The latest from the challenging and celebrated filmmaker Yorgos Lanthimos might be his most on point satire yet.

The director of “The Favorite” and “Poor Things” addresses the intellectual disconnect of modern discourse, the impatient and sometimes brusque way the educated, the informed and the impersonal scientifically minded struggle to communicate with the superstitious, misinformed and passionately aggrieved.

“Bugonia” also makes us wrestle with what we’re entitled to, as viewers, even from a cinematic voice as singular and shrwed as Lanthimos. Is he obligated to satisfy as well as engage?

This kidnapping thriller touches on the growing environmental crisis, the inability of people drawn to science to address human concerns in a humane and empathetic way and irrational people who see conspiracies and “dark forces” beyond rational understanding destroying their lives and poisoning civilization and the planet, rather than focus on the dark figures right in front of everyone’s eyes.

And Lanthimos takes such a comically cheap way out of resolving this plot dilemma that we don’t so much ponder “What’s it all about?” the way we did “The Lobster” or “The Killing of a Sacred Deer,” as dismiss it.

It’s on target and yet in the end a dissonant cop-out, with or without Marlene Dietrich underscoring his point for him.

Emma Stone plays Michelle Fuller, a callous loner and socially awkward chemist with a degree in psychology who struggles to humanize herself to her workforce at the biochem giant — Auxolith — whom she is inclined to work to death. As CEO, she just hates the “optics” of the insane hours she demands.

As the company’s campus and distribution are located in Georgia, in the “Right to Work” (anti-union) South, the “optics” may be all this “visionary” tyrant is worried about. Her yoga and self-defense tutored regimen in her solitary mansion are all the distractions she allows.

But there’s a madman out there, an aggrieved employee who knows that “No one on Earth gives a single f–k about us,” with a cousin-acolyte who is the only one who believes him when he says “I’ve figured it out.”

And Teddy, played by rail-thin, wild-haired and mad-eyed Jesse Plemons, has a plan. Teddy’s fervor has to do with “theories” he’s read about and on podcasts he listens to. It’s about the die-off of bees he keeps on his family’s farm and the destruction of a whole class of humanity just like him, his mother (Alicia Silverstone) and his dim-witted cousin Don (Aiden Delbis), whom he’s brought on board.

Teddy masterminds a kidnapping of the CEO of the company he packs boxes for. For an oligarch in training — Stone’s Fuller could be based on Theranos villain Elizabeth Holmes — our G-wagon driving master of the universe doesn’t have much in the way of security. As she drops and pummels her attackers, we see why she perhaps doesn’t feel the need.

But one syringe later she’s chained to a bed in Teddy’s basement, her head shaved because “that’s how they track her.” She wakes up to learn of her crimes against Teddy’s “family…community…civilization…and the bees.” A rational woman of science with an understanding of psychology tries to “dialogue,” work the problem and reason her way out of peril.

It’s just that she’s a smart person talking to a crank, a man “in a bubble” of his own creation, one that has him convinced she’s Andromedan — from that distant galaxy — and that she will commune with her fellow Andromedans in four days, on the next lunar eclipse. He delusionally figures he can intervene and save the planet when that happens.

“Bugonia,” whose title is a pun on the fact that the ancient Greeks believed bees popped out of the carcas of decaying oxen, is about two people in “bubbles” and their inability to connect in any rational way.

Teddy is down his rabbit hole and willing to torture Michelle to get her to admit that he’s right. Michelle can try to reach him and get punished for it, or appeal to any humanity in his shotgun-armed cousin. But they’re all speaking in duologues. No one truly understands anyone else.

Efforts to “explain” Teddy’s broken psyche ring true. But anybody who’s watched a “Twilight Zone” episode can guess where this is going early on, if only the director has the nerve to take the easy, cheap laugh way out.

Plemons and Stone, who has become the director’s Oscar-winning muse, are terrifyingly real. And the allegory of a civilization in crisis lured like lemmings off this or that cliff of lunacy lands hard.

But the payoff, probably based on co-writer and Korean filmmaker Jang Joon-hwan’s “Save the Green Planet,” feels like a comical cop-out that is even less “funny” than the dark and unsettling insanity that preceded it. Whatever the intent and expense gone to in order to realize this payoff, the message-undercutting effect is sour and unsatisfying.

Rating: R, bloody violence, torture and profanity

Cast: Emma Stone, Jesse Plemons, Aiden Delbis, J. Carmen Galindez Barrera and Alicia Silverstone.

Credits: Yorgos Lanthimo, scripted by Will Tracy and Jang Joon-hwan. A Focus Features release.

Running time: 1:58