Teddy has a bee in his bonnet about Michelle Fuller, the powerful chief executive of a pharmaceutical company. Teddy (Jesse Plemons) is convinced that Michelle (Emma Stone) – a ruthless, exaggerated alpha female – is actually an alien from the Andromedan race with nefarious designs on humankind.

A lunar eclipse is around the corner, during which an Andromedan spacecraft will visit Earth, Teddy predicts. Teddy and his neurodivergent cousin Don (Aidan Delbis) must act fast. The pair that has a dynamic out of the John Steinbeck novel Of Mice and Men kidnap Michelle, shave off her hair, throw her into a cellar, and bid her to summon the Andromedan emperor.

The billing of seasoned misanthrope Yorgos Lanthimos’s Bugonia as yet another of his black comedies is surely fake news of the kind that Teddy devours. Bugonia finds Lanthimos in a minor key, his ability to imagine the worst in people and his brilliance for creating unpredictable sniggers contained by an unusual refusal to embrace the source material’s outre qualities.

The 118-minute movie is an English-language remake of Jang Joon-hwan’s Save The Green Planet! (2003). Bugonia swaps the original South Korean film’s anarchic humour for nervous half-chuckles and inchoate warnings about the fate of the planet.

The remake is characteristically cruel, given Lanthimos’s track record in shredding human pretentions of grace and noble purpose. Any pricks of feeling for Teddy’s back story, revolving around his mother Sandy (Alicia Silverstone) or the easily bullied Don, are faint and fleeting.

But the characters are unrelatable, far-out in an uninvolving rather than an identifiable way. Teddy’s speeches are as relentless as the mood is grim, the politics as coherent as his rantings.

Screenwriter Will Tracy (The Menu, Regime) takes a blunt knife to evil corporations, Big Pharma and the CEO cult embodied by Michelle. Teddy’s diatribe about the “hollowed” and “harmless” people targetted by the aliens applies to the film’s eat-the-rich treatment too.

The scattershot satire is far more effective as a serial killer thriller. Bugonia derives its effect on the nerves entirely from linear, claustrophobic storytelling. Teddy’s modus operandi, Michelle’s rapid dehumanisation, the moments when it is unclear how Teddy will behave with his victim – Bugonia turns the screws slowly, surely and expertly.

Jesse Plemons deftly plays the dishevelled and deranged Teddy, whose earnest self-belief is the scariest thing about him. Emma Stone – in her fourth collaboration with the director – is fully at home with all kinds of weirdness. Stone especially comes into her own when Lanthimos’s bugaboo about the imminent destruction of the planet rolls out a big twist that isn’t one.

📰 Crime Today News is proudly sponsored by DRYFRUIT & CO – A Brand by eFabby Global LLC

Design & Developed by Yes Mom Hosting