In the cinema of Yorgos Lanthimos, there’s always someone on the other side of a locked door. Since popping up on the stateside radar with 2009’s Dogtooth, the Greek writer/director has maintained a steady authorial stamp, forever locating his characters within sealed environments, barricaded from the outside by those who wish to keep our protagonists in the dark. The impenetrable walls of The Lobster and The Favorite’s chosen settings only read as safety measures to those within their oblivious parameters, just as a dearth of actionable information in Kinds of Kindness and his aforementioned breakout drive their players straight into a ditch. Poor Things’ widespread appeal is often chalked up to its feminist themes and comparatively sunnier disposition, but it’s also the lone Lanthimos flick that frees its captives, offering a peak at the horizon that its creator is otherwise hellbent on concealing. Witnessing Bella Baxter discover the world in real time gave that movie an enviable entry point, one that Bugnoia intentionally mitigates by introducing its protagonist long after his hard won enlightenment. Unlike Lanthimos’ other central figures, he’s got the research and statistics to make a change. Unlike Bella, he lacks the agency.

After all, who would listen to Teddy Gatz (Jesse Plemmons), an unkempt conspiracy theorist living on the outskirts of Atlanta? Despite drifting through his factory job in an ill-tempered malaise, Teddy has quite the night life, uncovering a clandestine alien invasion with the help of his neurodivergent cousin Don (Aidan Delbis). The time for collecting and assessing data has just ended when we make his acquaintance, taking a break from his digitized models to kidnap Michelle Fuller (Emma Stone), a pharmaceutical CEO whom the Gatz boys believe to be an extraterrestrial in disguise. You don’t climb all the way up the corporate ladder without a little savvy, and what follows Fuller’s capture is a cagey battle of wills, pitting the prisoner’s weaponized buzz words against the determination of a true believer. 

Given his obsession with nefarious confidentiality, it was only a matter of time before Lanthimos dipped his toes into conspiracy culture, a statement that extends to global cinema at large. A driving force behind modern trepidation and upheaval the world over, the topic has only started to filter onto our screens, identified charmingly in Borat Subsequent Moviefilm, and then chillingly in last year’s criminally underseen Red Rooms. Both films found an empathetic way of letting their respective truth seekers down easy, and while Bugonia shares in their generosity, it’s much more open to the scandalous possibilities of a far-reaching cover-up. Rather than affording his audience a bird’s eye view, writer Will Tracy sticks the us right in the trenches, alternating between sympathy for an unscrupulous power broker and patience for a manic crack pot. Needless to say, neither choice is ideal.

Emotional alignment with an anti-hero is always subject to the charms of the actor at hand, but Bugonia’s dueling protagonist approach requires a calibration all its own. Denying either character the moral upper hand threatens to reflexively tilt our support toward the thespian with greater stores of charisma, but Plemmons and Stone are a match made in hell. The former has built a career out of wrongfooting audiences with his teddy bear visage, slowly revealing a seedy, remorseless undercurrent that Bugonia opts to place front-and-center, chipping away at a ghastly veneer rather than the other way around. Stone shares in the inversion of preconceived notions, and while the two-time Oscar winner has already shown the ability to contort her signature vivacity into something menacingly gnarled, the darkness here still comes as a shock. They’re not playing against type so much as reversing their known trajectories, and Lanthimos levels the playing field with the exactitude of a mad scientist.

He’s far from alone in his attention to detail, with Bugonia elevating above other entries in the two-hander subgenre by virtue of its sterling technical construction. Teddy’s house, wherein the vast majority of the film is set, is a soft-spoken marvel of production design, as littered with instructive ephemera as it is stocked with socioeconomic signifiers. A cluttered living space isn’t enough to get pulses pounding, but Jerskin Fendrix’s queasy-making score does the trick and then some, playing with your nerve endings like a fidget toy. It’s enough to make the viewer search for the exits, but Robbie Ryan’s boxy cinematography ensures that escape is always just out of sight. His chosen 1.50:1 aspect ratio was seen earlier this year in Wes Anderson’s The Phoenician Scheme, helping the ever-mannered auteur organize his characteristically busy frame by limiting negative space. Here, it functions as a trap, one in which the late James Caan had previously been ensnared.

There’s no mistaking the narrative similarities between Bugonia and Rob Reiner’s Misery, just as there’s no ignoring the differences. While both flicks situate vaguely famous, well-to-do narcissists at the mercy of volatile capturers, the 1990 Stephen King adaptation orients both its pity and incredulity toward Kathy Bates, saving only derision for Caan. Cleaner demarcation is also present in both John Carpenter’s They Live and Philip Kaufman’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers remake, obvious points of comparison that illuminate Lanthimos’ attunement to the here-and-now by charting such analogous paths. Paranoia is nothing new, as any number of 70’s flicks will readily attest, but the movies that employed it as a motif used to hone in on a domineering antagonist lurking in the shadows. Their ire and frustration felt laser focused; Bugonia only has a shotgun, sending a spray of bullets out at a deeply confusing target, shrapnel hitting just as many innocent bystanders as true-blue villains.

It’s certainly not for lack of targets, but rather their proliferation in a world that seems designed to make losers of us all. That’s a class of people that Lanthimos has always reveled in tormenting, and while accusations of cruelty seem to greet his every release, Bugonia isn’t punching down. Flawed as they may be, both Teddy and Michelle are fleshed-out individuals, simultaneously making the most and least of our glass-half-empty times. Their sparring leads to a broadly predictable outcome, but the nuances that Lanthimos and Tracy attach to their inevitable conclusion stick in your head days after exposure, fastened there by a climatic montage that’s both strikingly beautiful and tremendously upsetting. Among the best sequences of the movie year, the passage also clarifies the film’s title, named after an ancient Mediterranean ritual that won’t be discussed here. You can do your own research, like Teddy, or arrive at a greater understanding, like Michelle. Either way, you’re not leaving the maze.