Bugonia Is an Inverted Reflection of Everything We Fear
The remake of 2003's Save the Green Planet! is more relevant two decades later than it ever was. The post Bugonia Is an Inverted Reflection of Everything We Fear appeared first on Reactor.
Bugonia Is an Inverted Reflection of Everything We Fear
Published on October 31, 2025
Screenshot: Focus Features
Screenshot: Focus Features
It’s rare that a film with endlessly dour subject matter manages to be a strange joy to watch. This is the sort of dissonance that Yorgos Lanthimos specializes in, but the director may have outdone himself with Bugonia—a movie that asks, amongst other questions, if humanity deserves to continue at all. Conceptually, that’s bound to be a turn off for plenty of people; the world is bad enough, we might say, so why belabor the point? But the film, much like Lanthimos’ previous myriad examinations of our many human frailties, has much more to impart than doom alone.
Bugonia is the story of Teddy Gatz (Jesse Plemons), a conspiracy theorist who enlists his cousin Don (Aidan Delbis) in a plot to kidnap the CEO of Auxolith, Michelle Fuller (Emma Stone). Teddy believes that aliens are responsible for the destruction of the planet and humanity’s downward spiral, and that many powerful humans are actually “Andromedans” in disguise. After successfully drugging Fuller, shaving her head (so she can’t contact her alien cohort), and holding her prisoner in his basement unless she agrees to call off the Andromedan forces… things go rapidly off the rails.
Has Teddy lost his grip on reality? Is Michelle Fuller truly an alien in disguise? Is our world being destroyed by forces beyond our understanding? The answers probably aren’t what you’d assume…
Bugonia is a remake of Jang Joon-hwan’s 2003 film Save the Green Planet! It is important to make note of the distinction between a remake and a loose inspiration, because there seems to be some confusion online about which one this is. Bugonia only truly diverges from Jang’s film in two pieces of gender-swapped casting: Fuller, who is a male CEO in Save the Green Planet! and Don, who is the protagonist’s girlfriend rather than cousin. These shifts are worth noting because they change the shape of the film’s brutality entirely; it is very different for two grown men to kidnap and threaten a woman, even one in a position of power (a fact that Stone’s Fuller makes note of within the film itself). Having the co-conspirator be the protagonist’s relative rather than a romantic attachment also works to make the story itself far darker; there are no fleeting moments of “two kooky kids in love” to offset the terrible things lying in wait.
While all of the casting in Bugonia is spot on—both Stone and Plemons are turning in two of their career-best performances every step of the way—it’s Delbis’ turn as Don that is particularly exciting. New on the acting circuit, 19-year-old Delbis is a rare example of an openly autistic actor playing an autistic character on screen, and his depiction of Don is nothing short of stunning. In a landscape where audiences are frequently told that it’s simply too difficult to find neurodivergent and disabled actors that align with their roles, Bugonia lets Delbis’ thoughtful delivery and hushed vulnerability speak for itself. Within the context of this film, it’s very loud indeed.
Lanthimos never shies away from showing human beings at their ugliest, their most petty and obsessive, but there are layers within this story that prevent easy labels amongst its characters. At its core, Bugonia and the film it is remaking ask questions that are endemic to our era: Can we blame people for turning to conspiracy theories for comfort, given the state our world is in? (And even if we can, does it matter if we can’t combat it?) Does meeting violence with violence, of any sort, change people? At what point does dehumanization of one’s enemies make someone a monster of a different kind? Can all the beauty we bring to the planet begin to compensate for all the horrors we inflict upon it?
Teddy’s life (and Don’s by extension) is full of all manner of suffering. Auxolith’s presence in their hometown has dwindled its population and brought them into worse levels of poverty; Teddy was molested as a child and grew up without a father; Teddy’s mother (Alicia Silverstone) is in a coma after being a test user for one of Auxolith’s drugs to help her through opioid withdrawal. Careful detail throughout the film highlights this without fanfare, from the surrealist flashbacks of Teddy’s mother as a balloon he must hold onto with strings to the crooked cabinets of his childhood home to the plant where he tries to convince coworkers to file against Auxolith for OSHA violations to no avail. This life isn’t uncommon in the United States today, which is certainly the point of setting the story here this time around.
The inequity of this plot is beautifully illustrated in its opening minutes: Teddy gets Don ready with a layman workout routine consisting of pushups and high knees (which they both perform with mediocrity), all performed in his crowded family home, stating their need to be ready when they move to capture the enemy. This is juxtaposed against Michelle Fuller’s usual day, which features yoga, pristine living conditions, expensive products meant to keep her healthy, an army of workers that do her bidding, and hand-to-hand training against a fit instructor. When Teddy later asks how anyone is supposed to believe that she is a 45-year-old woman, irony somersaults into the room and lands with a thud.
(In case it wasn’t clear, a slice of that irony is that Emma Stone is 36 years old. We are never surprised when a 45-year-old woman looks ten years off the mark these days, after all; we often only wonder how much money she’s got at her disposal. Or think they’re aliens.)
At the visual level, Bugonia is a film that spends most of its time taking a granular look at mundane things. It has extraordinary trappings, sure, but much of what it showcases is just the opposite. The question of whether or not Andromedans are real is perhaps less ambiguous here than it was in its predecessor (presuming one finds it ambiguous at all). But while the ending will likely be the most divisive piece of the experience—and may not truly work, depending on how you take it—the fact that it remains is, at the very least, a wholly unexpected move.
But there is an artistic lineage to this film that is perhaps equally moving to its story, and one that keeps playing over in my mind when I try to decide how Bugonia made me feel: Jang Joon-hwan came upon the inspiration for Save the Green Planet! while watching another film—Misery. After viewing, Jang’s main critique of the movie was its lack of alignment with Annie Wilkes’ perspective. He knew that if he ever made a film like that, he wanted it to be from the kidnappers’ point of view, and years on, Save the Green Planet! came to be. This through line—from Stephen King’s novel, to Rob Reiner’s film, to Jang Joon-hwan’s film, to this one—is a perfect illustration of what is beautiful about human art and creativity. Each one of these stories, each with a different goal, different focuses, performances, influences, aesthetics, all flowing from the same river.
It is also a perfect illustration of what about that process is irreplicable. At a point in time when artists are fighting so hard to preserve their right and ability to create while CEOs (ones just like Michelle Fuller) would rather have AI regurgitate the work of human beings with no desire or inspiration inherent to the process… it feels far more pointed than usual. For that, I’m unbelievably grateful that Bugonia led me down that river all over again.[end-mark]
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