If Yorgos Lanthimos is going to direct a remake, the original film is going to need to be weird. Obviously. By all accounts, the 2003 feature Save the Green Planet!, written and directed by South Korean filmmaker Jang Joon-hwan, fits the bill. The Lanthimos version, written by Will Tracy and titled Bugonia, is about cousins Teddy (Jesse Plemons) and Don (Aidan Delbis). They live together in a creaky farmhouse and generally operate in a state of tense focus. Their self-appointed mission is clear and singleminded: kidnapping Michelle Fuller (Emma Stone), the CEO of a large pharmaceutical company. The main motivation, or so it seems initially, is some sort of vague revenge over a treatment process that didn’t go well for Teddy’s mom (Alicia Silverstone). As events proceed, it becomes clear that Teddy believes Michelle is at the center of a larger, stranger conspiracy.

In a manner that perhaps only Lanthimos can pull off these days, Bugonia is thrillingly bold and wild. There is no one else who makes the fracturing of the human psyche feel so kinetic. Presumably wracked with grief over what has happened to his mother, Teddy has willingly launched himself into turbines of paranoid thinking. One of the key inspirations of the film — crafted with equal, collaborative care in the writing, directing, and Plemons’s shrewd performance — is that Teddy isn’t a mere crackpot. He’s clearly intelligent and intent. It’s just that the voluminous amounts of information he absorbs are radically removed from what most people would view as plausible. The character is an unsettlingly accurate stand-in for any number of lost souls in the U.S. who crave an explanation, no matter how outlandish, for the hardships they face.

No everything in the film works. There’s a subplot involving a local police officer (Stavros Halkias) that strikes me as extraneous, providing a needless backstory of disturbance and pity for Teddy. The police officer’s initial appearance is also one of the few parts of the inventive script that comes across as leadenly obvious: It might as well be accompanied by a blinking “PLOT POINT” alert. What’s more, the last act occasionally favors chaos and shock over the coherent internal logic that has previously been meticulously adhered to.

At the center of Bugonia, Stone gives yet another performance of fury and nuance. Here character is introduced with a tinge of satire; she is trying out a softer approach, evidently in response to some sort of scandal, and it doesn’t come easily to her. Stone has crack comic timing and knows how to undersell the jokes. The scenes that follow are more impressive. Michelle finds herself in dire circumstances, and Stone shows the character constantly puzzling out to how to extricate herself, to determine the best strategic approach with her volatile, possibly unhinged captors. I felt like I could see her thinking, including the precise moments when she changed her mind about which tactics were needed. That doesn’t even get into the sharp spin she puts on certain line readings or the committed intensity she brings to the most harrowing moments.

Bugonia is Stone’s fourth straight film with Lanthimos. She clearly sparks off of his unorthodox storytelling. Her willingness to take any acting challenge he puts before her — and to always meet that challenge in newly astonishing ways — is one of the real thrills of current cinema.