Yorgos Lanthimos Defends Bugonia’s Strange Ending

This article contains spoilers for Bugonia.

“What the heck just happened?” Honestly, that question applies to basically every movie that Yorgos Lanthimos makes. But it’s particularly relevant for his latest film Bugonia, not so much because the ending is unclear, but because it is so unexpected.

For Lanthimos himself, what’s unexpected is the divisive response that audiences have had. “I’ve noticed that some people say, ‘Oh, it’s really dark and bleak, the ending,’ and then some other people find it very hopeful, because in a sense you don’t take it literally,” the Greek filmmaker told Entertainment Weekly.

Most of Bugonia follows troubled conspiracy theorist Teddy Gatz (Jesse Plemons) who, with the not entirely-willing help of his cousin Don (Aidan Delbis) kidnaps pharma CEO Michelle Fuller (Emma Stone). The duo have captured Fuller because they’re convinced that she is an Andromedan, an alien come to Earth to ultimately destroy humanity, and Teddy is willing to torture her into a confession.

Of course, throughout the film, we assume that Teddy must be nuts. He clearly spends too much time on the internet, and he’s undergone extreme emotional damage from the ordeal of his meth-addicted mother, an ordeal made worse by faulty drugs administered by Fuller’s company. Whenever Michelle admits that she is an Andromedan, we viewers just assume that she’s manipulating Teddy to find a way out.

But in the final moments of the film, after Don and Teddy have both met bloody ends, we see Michelle go back to her ship and tell her fellow Andromedans that their experiments have failed. From her ship, she immediately kills all the humans on Earth, and the film closes with a long montage of animals and plants alongside the corpses of people, all set to the folk song “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?”

So shocking is the ending that not even Lanthimos’s stars know what to make of it. In their conversation with EW, both Stone and Plemons admitted that they weren’t 100% who was at fault for the explosion that kills Teddy in the final moments, just when it seemed that Michelle was going to beam him into her ship.

“Yeah, I mean, I always assumed it was Teddy, really,” Stone explained. “There was a friction situation, and he got stuck, and that thing was a homemade [bomb].” But Plemons was drawn to the idea that Michelle killed Teddy, saying, “I like the [kill switch] beaming thing. That’s the one thing he didn’t think about.”

For his part, Lanthimos is just glad that people can see many different possibilities.

As extreme as the ending is, Lanthimos understands why people see hope in it. “It’s a film,” he reminded viewers; “and nature survives, and it kind of allows the hope of a second chance at everything restarting.” Thus, “some people see it this way instead of it all ended. So I think it says things about the viewer themselves, how they feel in the end. And I think sometimes it might change. If it sticks in their head, maybe they think about it [later] and go like, ‘Yeah, maybe it is hopeful. It’s not that bleak, actually.'”

In other words, the real confusing part of Bugonia is the viewer themselves, a group more surprising and complicated than anything Lanthimos could put on screen.

Bugonia is now playing in theaters worldwide.