Yorgos Lanthimos’ 2025, the science fiction black comedy, Bugonia, makes for a totally bewildering watch because of how it plays with our perception and pulls what can be seen as a nasty joke on the viewers at the very end. Adapted from the 2003 South Korean film, “Save the Green Planet!”, the plot here follows two individuals from the very extremes of society—Teddy, a conspiracy theorist who has a detailed explanation about how alien forces have been living among humans and controlling us; and Michelle, the cold and profit-minded CEO of a big-pharma company who hides her disdain for her employees and test subjects behind her corporate speak. Ultimately, it is the bizarre ending of Bugonia and its implications that make the film special and unforgettable, as it is definitely one of the films to watch this year.
Spoiler Alert
What is the film about?
Bugonia begins at a remote location somewhere in the American state of Georgia, where Teddy Gatz lives with his cousin, Don, and runs an apiary. While Teddy still goes out to work at a warehouse in the closest town, Don’s interactions with humans are limited to the rare times the cousins go into town to buy supplies. Therefore, the younger man has a close relationship with Teddy, which soon becomes integral to the plot, as the latter wants Don to help him execute a plan he has been drawing up for a long time. Because of his vast experience with bees at the apiary, Teddy is concerned about the rise in CCD, or colony collapse disorder, a rare phenomenon in which the male bees abandon their queen and the entire colony falls apart, killing all the insects.
He is also quite confident that this destruction of Earth’s honeybees, which will soon create significant problems for humans, is being methodically carried out by evil corporations in order to take control of society. What Teddy believes even more concretely is that these corporations are actually being run by aliens, who have been living among humans and impersonating us for many years now. Having cut himself off from regular news and information sources, as they only preach the fake narrative about the Earth and humans that are considered ‘normal’ by most brainwashed citizens, Teddy instead does his research on the internet, through YouTube videos and conspiracy theory websites. It is based on this crucial research of his that he feels the need to act against the aliens who are trying to kill all humans, and he decides to do so fast, before the upcoming lunar eclipse.
Elsewhere, Michelle Fuller, the CEO of a pharmaceutical megacorporation named Auxolith, goes through a routine day of bossing people around at the office and trying to cover up allegations of toxic work culture at her business. She has no idea that Teddy and Don have targeted her, as they believe that she is an alien being only pretending to be a human CEO. Soon, Teddy and Don go through a number of preparatory steps, like clearing their heads of all psychic compulsions and even chemically castrating themselves, before sneaking into Michelle’s property and abducting her. Shaving off her head so that the alien mothership cannot track her through her long locks of hair and rubbing antihistamine cream all over her body to weaken her neurotransmissions, Teddy starts negotiating with Michelle so that he can bravely save Earth from the alien invaders.
Why does Donny kill himself?
The first major shock in Bugonia comes when Donny commits suicide by shooting himself in the face, right in front of Michelle, and directly because of her words. By this time, Michelle had tried everything possible to protect herself in the hostage situation, first defying her kidnappers’ orders and then trying to ‘help’ them out monetarily, before then playing along with Teddy’s story and claiming herself to be an alien. Her fortunes had turned when Teddy’s rudimentary electroshock machine had burnt out sooner than she had succumbed to the pain, and therefore he started giving her a lot of respect, now believing her to be hailing from the royal family of the aliens. Although things do get better for Michelle, she is attacked by Teddy once again while discussing his mother’s case, and so when she finds herself in a situation alone with Donny, she tries her luck at wriggling her way out of the crisis.
Donny is clearly the most unfortunate character in the film, by my understanding, for he never has any control over or clarity about everything that goes on around him. From the very beginning, he is following Teddy’s orders and having to abide by the rules set by him, despite clearly having questions and doubts. Being autistic, he is easy to dominate, and therefore Teddy keeps feeding him all the nonsense about the aliens controlling humans through our minds and by giving us certain thoughts. Eating junk food, pleasuring oneself, or doing any of the insignificant and casual things we do mostly without a second thought are all apparently part of this mind-control mechanism. Donny definitely has many doubts over these claims, as is evident from his face, but he does not want to express himself and instead chooses to support his cousin.
In fact, it is Donny’s good-hearted desire to help and emotionally support his cousin that lands him in all this trouble, as he actively chooses to be by his side despite knowing that their actions are completely wrong. Unlike Teddy, Donny has a moral compass, and he is the one pulling his cousin back from committing even more mistakes on multiple occasions. He is always careful to not let Teddy hurt Michelle too much. However, he is also indoctrinated, along with being on the spectrum, which means that Donny also has certain beliefs and perspectives, making him more vulnerable to suicidal thoughts. He had perhaps had such thoughts for a long time, and when Michelle tells him about how she will help him escape Earth and take him with her, Donny is convinced that the end is near. It is also possible that he fears that the police officer with Teddy is going to discover their crime, and his fear leads him to take his own life.
Should we feel bad about Casey Boyd’s death?
Something that remains consistent throughout Bugonia is the director’s intention to keep us feeling confused about what our reaction to certain incidents should be, and the death of Casey Boyd is one such matter. On the one hand, Boyd is introduced as a clueless police officer who only wants to look out for the citizens living in the area, especially Teddy, as he has known the family for a long time. Boyd once used to babysit young Teddy, and so he knows how his mother’s ailment had wrecked the man’s life. Therefore, he keeps checking in with Teddy from time to time, and then his professional duties also make him come to the house in order to question the residents regarding the disappearance of Michelle. Even at this time, Boyd seems to be an innocent and helpless character who is bound to die only because of his closeness to Teddy.
But just like with almost all the other characters, the film throws a curveball at us, making us question our previous perspective immediately and making us feel all the more confused as to how we are to react and feel about the situation. Turns out, when Casey Boyd was a babysitter to Teddy, he used to inappropriately touch the boy, which has definitely played a part in making Teddy the kind of man he is at present. Boyd later realized his mistake and apologized to Teddy as well, but it is very evident that he himself has not been able to get over the guilt of his appalling behavior. By extension, he is unable to let Teddy get over the incident either, as he keeps mentioning the matter from time to time, only to apologize to Teddy, but nonetheless, reminding him of it.
To many victims of abuse, it is better to be able to stay away from their abuser, especially when words and confrontation have been unable to make them accept and move on with their lives. But in the case of Teddy, who had been wronged as a child, there is no getting away from his abuser, as the man has become a police officer and keeps visiting him frequently. Even though Boyd’s intentions at present are not wrong, his presence is possibly triggering and instigating to Teddy all the time. Therefore, when the loud bang of Donny firing the gun is heard, and it instantly alerts the cop to the presence of someone else at the house, Teddy kills Boyd, seemingly with a very personal intent. We are left wondering whether to feel bad about it, since Boyd was seemingly a changed man at present, but then again, his horrid acts from the past had genuinely stunted his victim’s life.
Does Teddy really believe his claims?
To begin with, Teddy has a very personal reason to act out against Michelle, as her big-pharma company, Auxolith, had been responsible for his mother’s ailment. When the authorities at Auxolith had decided to put Teddy’s mother, Sandy Gatz, in an experimental opioid withdrawal therapy, they had convinced the family that it would only do good. However, quite the opposite happened, with Sandy being reduced to a vegetative state, surviving on life support, and for this, Teddy still holds Auxolith and Michelle responsible, quite rightly so. Next is the fact that Teddy is a loner in society who has self-admittedly gone through all political ideologies, on the left, right, and center, clearly in search of some meaning to life. His extreme confusion about the world and the class divide in society has made him always search for answers, and since the practitioners of every ideology seek only to serve their ulterior motives through their followers, Teddy has only found disillusionment throughout his life.
Lanthimos maintains an air of dark humor throughout the film, with both the central characters, belonging to two very different sides of society, being poked fun at quite frequently. Teddy is truly introduced as a tinfoil-hat-wearing conspiracy theorist who is silly enough to believe that aliens have been pulling the strings on Earth since the very beginning, before his character transitions into an extremely violent man driven by utterly nonsensical beliefs in the first few minutes of the film. By the end of the film, we actually learn that he is a psychopathic serial killer as well, who has been abducting people for a very long time, only to run his deranged experiments on them and murder them in the process. Despite the shocking twist in the end, which can be perceived as the film shifting support towards Teddy and wanting us to feel for him, I personally feel that Teddy continues to be the butt of the joke even in the end.
Although the twist suggests that Teddy had been right all along, there are plenty of reasons to believe that Teddy had not actually understood the crisis of the times. He becomes symbolic of the thousands, if not millions, of humans on Earth at the moment who constantly search for external factors to blame instead of accepting our own shortcomings with regard to the climate crisis. While he is correct in believing that the death of the bees, which in itself is symbolic of climate change in the current global scenario, is related to the malpractices of corporations, Teddy’s brainwashed and manipulated mind also cannot accept the fact that we humans, and not some foreign species, might be responsible for it. Therefore, I see a chance to question whether Teddy really believes all his claims, at least to the fullest extent, or whether he too is bluffing, especially when he blows up his suicide vest in the end.
Teddy might have pushed the button to end his life and blow up everything around him in a ‘heroic’ (as he would like to believe) attempt to blow up the alien mothership, which means that he did believe that Michelle is an alien and that she was going to teleport him to the mothership. Blowing up the spacecraft would save humans from the aliens once and for all, and so Teddy might have been motivated to sacrifice his life to that end. Otherwise, it can also be seen as a sign of his cowardice, of him realizing that he has reached the absolute bottom, and so he chooses to end his life instead of being arrested by the police. This second case would imply that Teddy had actually never believed in his claims and had only used denial to lash out against people he hated. A third, much less symbolic, possibility is that Michelle actually puts in the wrong code to ensure that Teddy will be killed inside the closet that is really a teleportation portal.
Is Michelle really an alien?
Bugonia’s ending confirm that Michelle is really an alien and, in fact, that she is the emperor of the Andromedans, an alien race that had created humans and put us on planet Earth. It is revealed that the Andromedans were the ones behind the creation of all life on Earth, and when their experimentations with the dinosaurs failed, killing all dinosaurs in the process, they wanted to try something new and more ambitious, which is when they created humans. Teddy had been right about the aliens being able to track one another through transmitters in the hair, and since he had shaved Michelle’s head, her people (or aliens) could not find her. It is seemingly for this very reason, in order to take revenge for the two aliens that Teddy had supposedly murdered, that she had stayed back to teach the man a lesson.
But beyond the visual level, this revelation can also definitely be interpreted symbolically, with the distance, literal alienation, between the two classes that Teddy and Michelle belong to being at the very center. The difference between the lifestyles, perceptions, and social receptions is so vast between the two classes that the rich can really just fly off to a spaceship or some other planet while the deprived have to die. The film very carefully chooses not to take a side, but the flaws on both sides are made equally apparent. Michelle technically causes the death of Teddy, and she can casually fly away from the planet without facing any consequences as such. Michelle being an alien is also definitely symbolic of big pharma, which possibly controls much more of our health and well-being than we are made aware of. Michelle ruling over the universe and trying to decide the fate of humans on Earth is obviously representative of corporations running such pharmaceutical companies, contemplating what actions to take with respect to human lives in order to earn more profits.
What does the last scene mean?
Bugonia’s ending has Michelle, now in her alien-empress form, deciding that the humans have been a failed experiment, and killing all humans on Earth by literally popping a bubble over a flat-Earth model in the alien mothership. Firstly, the manner of this mass extinction is probably suggestive of how very fragile human life is at the moment, especially with regard to the climate crisis, which is gradually becoming very evident. Interestingly, there is very little blood seen on or around the countless dead bodies that are shown one after another. Aside from the blood from medical surgeries or of fish and other meat products, the only blood that can be seen is of a sailor who had hit his head on the glass of his cabin while dying. Numerous other humans seen lying dead must have suffered similar falls, but the whole sequence is mostly a literally bloodless affair. This is most likely a reference to the very word, ‘bugonia,’ that has been chosen as the title of the film. An ancient Greek word, ‘bugonia’ refers to the myth, which had led to a ritual, about the bloodless sacrifice of an ox causing the instant generation, or birth, of honeybees from its dead carcass. The bees are possibly symbolic of anything natural and helpful for humans in this myth as well, on the whole suggesting that the bloodless sacrifice of an ox can be of great benefit to human life. What Michelle does in the end is basically reset life on Earth, but interestingly, it is only the humans that are killed, or erased. All other life forms are seen thriving, with the film ending with a shot of the bees back and buzzing around the flowers at Teddy’s apiary.
Yorgos Lanthimos has mentioned in interviews how he sees the ending of Bugonia as hopeful and optimistic, which can be seen to be true from one perspective, not for humans, but for all other life forms. Human beings are a torturous and self-destructive species that dominates over every other life form, and it is perhaps best for the planet if all of us were to simply drop dead one fine day.
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