Bugonia was always going to be a strange little oddity. It is directed by Yorgos Lanthimos, after all, the guy who ended his most commercial film yet with a goat brain transplant. The premise is pretty weird too, pitting Jesse Plemons’ conspiracist beekeeper against a CEO who may or may not be an alien from the planet Andromedan.
Even the name is quite unusual, drawn from the Greek word “bougonia”, which refers to an ancient Mediterranean belief that bees spontaneously generate from the carcasses of dead animals.
What’s perhaps weirdest of all about Bugonia though is how much its ending will take you by surprise, even if you’re already familiar with the South Korean film that it’s based on.
Lanthimos’ remake ends in a very similar way to Jang Joon-hwan’s feature debut, Save the Green Planet!, yet much of the film misdirects you in that fashion. As a longtime fan of the original who even owned a Tartan Asia Extreme branded DVD (remember those?) I still spent most of Bugonia’s runtime expecting Lanthimos to take us down a different route. And in part, he does, although the ending hews far closer to the original than I expected.
Major spoilers for Bugonia below.
Bugonia ending explained: Who is Emma Stone’s Michelle Fuller?
Jang Joon-hwan first got the idea for Save the Green Planet! when he considered how Stephen King’s Misery might look from the perspective of Annie Wilkes. Throw in inspiration from a joke conspiracy site that claimed Leonardo DiCaprio is an alien and you’ve got yourself the building blocks for both his original film and the remake that’s followed.
The difference in Bugonia is that the CEO (who may or may not be an alien) is played by a woman this time around. Michelle Fuller (Emma Stone) is captured early on by Teddy who’s convinced that aliens live on Earth, and his cousin Don (Aidan Delbis), who blindly follows everything Teddy demands of him, including chemical castration to purge any distracting thoughts. Poor guy.
After they shave Fuller’s hair, convinced that she can use it to contact her Andromedan clan, things inevitably go from bad to worse. Fuller has just three days to escape before the lunar eclipse begins, which Teddy believes is when her alien mothership will come to Earth. His goal is to convince the Andromedans to help save humanity, using Fuller as a means to establish initial contact.
At first, Fuller denies being an alien, because obviously she isn’t one. Teddy’s evidence to the contrary isn’t exactly compelling, after all. Narrow feet, thin cuticles, and high hair density aren’t so much evidence of her alien nature than they are of Teddy’s apparent insanity.
Eventually, Fuller does what anyone threatened by torture would do, which is to go along with their captor and agree that yes, she is indeed an alien. Teddy doesn’t believe that this admission is genuine though, not until she endures electroshock torture that no normal human can withstand. According to Teddy, at least. That means Fuller isn’t just an alien, no. She’s Andromedan royalty, a princess of the highest ranking.
From that point on, Teddy treats Fuller with more respect, aside from the occasional outbursts and threats to her life. But everything goes to shit when a surprise visit from law enforcement derails the plan, and Don kills himself in front of their captive. What’s worse is that when Fuller tricks Teddy into visiting his mother — a coma patient made sick by her company’s trials — and killing her with what he believes to be a cure.
Using the opportunity to free herself, Fuller discovers that Teddy is even more unhinged than we all thought when she stumbles across a hidden room full of dismembered corpses, people he’d previously tortured believing them to also be aliens. If the narrow shoe fits…
Upon Teddy’s return, Fuller doesn’t back down. Instead, she seems like a woman possessed, outraged by the atrocities she’s witnessed. It’s not the loss of human life that concerns her though. At least, not if her new claims are to be believed.
Doubling down on her assertions that she is in fact an alien, Fuller admonishes Teddy for his misdeeds, speaking of the Andromedan race with newfound gravitas. According to her, she and the rest of her kind are responsible for the existence of humans in the first place, and everything she’s done on Earth is in service to a grander experiment.
Promising Teddy a cure to his mother’s apparent death, Fuller guides him to her office at work where she claims a teleporter can beam them both up to the mothership and undo everything that’s transpired.
While it still seems that Fuller might be leading Teddy on, the way her voice changed earlier as she spoke of humanity’s hidden history hints that there might be something otherworldly going on, after all. Yet when they arrive at her office, talk of a special teleportation code unlocked by a calculator sure does sound like baloney, a desperate plea to stall Teddy while her colleagues call the authorities.
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Eventually, Fuller convinces him to go first into the side room where her teleportation device is supposedly kept. This is the point where the authorities will obviously burst in and rescue Fuller, bringing Teddy into custody. Except, what happens next is far more explosive than that.
No, literally. Before you know it, the room suddenly explodes for real, sending Teddy’s now severed head flying through the air where it hits Fuller and knocks her out. Excuse me? It turns out that the bomb he was wearing was too sensitive and went off suddenly. Fuller only survived because she’d already tricked him into putting some distance between them without realising what was going to happen.
Emergency services rock up pretty sharpish after that and take Fuller en route to the nearest hospital where she can receive treatment for her injuries and the torment she’s endured. All’s well that ends well…
But then Fuller does what might be the strangest thing in a film that’s already pretty f***ing weird.
Instead of completing the journey to hospital, Fuller instead breaks out of the ambulance and walks all the way back to her office, limping as she avoids police who have now arrived on the scene.
Upon arriving, Fuller enters the same room where Teddy exploded just a few scenes earlier. And then she reappears suddenly in what can only be described as a pool of goop. Emerging from the slime, we see Fuller in a new environment unlike anything seen on Earth.
Reader, I gasped. And not just at the freaky alien fashion worn by the other Andromedans who now stand beside Fuller.
Yep, it turns out Teddy was right all along. Every crazed conspiracy claim he made was true, including Fuller’s startling alien secret.
Enraged by everything that’s happened, the Andromedans decide to give up on the experiment that is humanity, killing every single person on Earth in one fell swoop. A series of horrific yet also comic one-off scenes show the billions of corpses left behind in the wake of all this.
I for one welcome the apocalypse, but here, Lanthimos depicts it as a cruel, inevitably tragic end point for humanity (albeit one that’s also absurd on just about every level).
Just to be clear, this is essentially how Save The Green Planet! ends too. In both films, the CEO is revealed to be an alien for real, even if our unhinged protagonists remain rather deluded in some respects.
Clearly then, I should have seen this all coming after watching the original. But Lanthimos isn’t exactly known for following the straight and narrow, so there was every chance that he might mislead audiences twenty years on.
Plus, we shouldn’t overlook the impact that gender-swapping CEO has on our reading of the story. While it’s all too easy to assume the worst of a male middle-aged CEO, putting a woman in that same position of torture and captivity can subconsciously change our feelings toward the character (especially when played by a Hollywood star as recognisable as Emma Stone).
So whether you’ve seen the original or not, and whether you did successfully guess this twist, the way it all plays out will still shock you regardless. But don’t let on how shocked you are to anyone else. Especially if your feet are narrow or your cuticles are thin. You never know when there might be another Teddy keeping watch nearby.
Bugonia is out now in cinemas. UK fans can watch it at Cineworld, Odeon and Vue. US readers can get tickets from AMC Theatres, Fandango and Atom Tickets.
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