Justin Chang

Begonia is actually a remake of another film, Chang Joon Hwan's low-budget thriller from 2003, Save the Green Planet, which is now regarded by many as one of the most significant Korean movies of this century.

Although begonia is a bigger, more lavish production than Save the Green Planet, it does preserve many of the same plot details.

Jesse Plemons plays Teddy, a part-time beekeeper who also works in a warehouse owned by a major corporation that makes drugs and pesticides.

He blames the company and its CEO, Michelle Fuller, that's Emma Stone, girlbossing to the max, for their role in endangering bee colonies around the world.

But Teddy's rage goes further.

He claims that Michelle is an alien from the Andromeda galaxy, bent on destroying planet Earth.

And so, with the help of his cousin, Don, played by Aidan Delbus, Teddy ambushes Michelle outside her home and knocks her out.

When she comes to, she's tied up in the basement of Teddy's farmhouse and shaved bald for reasons that only her captor can explain.

Your hair has been destroyed.

What ship?

Your mother's ship.

Teddy demands that Michelle take him and Don to her leader.

Michelle's response is startlingly cool and methodical.

Rather than screaming or pleading for her life, she calmly explains that she isn't an alien, and that Teddy and Dawn would be wise to let her go.

Even when she's incapacitated, she seems unnervingly in control of the situation, and you begin to wonder fairly early on if Michelle really is from Andromeda.

Weirdly, the answer almost doesn't matter, because there's always been something otherworldly about the way Lanthimos regards his characters.

Watching one of his movies, like Dogtooth or The Killing of a Sacred Deer, is sort of like watching a strange behavioral experiment conducted by an extraterrestrial being.

Even so, Begonia doesn't have the staccato rhythms and bizarre non-sequiturs of most Lanthimos movies.

It was written by Will Tracy, a co-writer on the 2022 horror satire The Menu, and the dialogue has a lucidity that sucks you in.

Teddy strains to be polite with Michelle at first, but he starts to unravel as her barbed, insinuating words get under his skin.