Maybe I’m seeking too much from Yorgos Lanthimos, adapting the South Korean cult classic Save The Green Planet into his surreal comedy with Bugonia. After the likes of Poor Things and Kinds of Kindness, I was eager to see what wild twists and absurdities he tossed into this narrative about alien conspiracies and paranoia. Yet the entire film stays almost too faithful to the original, where the lingering questions of “Is this person an alien?” and “Is humanity doomed?” are eventually answered without much shock and a catharsis most hollow.

Emma Stone returns for her third Lanthimos film in a row as the pharmaceutical CEO Michelle Fuller. Her high status and routine of pique health contrast sharply with Teddy Gatz (Jesse Plemons), a man wronged by her company and forced to work in a fulfillment factory that she also happens to own. Having grown disillusioned with capitalism and inspired by conspiracy theories, he teams up with his slow-witted cousin Don (Aidan Delbis) to kidnap Michelle. To Teddy, this is more than revenge; it is an attempt to capture an alien secretly invading Earth. With Teddy’s calmly assured speculation on an alien presence, Michelle tries to talk her way out of escaping these two weirdos who have her locked up in her basement, trying to feed someone like Teddy exactly what he wants to hear.

As a slow-burning satire of the strange, this film is surprisingly light on Lanthimos’s penchant for the peculiar. It feels more faithful to the source material and is approached with restrained ridiculousness from screenwriter Will Tracy, whose eat-the-rich scripts for The Regime and The Menu mostly come in one flavor of satire. Bugonia is approached as more of a doomed satire on humanity, providing equal mockery of the poor conspiracy theorists and the influential figures who manipulate such dire individuals. From this angle, there’s an empty nature that harkens to Don’t Look Up, an apocalyptic satire that embraces how we’re all going to die, and there’s nothing to do about it because the corrupt and decadent control everything. The inevitable conclusion of such a picture is that we probably all deserve it and might as well get some dry/wry laughs out of all this.

This would be a decent staging of absurdity, but the big problem is that the movie becomes entirely predictable after taking its binary route. The bulk of the allure and comedy relies on answering the question of whether Michelle is an alien or not. Without giving anything away, there is a choice made, but with so much talk from Terry on the nature of the Andromedian beings he hunts, the film doesn’t diverge much from what is laid out, smearing so much of the narrative with tongue-in-cheek foreshadowing that it diminishes the grand revelation. The few comedic asides of Terry’s chemical castration, the messed-up relationship he has with a pedophilic cop (Stavros Halkias), and some grotesque violence that abruptly hits in the second act do little to delight for a film entirely centered on its conspiracy staging, maintaining as coldly focused on the firm track as Terry and Michelle’s daily regimen for success.

The most surreal aspect of Bugonia is how it favors more rigid than weird routes for its conspiracy satire. The indulgence of conspiracy theorists being right about aliens and flat-earth theories offers little catharsis for a film that taps into some intriguing theories of control and bee colonies. The big joke is on us for wanting to believe that something greater is in control of our lives to make the mess of capitalism and a doomed planet easier to resolve. We’re meant to laugh at this belief because if it is true, what will we do about it? Probably nothing. And if our existence is dominated by outside forces beyond any freedom we can exercise to escape, I’m gonna need some better gags and weirder routes than what Lanthimos has dished up here to join in the hysterics.

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