Only a gender-swapped remake of Save the Green Planet! produced by Ari Aster and directed by Yorgos Lanthimos (The Favourite) could get away with being this defiantly weird and still feel… oddly mid. Bugonia is uneven, overlong, and sometimes downright incoherent — and yet, it still works. Maybe it’s the singular mood Lanthimos conjures when he’s operating just slightly outside his own head, or maybe it’s Emma Stone turning in her most surprising performance in years. Either way, Bugonia stumbles into greatness more often than it earns it.

Based on the 2003 Korean cult classic and rewritten by The Menu’s Will Tracy, the film transplants the original’s paranoia-soaked bones into a sleek American nightmare. Jesse Plemons (Game Night) plays Teddy, a conspiracy-addled warehouse worker convinced Michelle Fuller (Stone, Kinds of Kindness), the CEO of pharmaceutical giant Auxolith, is an alien bent on exterminating humanity.

With help from his cousin Don (Aidan Delbis), Teddy kidnaps Michelle, drags her to a dingy basement, and sets about interrogating her through increasingly bizarre and brutal methods. From bee extinction to space empires, Teddy’s delusions aren’t just tinfoil-hat eccentric—they’re weaponized. And yet… there’s just enough doubt to make you squirm.

That’s where Stone shines. Michelle might be a corporate shark—or a full-blown Andromedan overlord. Stone walks that line with razor-sharp precision, never letting you know which side she’s on until it’s far too late. Physically transformed (yes, she’s actually bald), she plays Michelle with a coiled, unnerving calm, always recalculating, always one move ahead. It’s a performance that’s slippery, strange, and oddly emotional—proof that Stone and Lanthimos still bring out the best in each other, even when the material’s this jagged.

Plemons, though, is in another movie entirely. He commits—fully—to Teddy’s unraveling mind, but there’s a tonal mismatch here. Where Stone keeps her cards close, Plemons flails in broad gestures. It’s like he’s trying to out-crazy the film’s ideas instead of grounding them. He’s great with the right script (Killers of the Flower Moon, I’m Thinking of Ending Things), but this feels like a swing and a miss. Delbis, on the other hand, gives a soberly moving turn as Don—the rare nonprofessional casting that actually elevates a film. Delbis represents a purity within Bugonia, and the way Lanthimos uses his open, earnest energy against the film’s unrelenting cynicism is deeply affecting.

Technically, Bugonia is a flex. Cinematographer Robbie Ryan shoots most of the film on VistaVision, making even the smallest moments feel operatic. It’s a visual throwback to One-Eyed Jacks by way of the Twilight Zone, with long, static frames that turn basements into battlegrounds. Costume designer Jennifer Johnson builds a subtle story arc in Michelle’s wardrobe—black McQueen power suits slowly unraveling until something alien bleeds through. And Jerskin Fendrix’s score? It rips. Written before he even saw the script (based only on the words “bees,” “basement,” “spaceship,” and “Emily-bald”), it’s a twitchy, propulsive blast of industrial angst and baroque dissonance. You feel it in your bones.

Thematically, this is Lanthimos back in Dogtooth territory: a claustrophobic war of ideals in a box-sized world. It’s hard not to think of our current moment, drowning in misinformation and ecological dread, when Teddy starts connecting bee deaths to alien mind control. But the film doesn’t preach. It doesn’t even try to make sense. It just stares into the void and dares you to laugh.

If it weren’t so committed to keeping its cards hidden, Bugonia might be easier to love outright. There’s something fascinating here about how we mythologize trauma and misdirect rage, but the film doesn’t unpack those ideas so much as toss them around like grenades. Still, for all its indulgence and tonal whiplash, there’s a cohesion to the chaos. It lingers. And maybe that’s the point.

Bugonia might not be Lanthimos’ best, but it’s his strangest—and that’s saying something. It’s a remake that knows it can’t top the original, so it mutates into something else entirely: a satire of paranoia, a parable about power, and an accidental portrait of our fractured moment.