Office Space

Emma Stone and Jesse Plemons star in Yorgos Lanthimos's out-of-this-world comedy-drama Bugonia

- WORDS: JAMES MOTTRAM

IS THERE ANYBODY out there? It's a question you'll be asking after watching Bugonia, the latest madcap movie from Greek-born master of weird Yorgos Lanthimos. The director of The Lobster and Poor Things is back with his first remake, a wild take on 2003's South Korean movie Save The Green Planet! Emma Stone plays Michelle, a callous CEO who's kidnapped by one of her low-grade employees, Teddy (Jesse Plemons), and his cousin Don (Aidan Delbis), the former fully convinced that Michelle is an alien from Andromeda and is out to destroy Earth.

"There's a lot of layers in the film," says Lanthimos, who's worked from a script by Will Tracy (Succession). "The surface of it is conspiracy theories, but for me I think the world today, and technology especially, just encloses us into these very tight bubbles, and it just reinforces what you already believe, and it's hard to get out of it. So the film is structured in that way. You have these typical characters you think you know, but minute after minute, various layers are revealed. You don't even know who to root for at times."