Bugonia – Venice review

Yorgos Lanthimos remakes 2003’s Korean genre gem Save the Green Planet! for an age of managed decline, and produces a darkly comedic fable about the end of the world… or is it?

★★★★

Two young men (Jesse Plemons and Aidan Delbis, both superb), convinced Earth is under invasion, abduct a healthcare CEO they believe to be an alien intent on enslaving humanity. Pretty soon they’ve shaved her head and covered her in anti-histamine cream to prevent her from sending “transmissions.” But will she take them to her leader before they take her to the cleaners?

The premise, borrowed wholesale from Jang Joon-hwan’s Save the Green Planet! (2003), remains largely intact in Yorgos Lanthimos’s 2025 remake. About 95% of the story beats survive. What Lanthimos alters is the register. Emma Stone’s executive never rants; she speaks in the dulcet tones of boardroom diplomacy, spinning talk of “dialogue” and “moving towards a solution.” That corporate vocabulary is its own form of menace, language that drains urgency and cloaks the situation in civility. But is she hiding fear, or threat? What will be the ending of the film – and, whether now or later, what will be the ending of humanity’s time on earth?

Beneath the absurd, even farcical, kidnapping plot runs an ecological anxiety that chimes with real-world fears. This is a story steeped in modern denialism – denial of the threats from war, AI, and the climate crisis. Talk of conspiracy may or may not be a delusion but a warped acknowledgement that something feels seriously out of joint; a real sensitivity to potential planetary collapse.

Jesse Plemons carries the film’s emotional weight, his paranoia edged with hesitation and doubt. Those small falterings give his scenes a brooding tension, whether he’s facing off against a bound Emma Stone or nervously riding his bike around town. Stone herself is icily commanding, her calm restraint more unsettling than any outburst. (At Venice, she echoed the calculated detachment of her performance with a press conference quip about her own alien status – “How do you know I’m not?”) Robbie Ryan’s camera frames her with unyielding precision, stripping glamour from corporate interiors until they feel airless, and distilling a sense of funk in the rundown family home with its secret basement holding cell. Jerskin Fendrix’s score adds its own disquiet, vibrating beneath the surfaces like pressure waiting to burst.

Alongside the mix of humour and dread are some moments of brutality, and the closing images lift this remake beyond mere reenactment. Lanthimos stages them with stark grandeur, leaving behind a sense of awe. Bugonia is, in the end, an absurd conspiracy thriller that’ll keep newcomers guessing right until the end. (For those who know Save the Green Planet!, the trajectory holds no great surprises.) Though it may hew closely to the original, Bugonia surpasses it through sheer strength of craft and performance. This dark and deadly farce is a faithful retelling, speaking to our collective moment; a warped mirror held to a collapsing world.

Bugonia premiered at the Venice Film Festival