OK, Let’s Talk About That Bugonia Ending

As you might imagine, this story contains major spoilers for Bugonia, including discussion of the ending.

Yorgos Lanthimos likes to provoke. The high-profile Greek director has made a career out of building slightly surreal, darkly comedic universes filled with quirky characters, bizarre scenarios, and unsettling themes. From The Lobster to Poor Things, his films hold up a cracked mirror to perverse human behavior, fluid social institutions, and hierarchical power structures, daring us to squirm at everything we recognize with a warped sense of humor. So it shouldn’t be a surprise that his newest project, Bugonia, a modern parable about a conspiracy theorist convinced aliens have invaded Earth, doesn’t exactly have a simple, straightforward conclusion. As is usually the case with Lanthimos, he’d rather shock the system than offer closure.

If you’ve seen Jang Joon-hwan’s Save The Green Planet, the 2003 South Korean movie on which Bugonia is based, then you might see Lanthimos’ bait-and-switch coming. After all, Will Tracy’s script is loyal to its source material: Teddy Gatz (Jesse Plemons) works as an e-commerce drone who spends his extracurricular time beekeeping and spiraling down conspiracy theory rabbit holes. He’s convinced that Michelle Fuller (Emma Stone), the powerful CEO of biomedical company Auxolith, whose clinical drug trials have placed his mother into a coma, is actually an Andromedan alien intent on destroying the human race. That leaves him only one choice: Along with his cousin Don (Aidan Delbis), he abducts Michelle and holds her hostage in his basement, shaving her hair (to prevent her from telepathically communicating with the mothership), slathering her in antihistamine cream (more pseudo-science protection), and demanding an audience with her species’ high court.

The abrupt setup leads to a string of tense interrogations, negotiations, and electrocutions before Michelle reveals (or at least convinces Teddy) that not only is she an Andromedan—she’s their leader. This performative, but sincere disclosure—complete with an entire history of her race’s infiltration and explanation for Auxolith’s research—is enough that, on the day of the lunar eclipse, Teddy escorts her to Auxolith headquarters, where she’s promised to teleport him to her spaceship. Once inside her office, she pulls out a calculator (seemingly stalling for time) and punches in a long code to activate Teddy’s intergalactic journey inside her closet. But as she counts down, Teddy’s heightened body temperature triggers his “insurance” suicide vest, decapitating him in a bloody explosion that ends the elaborate charade. Or does it? Just when you think the movie’s over, Lanthimos pulls the rug out and makes you reconsider everything you’ve just seen.

In a dreamlike coda, Michelle escapes the ambulance escorting her to the hospital, returns barefoot to her office, climbs into her now blood-soaked closet, and beams herself up into a jellyfish-looking spaceship. Soon, she emerges through an orange goo, dons an imperial headdress, and is welcomed by a cadre of humanoid aliens wrapped in large wool-knit-looking sweaters. The group convenes for a council meeting, where Michelle—speaking in her native tongue—decides that humanity is irredeemable. “Their time will end,” she says, before popping a protective bubble over a model flat Earth and killing the entire population. Lanthimos then buttons the movie with a montage (set to “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?”) of motionless bodies across the globe—in museums, classrooms, markets, cars, and boats—as animals, and more specifically, bees, continue to survive.