Bugonia Ending Explained

This article contains major Bugonia spoilers. Our spoiler-free review is here.

You know what they say about broken clocks? Turns out it applies to delusional conspiracy theorists too.

Despite anyone who has ever interacted with a fringe internet personality feeling it in their bones when Emma Stone’s Michelle Fuller whispers “Jesus Christ” to herself upon learning she’s been kidnapped by a UFOlogist nutter… said nutter wasn’t just whistling John Williams. In a twist that perhaps did not seem entirely inconceivable if you’re familiar with The Twilight Zone formula, Michelle Fuller is indeed an alien. She is an Andromedan to be precise, an ancient species that we are led to presume really has been watching humanity since the dawn of time. We are their science project, which they began developing after going back to the drawing board following the dinosaur disappointment.

In a conception of human history that would appeal to anyone who watched the History Channel’s Ancient Aliens and bought into the hogwash—or at least enjoyed the opening prologue of Ridley Scott’s Prometheus—the entire expanse of human history is one big experiment led by Andromedans, who walk among us like Stone’s Michelle. Furthermore, much of what Jesse Plemons’ Teddy perceived to be telltale signs of their methodology turned out to be accurate. Long luxuriant red hair is how Michelle communicates with her mothership, and her pharmaceutical company really did poison people like Teddy’s mother (Alicia Silverstone) as a way of keeping us docile.

Perhaps it was also implemented as some final morality test to see whether we are worth saving. But in the biggest twist of the movie, it turns out Teddy’s one mistake is not realizing that Michelle herself is the actual Andromedan empress, as opposed to merely another servant or herald for the intergalactic empire. And her haphazard wardrobe-teleporter really is controlled by a retro, 2000s-era calculator, sending her back among the stars.

From her mothership, the empress passes final judgment on Earth. Whether out of disgust for how Teddy treated her and others of her retinue, whom she found dissected in his basement, or simply aggrieved that humans have achieved the ability to see through her machinations and manipulations, she reaches an irreversible conclusion about the human race. A switch is flipped, and the world stops with humanity dying in the throes of everyday living, whether that’s mowing the lawn, eating breakfast, or having sex. It. All. Just. Ends.

But What Does It Mean?

The above summarizes the utter lunacy of Bugonia’s concluding narrative, however the reason it lingers in the mind is because it exists as more than just a “gotcha” twist. While the reversal where the “crazy man” turns out to be right is a familiar conceit in genre storytelling—it is in fact the same rough ending of the South Korean film on which Bugonia is based, Save the Green Planet!—the eerie beauty and tranquility of a world filled with dead humans, but living animals, invites the audience to interrogate everything which came beforehand.

On a base level, there is the bleakest of bitter class ironies to take from this conclusion. While audience sympathy is likely to immediately transfer to Michelle at the beginning of the movie when she awakens in a dingy basement with two seeming lunatics keeping her prisoner and calling her an alien, the more we learn about Teddy’s tragic backstory, the more audience allegiances are likely to waver, if not outright transfer.

As we eventually learn, Michelle Fuller was not only targeted because she was a nearby wealthy executive with a high hair density. She also was the leader of the company which used an experimental new gene therapy ostensibly to treat the virus killing Teddy’s beloved mother. Instead it trapped her in a chemically induced coma from which she would never awaken. In the aftermath, Michelle’s Auxolith conglomerate apparently gave Teddy enough money to pay some bills and to keep his mother’s home. Yet it was not even enough for the sad sack to be able to quit his dead-end job in Auxolith’s packing room.

It was blood money paid to make him go away and to hide corporate malfeasance and misdeeds behind publicity platitudes about “learning from our mistakes,” and probably a handful of legally binding NDAs.

After realizing that Teddy Gatz is the child that Michelle’s company left to a grim fate, Michelle plays initially contrite and sympathetic to his plight. But soon enough, she lets her true nature shine through when she gloats above him that he will always be unhappy because he is a loser, and Michelle is “a winner.” Through the zero-sum game of life that many vulture capitalists like Michelle view the world, you are either one or the other, and it is her responsibility to take as much as she can from the larger pool of losers like Teddy so as to ensure her success and definition of happiness. To couple that revelation with the realization that she is indeed an alien makes the class and anti-capitalistic subtext of the ending overwhelmingly potent… and nihilistic.

No matter how empathetic or rehearsed someone like Michelle is, she represents a bottomless appetite that our “greed is good” system rewards without punishment or shame. She can show genuine anguish for Teddy’s grief, or the loneliness displayed by his cousin Don (Aidan Delbis), but when Don’s resolve finally falters, a flicker in her eyes shows a predator’s satisfaction at domination. She basks in twisting the knife just enough to get Don to turn the gun on himself and pull the trigger, even as she cries what appear to be sincere tears for the life lost. She will take and take, until there is nothing left.

So it is with the whole world when this alien queen bee decides to flip a switch and turn us all off. The drones have outlived their usefulness, and like a ChatGPT user quitting their interface, she is ready to put the tools with limited intelligence away.

It’s a grim way of viewing the ending… but hardly the only option. After all, Bugonia is a movie made by Yorgos Lanthimos, the mischievous auteur who helmed the fairly hopeful, if sardonic, Poor Things, a movie from which its very title suggests we humans are silly, dim things. And a world without us, feels strangely euphoric in the final moments of Jerskin Fendrix’s score.

Another way to read Stone’s layered performance in the final seconds of the film, then, is one filled with regret and that still tangible empathy. She is no longer performing for men who might kill her. Left to her own thoughts and emotions, she seems to cry tears for the nine billion or so lives she just snuffed out. We are poor, wretched things, but as our death tableaux reveals, we have the capacity to be beautiful and silly, as well as murderous and awful.

In fact, those shots of the dead are what make the ending so ambiguous.

So… a Hopeful Ending?

It’s worth noting that the ending is actually one of the places where Bugonia differs most from its source material in Save the Green Planet! While that movie likewise concludes with the kidnapped CEO revealed to be an alien king who decides we have failed him, the implications are starker. A bright apocalyptic line shines on the faces of strangers throughout the world, and finally on a sad abandoned dog before the entire planet explodes. Nothing is left except a television floating through the cosmos playing old VHS tapes of Teddy’s Korean proxy. The home movies show him as a child with the parents who are long gone.

It is nihilistic in the extreme, albeit in a stylish, early 2000s way. Lanthimos’ film seems to have a similar nihilism, and yet notably the dogs do not die. The animals live. Only the humans are extinguished. That carries meaning to screenwriter Will Tracy, who made the change. And when we talked with him about the film, he opened up about his own perception of the ending.

“The aliens in that film kind of threw the baby out with the bathwater,” Tracy says of the original Korean picture. “In this film, they just kind of turn off all the humans. We just fall asleep like robots forever, and we’re just gone. And yet, we’re still there in the tableau at the end. We see a world without humans, but also you see those people in those moments of death, and they’re quiet and banal, and idiosyncratic and a little weird, a little bit funny, a little bit sad and warm. You see some of the bad things that people do and some of the good things that people do, and you basically get a panoply of the whole human experience there at the end. That’s to me the big difference between the endings. You see everything we’d be losing, good and bad, without us.”

Furthermore, the writer considers this a strangely hopeful ending, albeit not for the reasons I previously suggested wherein Lanthimos might be teasing the planet is better off without homo sapiens.

“A really bleak ending would be saying, ‘Well, it’s always going to be like that,’” Tracy contends. “But to me, it’s like this hasn’t happened, and it will not happen, so you don’t have to think of it like, ‘Well, that’s the fate that we’re doomed for.’ You can look at it as like, ‘If we don’t want that kind of ending for ourselves, then we have to start listening to each other. And we have to start making actually robust and sane civic institutions that look out for each other.’ We have to stop destroying ourselves. So that’s a constructive, hopeful way of looking at the ending.”

Ultimately the finale is designed to be open to interpretation, and to stir what Tracy sees as a conversation.

“We just discussed off the top of our heads like three or four different interpretations of the ending of the film, and I think they’re all valid, and there’s probably numerous other ones,” Tracy explains. “Yorgos and I want the film to be, again, not prescriptive, but you’d leave with it and you can have a conversation… I don’t want people walking away with any one interpretation of the theme, or to feel either too bummed out or too joyous or whatever. I just want people to leave and feel like, ‘Oh, we can get a drink afterwards, have dinner afterwards, and there’s actually a conversation to be had because the movie,’ because we’ve built in enough of that ambiguity, and hopefully the themes are robust enough and the emotional reality of the characters are robust enough, that it opens itself up to interpretation.”

Bugonia is playing in theaters now.