29/08/2025 - VENICE 2025: Yorgos Lanthimos remakes Jang Joon-hwan’s Save the Green Planet! and unleashes a wickedly playful, grotesque and unsettlingly timely tale of paranoia and power

With Bugonia [+see also:
trailer
film profile], premiering in competition at the Venice Film Festival, Yorgos Lanthimos delivers a playful, deranged and oddly vital tale. An English-language remake of Jang Joon-hwan’s 2003 movie Save the Green Planet!, the picture thrives on a finely tuned balance of absurdity, genre chaos and biting social critique – a mix that feels at once deliriously entertaining and worryingly urgent.

The story centres on Teddy (played by Jesse Plemons), a thirty-something beekeeper consumed by paranoia and conspiracy theories, and Don (newcomer Aidan Delbis), his naïve younger cousin with a childlike fragility. Convinced that Michelle Fuller (Emma Stone), the ruthless CEO of a global pharmaceutical company, is in fact an alien plotting to annihilate humanity, the two kidnap her in the hope of saving the planet.

Much of the film’s wicked charm lies in its cast. Plemons, who has mastered the art of playing the alienated psychopath, embodies Teddy with terrifying precision, switching between bursts of violent mania and awkward tenderness. Stone (here also serving as a producer through her own banner, Fruit Tree) plays Michelle with a deliciously sarcastic edge, embodying both corporate power and survivalist resilience. Delbis’s Don provides a counterbalance of innocence, whilst Alicia Silverstone and comedian Stavros Halkias round off the ensemble with sharply observed supporting turns.

The screenplay, penned by Will Tracy, walks a fine line between nonsense and profundity. The dialogues are simultaneously idiotic and razor-sharp, peppered with surreal turns that, almost by accident, become philosophical reflections on power, belief, the gap between the rich and the poor, and the human condition. This tonal instability is the film’s secret weapon: just as the audience settles into one register – comedy, horror, drama or science fiction – Lanthimos abruptly shifts gears, throwing viewers off balance. The result is a two-hour experience with almost no predictability; like the characters, we are never sure what to believe.

On a thematic level, Bugonia targets familiar villains but does so with invigorating energy. Its dystopian set-up gradually reveals itself as a mirror of the present: corporate greed disguised as diversity and inclusion campaigns, multinational firms exploiting both workers and consumers, and the glaring failures of the US security and education systems. Unsurprisingly, Lanthimos paints these realities in over-the-top, grotesque colours, but the exaggeration only underlines their plausibility.

Technically, the film is unmistakably a Lanthimos creation. Robbie Ryan’s cinematography dazzles with oversaturated hues – red, in particular, dominates to queasy effect – while his frequent close-ups push the actors’ eccentricities to the fore. The production design by James Price and costumes by Jennifer Johnson oscillate between tacky and pristine, amplifying the sense of surreal dissonance. Meanwhile, Jerskin Fendrix’s score veers from playfully melodramatic to almost deafening, always threatening to overwhelm the action yet somehow amplifying its absurdity.

What elevates Bugonia beyond a mere exercise in eccentricity is its sense of joy. For all its disturbing ideas, the film radiates the impression that it was made with mischief and pleasure. It is probably Lanthimos at his most unrestrained – nihilistic yet comedic. The laughter comes easily, but so does the unease. By the end, one has the feeling of having witnessed a work that dares to be silly and profound in equal measure, revelling in contradiction while exposing hard truths about contemporary society.

Bugonia was produced by Element Pictures (Ireland), Fruit Tree (USA), Square Peg (USA) and CJENM (South Korea). Universal Pictures handles its worldwide sales.