ArcaMax

The actual bug alluded to in the title of the new Yorgos Lanthimos movie is the humble honeybee, that tireless insect whose pollinating peregrinations keep the Earth's greenery going and grocery aisles stocked. The human characters, however, are the truly buggy ones -- they're clearly not right in the head. Well, maybe.

For example, Michelle Fuller (Emma Stone, fully onboard for her fourth Lanthimos film). She's the steely CEO of a pharmaceutical company called Auxolith, described in the movie's fake LinkedIn profile as "guided by science and driven by purpose." Very much like Michelle herself, who tries to project an air of earnest corporate concern, but dislikes overuse of the word "diversity."

Then there are Teddy (Jesse Plemons) and Don (Aidan Delbis), a pair of amiable nutjobs living in woodsy isolation in a house outside an unspecified small town. Teddy is an all-in conspiracy theorist, and he's convinced that Michelle is a space alien, sent here to prepare the ground for an extraterrestrial invasion. Teddy knows this for a fact because he's researched it on the internet. Don, who is Teddy's autistic cousin, sweetly nods along. (Actor Delbis, making his movie debut, was said to describe himself as autistic, rather than neurodivergent, in a recent Los Angeles Times feature.)

Director Lanthimos has become a laureate of bizarre tales and bad vibes since his breakthrough with the 2009 film "Dogtooth," and here, adapting a 2003 South Korean movie called "Save the Green Planet!," he's right at home.

"Bugonia" offers no hope to its characters, no dream of better days. The disheveled Teddy, who looks as if he's crawled down a long road of broken glass and busted dreams, is too pigheaded to entertain the possibility that his alien-invasion theory could be wrong. The dots he's connected are irrefutable. His mother (a cameo by Alicia Silverstone) was once a test subject in an Auxolith drug experiment that left her in a coma, a state in which she's remained ever since. Teddy stokes his bitterness about this while working in a local Auxolith warehouse, and he supplements his income from that job as a beekeeper. Tending the hives in a backyard apiary along with the eager-to-please Don, Teddy notes, with mounting alarm, that more and more of his bees keep mysteriously dying. (If the phrase "colony collapse disorder" means anything to you, keep it in mind.)

Apart from seeming fairly delusional, Teddy is also heartless. He talks the trusting Don into submitting to chemical castration -- something Teddy has already done himself -- in order to fend off any hormonal distractions. From now on, saving the planet will be the only thing that counts. (Where have we heard this before?)

After the boys kidnap the martial-artsy Michelle (and nearly get their butts kicked in the process), they shave her head (Teddy believes her hair is the medium through which she receives communications from her faraway homeworld of Andromeda) and cuff her up in their basement for some unpleasant abuse. What Teddy is after is a meeting with her emperor before any possible invasion can begin. Michelle is fiercely resistant. "You need help," she tells Teddy. "You're mentally ill." "Don't talk to me like I'm a dipshit," Teddy says. Then the unpleasantness begins.

Stumbling into the middle of this situation comes a local lawman, Sheriff Casey (Stavros Halkias), who's on the hunt for the kidnapped Michelle. Casey and Teddy know each other. Teddy's mom once employed Casey as a babysitter, in which capacity he turned out to be a child molester. Now he wants to make amends. "I was young and lost," he tells Teddy. "I'm a different guy now." Teddy is not instantly won over. Nor is he under any illusion that Casey will be the last cop to come around in search of the big-deal businesswoman he's holding captive. ("I am crucial!" Michelle has already told him -- where in the big-deal business world have we heard that before?)

Along with its occasional eruptions of bloody, bone-cracking violence, "Bugonia" is also one of Lanthimos' most inviting movies, thanks very much to the chemistry between Plemons and Stone (who were also teamed in his last film, the near-unendurable "Kinds of Kindness"), and Robbie Ryan's probing cinematography, and, not least, the guileless lovability of Delbis, who is a real find.

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To find out more about Kurt Loder and read features by other Creators writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators website at www.creators.com.

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