HERE'S LOOKING AT YOU, KIDNAP

Opening this weekend:

Bugonia--Pharmaceutical exec Michelle is abducted from her driveway, after vigorous resistance. The unimpressive kidnappers, Teddy (Jesse Plemons), a beekeeper and conspiracy theorist, and his affectless cousin Don (Aidan Delbis), shave her head and chain her to a bed in the basement. Teddy believes that Michelle (Emma Stone) is an alien infiltrator from Andromeda, and wants her to arrange a meeting with the Andromedan Emperor during an upcoming lunar eclipse to negotiate a withdrawal from their occupation of Earth.

Michelle stays calm and tries to reason with her captors, explaining that she isn't an alien, but that she is a VIP and the search for her will be relentless. Teddy is having none of it; he's anticipated every argument or play on their sympathies that Michelle can make, and he seethes with barely controlled rage. Gradually, we learn why.

Working from a script by Will Tracy, the mad Greek Yorgos Lanthimos directed this American version of a South Korean satire, Jang Joon-Hwan's Save the Green Planet! It's a bitterly funny, and sad, dramatization of how closed bubbles of belief can shut down the chances for productive human exchange. Michelle and Teddy lash out at each other with confident invective that suggests their positions are unassailable, impregnable.

Stone inevitably evokes sympathy; her eyes seem somehow wider and more plaintive under her shaved scalp, and the lotion smeared on her head gives her the spectral look of a Kabuki character. But she and Lanthimos also make sure we see that Michelle is a passive-aggressive bully, and in the midst of a grapple with Teddy she blurts out her Nietzschean view of their relationship.

Plemons is also superb, and he and Stone volley the dialogue at each other with skill and nuance. Delbis is touching as the apparently neurodivergent Don, who is pushed around by Teddy but at bottom seems to be more openminded and instinctively decent than his mentor.

It becomes clear that Lanthimos, following the Korean film's example, plans to finish Bugonia with a grand satirical topper. The route he takes, though admittedly funny, is heavy-handed, and diffuses the bite of what has gone before. Even so, Bugonia has more than enough brilliance and passion to be worth a look.