Oh, when will they ever learn? It's a question that director Yorgos Lanthimos continually asks of his characters, and, by extension, the human species as a whole. His distinctly macabre filmography is filled with disturbing tales of morality, each finding ways to twist the knife on our preconceived notions. The off-kilter performances and absurd concepts—such as being turned into an animal if you don't find a companion in The Lobster, or Barry Keoghan omnisciently terrorizing Colin Farrell's family in The Killing of a Sacred Deer—are never so disconnected from reality that they can be excused as pure fantasy. It's just another way of looking at things; once you take a step back, the error of our own ways is exposed in a deservedly uncomfortable light.

Depending on your relationship with Lanthimos, you may either cheer or jeer at the fact that Bugonia is his most straightforward film to date… although you have to understand that we're very much grading on a curve. The weirder and more hostile the better, I say as one of the few fans of last year's mean-spirited Kinds of Kindness. Much of that might have to do with screenwriter Will Tracy subbing out the black heart of Efthimis Filippou and the sardonic wit of Tony McNamara for something a little more directly addressed to our modern times.

The first half of the famous lyric to the leading question of this review is “Where have all the flowers gone?” For Teddy (Jesse Plemons), they’ve all but disappeared, both literally and figuratively. Living in his dilapidated bee farmhouse with his cousin Don (Aidan Delbis), the pair have fallen on hard times over the years through family tragedies. Part of that responsibility falls upon the local biochemical company, which has poisoned the local bee population and put Teddy’s mom (Alicia Silverstone) into a coma after a failed trial of an opioid drug. Michelle Fuller (Emma Stone) is the CEO of the company, and is the type of boss to passive-aggressively claim that employees can go home whenever they want and that diversity is what makes us special… so long as it all leads to a healthier bottom line.

Teddy wonders how humanity can be so cruel to one another, how he and Don can have so little, while the Michelles of the world can exact their will without consequence. At least in bee colonies, the worker bees have a sense of purpose for their queen, and everything in nature is perfectly balanced. Teddy’s narration mentions that there’s no sex when bees pollinate, so no one gets hurt. The odd unprovoked specificity of that line, along with a local police officer’s (Stavros Halkias) persistent apologizing for vague acts he inflicted on Teddy many years ago, hints at the darkness lying at the forefront of Teddy’s heart. Working from that mixture of long-buried PTSD and an avalanche of interest conspiracy theories, Teddy comes to the conclusion that Michelle must be an alien from the Andromedan galaxy, sent to Earth to push the human species deeper into the mud. He and Don kidnap and hold her in their basement, waiting for the lunar eclipse in four days so that she can call her mothership and they can negotiate a truce between the two species.

Of course, Michelle isn’t on that same wavelength, especially when she wakes up and discovers that all her hair has been shaved off (Teddy claims that Andromedans use their hair as tracking devices). Stone, working with Lanthimos on their fourth consecutive feature, is more than up to the task of working within a limited setting. In contrast to the revolving door of elaborately lush sets of Poor Things, most of the runtime in Bugonia is devoted to her being chained to a bed in a dingy farm cellar. She’s like a boxer, studying her opponent over several rounds, eventually using their weapons against them.

Teddy’s biggest weapon is his confidence in his findings and his initial absolute refusal to be dissuaded by Michelle’s pleas of how ludicrous this all sounds. Without being overly specific to demographics, Lanthimos and Tracy highlight the societal divides we face based on our inability to close our mouths and open our ears. Every contradiction is a personal attack and an opportunity to dig your heels in even more. It should be noted that Ari Aster is a producer on this project, with his film this year as a writer/director, Eddington (also starring Stone), tackling these same topics through a much more confrontational lens.

Lanthimos hasn’t lost his confrontational attitude towards his audience, dialing up the tension through Jerskin Fendrix’s bombastic score and some harshly precise editing. This chamber piece eventually becomes a torture chamber as DP Robbie Ryan goes back and forth between keeping a distance from the squirming and pushing it right in front of our faces. Despite being small-scale, this is still a gloriously cinematic project, one that stretches its dollars to their fullest potential. A few dips into Teddy’s nightmarish past are rendered in washed-out black-and-white, almost out of a gothic tragedy.

This is a two-hander with an unfortunate third wheel in Don, who is neurodivergent and forcefully taken along on Teddy’s crazy train. He perfectly fits the mold of the innocent lackey to the evil boss, someone who is eventually made to realize the error of their ways by the compassion of the hero. That obviousness is evident from start to finish, covering this story in a layer of predictability. Some acts of cruelty come off as cheap provocation, something that Lanthimos has skillfully been able to circumvent throughout his career.

Oh, when will they ever learn? According to Bugonia, it seems that we’re well aware of the problem, but lack the will to fight for the cure. Indifference is a much more pathetic reason for our downfall than ignorance, although it does have an ironic ring to it.