These days, director Yorgos Lanthimos loves two things: telling deeply weird stories and casting Emma Stone in them. With Bugonia, he gets to fulfill both tasks yet again, retelling the 2003 South Korean sci-fi thriller Save the Green Planet and its satirical tale of a CEO kidnapped under the suspicion that she’s an alien. The fallout of this abduction is as disturbing as it is entertaining, though Lanthimos’s take on the material always feels like he could push things a little further for maximum sardonic impact.

In a world where horrifying yet stupid conspiracy theories drive the halls of government, Bugonia’s conspiracy-addled choices feel at once impossible to believe yet exactly what conclusions one might reach after too many 4chan visits. Beekeeper and factory worker Teddy Gatz (Jesse Plemons) certainly believes what he says, though it takes a few extra nudges to convince his possibly autistic cousin Don (Aidan Delbis) that they’re acting for a noble cause. And not just because this scheme involves chemical castration to block unwarranted distractions. Their target is Michelle Fuller (Stone), esteemed CEO of the pharmaceutical company Auxolith, a position Teddy claims is a front for her true role as an extraterrestrial spy from the Andromeda galaxy. Such a being communicates through hair—requiring Teddy and Don to shave Michelle bald on the way to their isolated farmhouse—and in a few days, other Andromedans will contact Earth to pick her up. So, Teddy and Don kidnap Michelle and force her to admit she’s not human and to let them meet her leaders so they can ensure the Andromedans leave Earth for good, thereby saving the world.

Obviously, the trope of a billionaire CEO not acting fully human nor understanding the plights of their employees/clients isn’t new. Also, there’s definitely something strange about how Michelle reacts to her kidnapping at first, calmly detailing how a manhunt will play out in such precise corporate terms that you suspect this isn’t the first time she’s rehearsed it. But there are only two ways this story can play out, and the full scope of Teddy’s conspiratorial mindset is so absurd that you must at once believe it’s ridiculous and just plausible enough, given the filmmaker we’re dealing with here. After all, Teddy claims to know exactly what Andromedan ships look like, yet later awkwardly confesses to Michelle that any human resistance to this supposed invasion consists of him and Don. As he puts it so bluntly while stocking up on supplies, “No one on Earth gives a single fuck about us.”

There are hints at a deeper pain behind Teddy’s madness, from his mother being a victim of Auxolith pharma tests gone wrong to witnessing fellow blue-collar employees struggle with injuries on the job. This is Plemons’s sweet spot, playing characters so unhinged yet affable that viewers don’t know whether to fear or sympathize with him. He commits so hard to believing the sci-fi rationale for why things have gone so wrong on Earth that the viewer almost wants to believe it in turn. Stone, meanwhile, has fun keeping the audience guessing as a prisoner in the basement who nonetheless makes cold, calculating decisions to outwit her captors. In between their battle of wits is Don, who seems to recognize Teddy’s madness yet whose commitment to him results in complete tragedy. This is Delbis’s film debut, and he leaves enough of an impact as this tragic, Lenny from Of Mice and Men-style figure that Lanthimos should definitely add him to his list of recurring collaborators.

The script, written by Will Tracy (The Menu, Succession), has more implied absurdism than the visually bizarre locations of The Favourite and especially Poor Things. The result is a largely straightforward thriller with only a few examples of abstract weirdness, as if generated in response to the absurd horrors of the 21st century. It’s only near the end that Lanthimos cuts loose and, without spoiling anything, concludes his morality tale with an outcome that feels almost tragicomic.

Placing his story in conventional settings might not always be this director’s strength, but he regularly seems at home making his audience empathize for peculiar people. The two leads of Bugonia certainly don’t qualify as all-out heroes, but this film’s theme is humanity and whether we’ve squandered our time on this world. The answer to that question is audacious in a way only Yorgos Lanthimos’s brain can project, adaptation or not. Even with a lack of major twists, it’s still a very human answer.