Emma Stone & Jesse Plemons in Yorgos Lanthimos Film

Buried way down in the end credits is an acknowledgment that Yorgos Lanthimos’ Bugonia is based on the film Save the Green Planet! Audiences familiar with that 2003 Korean sci-fi comedy, written and directed by Jang Joon Hwan, will be at a distinct disadvantage in terms of surprises. But for anyone coming fresh to the American remake, there are plenty of weird twists, explosive violence, bursts of slapstick physical comedy and satirical jabs. Either way, the pleasure of watching Emma Stone and Jesse Plemons go at it as a Big Pharma executive and a crunchy-granola conspiracy theorist is reward enough.

While Stone memorably worked with Lanthimos on The Favourite and Poor Things, she was joined by Plemons last year in the director’s enigmatic triptych, Kinds of Kindness. Their new collaboration is more satisfying than that uneven and overlong puzzle box, not to mention more readily coherent as a narrative. But it does feel almost like a repertory company lark, dashed off between more ambitious projects, prompting the hope that the Greek director will scale up again soon.

Plemons plays Teddy, an apiarist and dark web surfer convinced that the colony collapse disorder that devastated the honeybee population is about to be visited upon humanity. He has gotten his younger cousin Don (Aidan Delbis) on board with his paranoid — or perceptive? — belief that aliens from the neighboring Andromeda galaxy are preparing to destroy Earth.

Like a New Age cult leader with just one acolyte — and even he doesn’t seem 100 percent convinced — Teddy drills Don on the need to clear their “psychic cachets” and shut the Andromedons out of their “brain boxes.” “Procreation is just a pain trap,” says Teddy, who injects them both with a “chemical castration” formula in order to kill any sexual urges, harness the neurons and be their own masters. In other words, they need to shape up if they are to outwit a bunch of crafty extraterrestrials and save the world.

Adapted by The Menu screenwriter Will Tracy (who also worked on Succession), the film unfolds like a ticking clock, counting down the last days until a lunar eclipse. Teddy’s plan kicks into action when he and Don kidnap Michelle (Stone), the hard-edged, high-powered chief executive of a pharmaceutical giant, convinced she is an alien infiltrator.

Tracy and Lanthimos have already given Michelle a cunning intro by that point, revealing her to be a master of empty corporate-speak. She talks about the importance of diverse thinking to change the work culture and introduces a company-wide policy under which employees should be encouraged to leave the office promptly at 5:30 p.m. “But feel free to stay longer if you have work to finish.”

Michelle is as physically fit and quick-thinking as she is sharp in business acumen, so she puts up quite a fight when Teddy ambushes her in her driveway. DP Robbie Ryan captures the struggle in hilarious wide shots, showing us the impressive home and manicured grounds while Lanthimos and longtime editor Yorgos Mavropsaridis jump from one striking observation point to the next. Only when Teddy pins her down long enough to inject a tranquilizer is Michelle finally subdued.

The kidnappers take her to Teddy’s house and strap her to a table in the basement, after taking precautions to make sure she’s not traced by fellow Andromedons. They smash her phone, and shave off her hair — supposedly the only way she can be identified by her kind — and smear antihistamine cream on her arms, legs and head to weaken her.

Don is permanently on the verge of full-blown panic and constantly muttering that he’s not up to the task. But Teddy silences his doubts: “It’s not in control anymore,” he says, indicating Michelle. “We are.” He interrogates her repeatedly, urging her to admit she’s an alien so she can get on with facilitating his demands for an audience with her emperor and a promise that she will persuade her species to leave Earth.

Michelle barks threats, attempts to reason with him (“Can we have a dialogue?”), plays along by feigning a confession to mock him, and tries winning over Don while Teddy is upstairs, telling him that his cousin is unhinged. None of this goes over well with Teddy, who pumps her with 400 volts while blasting Green Day’s “Basket Case” to cover the screams.

While Bugonia is basically a chamber piece for three characters, concerned cop Casey (Stavros Halkias), who was once Teddy’s babysitter, starts asking questions and speculating about Michelle’s disappearance. Plemons steadily turns up the febrile intensity as he zips in and out of town on his bicycle to see his mother (Alicia Silverstone), who has been in a coma since submitting to pharmaceutical trials conducted by — duh — Michelle’s company.

That adds fuel to Teddy’s simmering rage but also gives Michelle something to work with, using the highly developed emotional manipulation skills Teddy warned Don about. Eventually, Michelle loses her cool and screams “You can’t beat me because you are a loser and I’m a winner! And that’s fucking life!” By which time you start to wonder, “Wait, is she an alien?” At the very least she’s a formidable avatar for corporate fuckery.

What follows is a genre-hopping blast of suspense, sci-fi, paranoia and dark comedy made all the more arch by Jerskin Fendrix’s high-drama score. In keeping with the Korean original, it’s far from subtle and often a bit silly, but Lanthimos can always be relied upon to serve up something weird and subversive. It seems typical of his taste for peculiar arcana that the title comes from the Ancient Greeks, for whom the term referred to the mythical belief that the rotting flesh of dead oxen spontaneously generated new swarms of bees. Yes, apparently there’s a word for that.

Stone and Plemons are both in top form, clearly vibing with the director’s idiosyncratic sensibility and upping each other’s game. And newcomer Delbis is a sad-sack delight, a sweet-natured naïf caught in Teddy and Michelle’s ferocious battle of wits.

Bugonia is by no means Lanthimos’ best work, but it looks spectacular thanks to the sheer richness, the stinging clarity and the eye-searing colors of Ryan’s VistaVision images. Besides, what’s not to love about extinction-level anxiety accompanied by the aching tenderness of Marlene Dietrich singing Pete Seeger’s anti-war folk song, “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?”