Bugonia Review: Bugging Out

The red sole of a Christian Louboutin high heel has become cinematic shorthand. It’s the feminine version of those business cards that Patrick Bateman would drool over or a modernizing of Alexis Carrington’s ludicrously over-padded shoulders. It speaks to a certain affluent cruelty, style without humanity, and provides an easy introduction to Michelle Fuller, pharmaceutical CEO, eco-criminal, and nemesis to obsessive beekeeper and UFO conspiracy nut, Teddy, in Bugonia.

Gender swapping the embodiment of capitalist greed is one of the first major changes that director Yorgos Lanthimos and screenwriter Will Tracy (The Menu) made for their loose adaptation of South Korean director Jang Joon-hwan’s 2003 satire, Save the Green Planet! In the original version, Teddy analog Lee Byeong-gu kidnaps male executive Kang Man-shik. Here, Kang becomes Michelle, while Lee’s doting girlfriend, Su-ni, becomes Don (newcomer Aidan Delbis), Teddy’s tragically codependent cousin.

Changing the sex of the central dueling pair changes the dynamics, especially since Michelle is played by Lanthimos regular Emma Stone, while Teddy is played by Jesse Plemons, her Kinds of Kindness dance partner and Lanthimos’ walking analogy for the delusional American male. Unlike the original, there’s an inherent undertone of sexual violence when Teddy and sidekick Don abduct her, strip her, shave her head, chain her in the basement, and demand that she admits she’s an agent of the emperor of Andromeda.

While Jang was quietly concentrating on the desperation of the working class, with a subtext that the rich and powerful may as well be aliens, the actual target of Lanthimos’ remake seems much vaguer. The timing of the gender swapping is unfortunate to say the least, since a huge number of companies have used the Trump administration’s anti-DEI witch hunt to purge their C-suites of any non-dudes. Beyond the fact that this would be another reason to work with Stone (this being their fourth consecutive collaboration), and the idea of a woman running a biotech company may make the audience make some Elizabeth Holmes connections, it’s just a thread that neither gets pulled nor really woven into the material.

The draw is, of course, watching Plemons and Stone working together without the time constraints or forced oddities of Kinds of Kindness. Plemons remains the undisputed master of this kind of oblivious awkwardness, of characters who think their underdog status is always someone else’s fault. Even with Teddy’s tics and habits dialed up to 11, he’s still the smaller presence than Stone, who continues her commitment (for better or for worse) to maximalist acting. Their scenes together, especially as she tries to manipulate the dim but determined Teddy, are undoubtedly fascinating, and layered with the vicious cunning that has always been Lanthimos’ trademark.

But it’s the excellence of execution that obfuscates that Jang’s wild but pointed tragicomedy has lost its incisiveness in translation, its blunderbuss now loaded with feathers rather than buckshot. True, the odd quill may scratch the surface, but there’s nothing really penetrating. Just as the gender swap doesn’t really say anything about the modern workplace and corporate politics, neither does Teddy’s paranoid mindset seem to have undergone any kind of updates, being more The X-Files-style “I want to believe” misguided heroism than Facebook-fueled mania. As for any eco-politics, it’s tough to remember that the fate of Earth is supposed to be at stake. Some subplots seem designed simply to make Lanthimos laugh at his own transgressiveness, like having the local sheriff (Stavros Halkias) admit to sexually abusing Teddy as a kid. Meanwhile, there’s the core problem of having dueling antagonists: Whether by interstellar edict or for profit, Michelle is killing the planet, and even if Teddy’s right about her he’s got too many dirty secrets to be likable. By the end, you may wonder whether their planet was ever worth saving.

This article appears in October 24 • 2025.