If there’s one thing that ties the films of Yorgos Lanthimos together, it’s that everyone talks like an alien attempting to simulate human language. Maybe human emotion, too. Most of his characters seem new to the planet, beings who have not quite caught on to the whole interpersonal interaction thing. His 2023 comedy “Poor Things” featured a baby in a woman’s body turned loose on society and delighted by every bit of it. But you can go all the way back to “Dogtooth” (2009), his hellishly, possibly hilariously disturbing film about adult siblings raised in isolation from the world, and see all the same DNA. Nobody knows what’s going on in a Lanthimos film. I’m not even sure he does.
So it feels like a bit of an inside joke that “Bugonia,” the director’s latest offering, is kind of about aliens but features his most human dialogue. It’s practically naturalistic, and though Will Tracy’s screenplay is based on Jang Joon Hwan’s 2003 sci-fi film “Save the Green Planet!,” the movie feels more like a demented riff on Spielberg. Teddy (Jesse Plemons), who is, I guess, our hero, rides his bike around the dirt roads near his house, wearing a backpack, and lives with his cousin Don (Aidan Delbis) in a pleasantly rambling house full of knickknacks and the detritus of past generations. The score swells with strings. You can feel the humidity on your skin.
Teddy and Don are beekeepers and conspiracists, an interesting combo, and Teddy has become fixated on his pet theory: that Andromedans — a superior race from the neighboring galaxy — are running the planet and also ruining it. His monomania centers on Michelle (Emma Stone), the chief executive of the pharmaceutical company that seems to employ most of the town. Michelle is skinny and fabulously wealthy and a total girlboss, and Teddy is grimy and has a greasy ponytail. They could not be more unalike. Teddy and Don are certain that if they capture Michelle and destroy her, they will save Earth, since she and her company are at the center of this Andromedan plot. She, obviously, is one of Them.
This is not really Lanthimos’s weirdest film, and it’s not his funniest or his most fun either. It’s mostly kind of sad. Teddy has had a pretty lousy life, the details of which are gradually spooled out as the story goes on, and he is the kind of guy you’d expect to get tangled up in a conspiracy theory. Michelle quite accurately pinpoints him as stuck in an internet echo chamber, headed down a spiral where each of his ideas is reinforced by another. (“Is that some Rabbit Hole crap you read in The Times?” he yells at her, only he doesn’t say crap, and actually she probably listened to the podcast.)
But even minor Lanthimos has its pleasures, if you’re into his whole thing. There’s an erratic absurdism to his style: Just when you think you know what this movie is about, he jerks you sideways for a second, so you can’t get too comfortable. You have to keep watching, just so you know what it’s all going to add up to — and you probably won’t guess it in the end.
Really, though, the reason to watch “Bugonia” is its leads. This is Stone’s fourth collaboration with Lanthimos after “The Favourite,” “Poor Things” and “Kinds of Kindness.” Most of the movie hinges on Teddy’s insistence that Michelle is an alien and Michelle’s insistence that she isn’t. It’s ideal casting for Stone, with her anime-huge eyes and slightly otherwordly-wide grin, and her ability to flip between deadpan and vivacity on a dime.
The star of the show, though, is Plemons, who performed alongside Stone in all three segments of the triptych “Kinds of Kindness,” but here gets one feature-length story to play with. Teddy is not an easy character to pull off. He is unappealing, stuck in some state of arrested development, absolutely certain of his rightness and yet totally ridiculous and almost certainly dangerous. He’s jumped so far down his rabbit hole that he has to speak in very big words, strung together in carefully rehearsed phrases, rattling them off hurriedly as if he’s afraid of being knocked off his track.
All of this adds up to a film that’s more like a character drama than an action movie, albeit a particularly strange one. What’s most notable, from a Lanthimosian point of view, is that gone are the stilted phrases and grammar that sound as if the dialogue has been (purposely) run through Google Translate and back again a couple of times.
This has the perverse quality of being distracting, if you’re expecting the typical stiltedness. But it also made the Spielbergian homages stand out. Spielberg’s alien movies are about humanity’s responses when confronted with the unknown. And “Bugonia,” in its own way, is as well. At one point, Michelle notes to Teddy that sometimes things happen without explanation — that not everything has a motivation or a cause, even the bad things. He’s horrified.
Conspiracy theories are constructed to make us feel better about the randomness of the world. But one fact remains: We’re all a little unsettled when confronted with the chaos of the cosmos. That might be the most human fact of them all.
Bugonia
Rated R for some jarring scenes of gross, sudden bloodshed, suicide and death. Running time: 2 hours. In theaters.
Alissa Wilkinson is a Times movie critic. She’s been writing about movies since 2005.
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