Bugonia Gets a Little Lost in Translation

Focus Features

3.5/5 stars

By this point, Yorgos Lanthimos has established himself as one of the strangest mainstream filmmakers working today. The former student of the Greek Weird Wave is famous for absurd storylines and off-kilter directorial flourishes. With that, his newest film Bugonia is easily his most straightforward. This English-language remake of a Korean film spends most of its time as a three-character chamber drama with none of the fisheye lenses or unconventional camerawork that have become the director's trademark. The change leaves the story a little underwhelming until it closes with all the bizarre, fantastical elements of its source material.

Teddy (Jess Plemons) and his cousin Don (Aidan Delbis) are in a desperate situation. Teddy's mother is dying after being a test subject for experimental drugs, corporate greed is killing the planet, and the bees are dying at an alarming rate. They blame all of this on pharmaceutical CEO Michelle Fuller (Emma Stone), whom they kidnap and force to confess that she's an alien being and urge her to make contact with her planet's emperor in the days leading up to a lunar eclipse.

While based Jang Joon-hwan's original film Save the Green Planet!, Lanthimos' take is much more restrained. That makes the story easier to digest, but it does lose some of the chaotic absurdity of the original. That is, until the climax, when he finally takes the story over the cliff into pure madness. Without spoiling anything, it's a gutsy choice to end the film the way he does, and the snappy dialogue and fantastic performances do much to get us there. Bugonia wasn't as weird as I hoped, but that may be perfect for some viewers.

Directed by Yorgos Lanthimos // Written by Will Tracy // Based on an original screenplay by Jang Joon-hwan // Starring Emma Stone, Jesse Plemons, Aidan Delbis, Stavros Halkias, and Alicia Silverstone // 118 minutes // Focus Features // Rated R