BUGONIA Special Screenings

Yorgos Lanthimos’ remake of the 2003 Korean cult classic SAVE THE GREEN PLANET! stars Jesse Plemons as a conspiracy-obsessed man who kidnaps Emma Stone’s pharmaceutical company CEO, seeking to prove that she is an alien from outer space, one of thousands secretly living among Earth’s humans. Plemons plays Teddy, who lives with his autistic cousin Donnie (Aidan Delbis) in the isolated old farmhouse he grew up in. Teddy hatches a plot to kidnap Michelle Fuller (Stone), the high-powered CEO of the pharmaceutical company Teddy works for, who he believes, based on his extensive online research, to secretly be an emissary from the Andromeda galaxy, charged with running, and ruining, our world. With Fuller chained up in his basement, Teddy undertakes a series of interrogations, intent on proving Fuller to be non-human, and negotiating her and her fellow aliens’ withdrawal from our planet. The screenplay by Will Tracy (THE MENU, SUCCESSION) provides exquisite dialogue for Plemons and Stone to wield in a battle of wits laced with lunacy and cunning. Several key members of Lanthimos’ creative team deliver inspired work here, including production designer James Price (an Oscar® winner for Lanthimos’ POOR THINGS), Lanthimos’s longtime editor Yorgos Mavropsaridis, cinematographer Robbie Ryan (Oscar®-nominated for POOR THINGS and THE FAVOURITE) and composer Jerskin Fendrix, an Oscar® nominee for POOR THINGS, who here crafts another eerie and atmospheric banger of a soundscape. –Todd Hitchcock