Bugonia is Yorgos Lanthimos’ latest offering. It’s an absurd sci-fi and psychological warfare presented as an art house chamber piece. The chamber in question is the basement of conspiracy theorist Teddy Gatz (Jessie Plemons) and his neurodivergent cousin Don (Aidan Delbis). Their captive is millennial girlboss Michelle Fuller (the ever-endeavoring Emma Stone) and what follows is a series of bizarre, baffling confrontations and mind games.

Fuller’s extraordinary world pre-abduction is that of a high-profile corporate executive, the CEO of Auxolith, a major pharmaceutical company. A woman on the cover of Time, she’s been to the White House, her office resembles that of Hank Scorpio in The Simpsons, but her demeanor is bordering on The Devil Wears Prada’s Miranda Priestley. The queeniest of corporate bees. The renegade worker bees, Teddy and Don, on the other hand, have her honeycomb motif imprinted in the fabric of their home.

Director of photography Robbie Ryan captures Lanthimos’s vision again in a boxy aspect ratio, iconic low angles and wide long takes which allow the choreography to unfold in absurd theatre. Then Fuller is shaved and clad in an oxblood burgundy dressing gown and anti-histamine cream. An appearance that evokes the close-ups of Carl Theodore Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc. However, the role of the martyr appears to be assumed by Teddy, chemically castrating himself and his cousin for the good of the cause. The dream sequences are reminiscent of Federico Fellini, while the symmetrical compositions of empty quiet spaces are pure Stanley Kubrick. And the inclusion of Pete Seeger’s “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?” operates in a similar manner to Vera Lynn’s “We’ll Meet Again” in Dr. Strangelove. The film draws on an obscure conspiracy theory that inspired its Korean predecessor, Save the Green Planet: that Leonardo DiCaprio is an alien sent to Earth to seduce as many women as possible. Don, played with a familiar, often quiet, black-eyed menace by Plemons, becomes Lanthimos’s version of this figure, a self-appointed savior or destroyer of the planet, depending on your view.

Mercifully, Lanthimos avoids the “all in their head” trope that so often pervades psychological thrillers of this sort, elevating paranoia to the level of a cosmic opera, which questions everything from the shape of the Earth, the existence of higher powers, to whether Fuller might indeed be an empress alien from the planet Andromeda. It is a Lanthimosian exploration of delusion, conspiracy and the elasticity of truth. But what does it mean to be Lanthimosian?

Aesthetics aside, at the heart of every Lanthimos film lies a system, a rule or social structure that governs behavior in a way that seems rational until it doesn’t. In Dogtooth, children are raised in isolation, taught that cats are predators and the outside world is deadly. In The Favourite, the system is courtly politics and the power struggles of the royal palace. Obedience to rules is crucial and through that obedience he exposes how arbitrary the rules of our world are. In Bugonia this system is about belief in conspiracies and the rules we create to make sense of the world, exposing how the social contract breaks down when we refuse to see the world for what it truly is.