan. A relevant fact to keep in mind for two specific reasons. The first concerns the contemporaneity of the film’s theme, where conspiracy theories become the center of the obsessions of Jesse Plemons’ protagonist and his victim Emma Stone. The second is to note how the Greek director’s touch is so personal and recognizable that it would be easy to mistake it for a work exclusively belonging to his universe, even though the screenplay was handled solely by Will Tracy of the culinary thriller The Menu.

Closer to his latest Kinds of Kindness than to the baroque style of The Favourite and the previous Golden Lion winner, Poor Things, and even less so with the beginnings of the Greek Weird Wave from Dogtooth to Alps, Bugonia is Lanthimos’ playground in a disturbed America where personal and social discomfort merge. Where it’s easier to believe that we are surrounded by aliens rather than face the horrors that life offers. Insidious enemies, with our same organic composition, seemingly identical to us yet superior and determined to destroy us day after day. It wouldn’t be hard to think like the protagonist Teddy (Plemons) given the dark times we are living in, from genocides that don’t seem to stop to climate crises that could bury us under melting glaciers and anomalous heatwaves.

Bugonia is the expression of a disturbed psyche that in society and daily life has failed to find the right attention, unable to take care of itself or process the abuses from which it has been oppressed. Teddy’s character is the clearest example of this. The son of a mother who instilled in him doubt about what we are injected with or fed every day, anti-vaxxers who existed long before Covid-19 and who had the misfortune of facing tragedies that only reinforced their delusional theories, the man is the expression of repression that generates monsters, but which Bugonia almost tries to justify. Unlike what was said in the second episode of Kinds of Kindness, whose protagonists were also Jesse Plemons and Emma Stone and in which conspiracy was an end in itself.

In Bugonia, Teddy believes that the CEO of a major pharmaceutical multinational is an alien from another planet and that it is due to her experiments and those of her race that bees are disappearing and, above all, that his mother is dying. It is therefore into the protagonist’s background that Lanthimos delves this time, into how traumas and abuses have led to the imbalance of a sick mind in need of care. Paranoia and obsessions return like a refrain in Bugonia to speak of us and our species, of the harm we do to ourselves and to our planet, using as an excuse the idea that some higher entity is manipulating us and damaging our ecosystem, desperately trying to strip away any shadow of failure for which we alone are responsible.

Brutal and sardonic, what gives an extra spark to the American remake is the highly successful partnership with Emma Stone, shaved for the occasion, and a Jesse Plemons who, thanks to the European filmmaker, is increasingly gaining leading roles on the global stage. Dangerous and (un)measured, the actor can generate tension with his mere presence or with a sideways glance, whether in smaller roles like the soldier in Alex Garland’s Civil War or in works where he leads the scene as in Bugonia. Daring and audacious, returning film after film, with his actors Yorgos Lanthimos seems to be giving life to a theatrical company on the big screen. He seems to be dictating a style that not only encompasses the aesthetics and creation of his universes but also the acting and expressions his performers must master, both physical and facial. Another great demonstration of what it means to direct actors, while it is likely that, together, they end up letting loose in his worlds. All infinitely human and extra-human. All terrestrial and extra-terrestrial.