Bugonias bizarro ending, explained

Has Yorgos Lanthimos’ Bugonia left you questioning your very reality? Don’t worry, you’ve come to the right place.

Lanthimos’ dark comedy about a conspiracy theorist who kidnaps a high-powered CEO comes with its fair share of twists and turns. Its ending in particular seems designed to shock, although Lanthimos and screenwriter Will Tracy do plant their fair share of hints at what’s coming. Let’s break it down.

How does Bugonia end?

Aidan Delbis, Jesse Plemons, and Emma Stone in “Bugonia.”
Credit: Atsushi Nishijima / Focus Features

Based on the 2003 South Korean film Save the Green Planet!, Bugonia sees beekeeper Teddy (Jesse Plemons) and his cousin Donny (Aidan Delbis) take pharmaceutical CEO Michelle (Emma Stone) hostage. They believe that she is an Andromedan alien who was sent to infiltrate humanity and make them subservient to alien rule. By Bugonia‘s end, Lanthimos reveals that Teddy was right… kind of.

That’s right: Michelle is actually an Andromedan. More than that, she’s the Andromedan empress.

The revelation comes on the night of the lunar eclipse, which is when Teddy believes the Andromedan mothership will arrive near Earth. Michelle manages to get Teddy to the headquarters of her company, Auxolith, where she claims that the closet in her office is actually a transporter that will beam the pair of them to the mothership. Things quickly go awry when Teddy shows Michelle that he’s wearing a suicide vest as insurance. Moments later, the vest detonates in reaction to his body heat.

If you believe that Michelle is a human, the entire Auxolith scene feels like her stalling for time in order to get help from outside authorities. However, in the chaos that follows Teddy’s death, it turns out that that isn’t the case at all. Michelle drags herself from an ambulance back to her office, where she does, in fact, get transported to the Andromedan mothership.

What did the Andromedans want with Earth?

Emma Stone in “Bugonia.”
Credit: Atsushi Nishijima / Focus Features

So yes, Teddy was correct about Michelle being an Andromedan. He was also correct about her hair being how she could communicate with her ship, and about her being a member of the imperial bloodline. (Of course, he missed that she was the actual emperor.) Still, he was far off on the reason the Andromedans were truly on Earth.

Right before Michelle and Teddy head to Auxolith for the last time, Michelle discovers Teddy’s experiments on dead bodies, some of whom were Andromedan, some of whom were human. At this point, Michelle quits pretending to be human (or pretending to be a human claiming she’s an alien in order to satisfy her captor) and tells Teddy the story of the Andromedan race. They arrived on Earth millions of years ago, accidentally killing dinosaurs in the process. From there, they created humans in their own image. That prompted the creation of the ancient civilization of Atlantis.

However, as humans turned on one another and engaged in devastating wars, the Andromedans grew horrified at their own offspring. According to Michelle, Auxolith’s experiments — including the drugs that put Teddy’s mother Sandy (Alicia Silverstone) in a coma — were intended to find a way to help humanity and continue their evolution. However, those experiments ended up failing. Ironically, in the end, by trying to save humans from aliens, Teddy actually dooms them, as his kidnapping and torture of Michelle prove to be the last straw for the aliens’ patience. Michelle, now back on the mothership (and sporting a massive hair headpiece), decrees that humans cannot be saved. With one pop of a bubble encasing the Andromedans’ model of Earth, she wipes out every human on the planet. It’s a bleak conclusion for humans but not for Earth: In the film’s final moments, bees begin to flourish again.

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Wait, is Bugonia saying that conspiracy theorists are right?

Aidan Delbis and Jesse Plemons in “Bugonia.”
Credit: Atsushi Nishijima / Focus Features

Bugonia‘s reveal that Michelle has been an Andromedan all along gives the film killer rewatch value, especially when it comes to Stone’s performance and the many layers of deception Michelle is balancing. However, does it also risk legitimizing extremist conspiracy theorists like Teddy by proving his theories correct?

Not really! Bugonia still highlights how dangerous Teddy is. He tortures Michelle, coerces Donny into chemical castration, murders cop Casey (Stavros Halkias), and is so out of touch with reality that he believes the antifreeze he kills his mother with is actually a miracle cure. In no way does Bugonia validate these actions.

The film does acknowledge that Teddy’s conspiracies stem from real problems, though — and no, I’m not just talking about the aliens. His theorizing is rooted in legitimate issues: wealth disparity, environmental collapse, the broken healthcare system. Michelle has ties to all these evils, from her involvement in Sandy’s coma to Auxolith’s connection to declining bee populations. Because of this, she becomes the perfect embodiment of all of Teddy’s suffering. That she is actually an alien adds an extra layer of veracity to Teddy’s true complaints about the state of the world, although he’s twisted the truth of the Andromedans’ involvement on Earth entirely.

Still, the biggest question Bugonia poses isn’t “Is Michelle actually an alien?” It’s whether humanity is worth saving in the first place, even with dangerous conspiracy theorists like Teddy or soulless corporate figureheads like Michelle harming the people around them. Bugonia‘s final montage of dead humans collapsed in a variety of situations, from clubbing to prayer, highlights that there’s so much more to humanity than the polar opposites we’ve been following for the whole film. No one person can truly encompass it all.

Bugonia is now in select theaters, and opens wide on Oct. 31.

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