Yorgos Lanthimos and Emma Stone‘s latest collaboration, Bugonia, has finally arrived, and its ending is certainly going to have everyone talking. A remake of the South Korean film Save the Green Planet!, Bugonia stars Emma Stone as Michelle, a CEO at a pharmaceutical company who finds herself kidnapped by Teddy (Jesse Plemons) and his cousin Don (Aidan Delbis). These two bee farmers are convinced that Michelle is, in fact, an alien and is responsible for ruining humanity.
Bugonia is a movie that plays with the audience’s notions of what is and isn’t true. Centering the film on a conspiracy theorist leaves the audience wondering how much can and cannot be believed. Is Emma Stone’s Michelle actually an alien, or a human woman who is the victim of a man who has fallen into an echo chamber of misinformation? Are Teddy’s actions the ramblings of a madman, or has he cracked a secret code no one else can see, or are those two ideas mutually exclusive? Here is Bugonia’s controversial ending, explained.
Spoiler Alert: Spoilers ahead for Yorgos Lanthimos’ Bugonia
Is Michelle an Alien in ‘Bugonia’?
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For much of Bugonia’s runtime, the audience is meant to laugh at Teddy’s thought process while being equally appalled at his behavior. He has all the makings of a paranoid conspiracy theorist. He gets his information from a fringe podcast; he distrusts traditional news media (he makes a point to say “I don’t get my news from the news”). He makes wild accusations with no basis in proof, and even the act of kidnapping a woman because he “believes.” Any information that Michelle gives that proves she is human, Teddy rejects, so there is no winning for her in this situation. The only moment Teddy changes his view of her is when he goes from thinking she is a worker drone to believing she belongs to the alien species’ royal bloodline after subjecting her to torture and seeing her endure a higher level of electrical wattage.
Teddy’s paranoia seems to be a coping mechanism, and his attack on Michelle is personal as he blames her for making his mother sick. Not only does Teddy work in Michelle’s company’s warehouse, but his mother, Sandy (Alicia Silverstone), was one of the patients in a clinical trial run by Michelle’s pharmaceutical company. The trial failed and resulted in Sandy falling into a coma. Teddy says the Andromedans — the alien species he has accused Michelle of being — are running human trials. Teddy is also implied to have been abused as a child by his babysitter, now a cop, played by Stavros Halkias, contributing to his anger and frustration with the world, as he has been made to feel powerless.
Teddy has felt powerless his entire life and harbors a tangible disdain for billionaires who seem to lack empathy, sacrificing others for profit. That certainly feels timely. Teddy channels all his anger and frustration into a single person, pointedly, a woman CEO whom he can blame for ruining the world. Teddy evokes concerns about the male loneliness epidemic and incel culture, even to the extent that he and his cousin Don chemically castrate themselves to be immune to Michelle’s “powers.”
While Michelle denies being an alien, as Teddy holds her captive, grows more violent, and makes wilder accusations, she begins to play along to survive. She admits to being an alien, though Teddy doesn’t believe her first attempt, saying she doesn’t sound convincing and isn’t admitting it in the Andromedan. As the film goes on, Michelle commits to the bit to ensure her own survival, telling Teddy what he wants to hear. She tells him that the anti-freeze in her car is, in fact, a cure for Teddy’s mother’s disease. While Teddy is out, she manages to break free of her chains and discovers a secret hidden room where Teddy has seemingly kidnapped, tortured, and killed many other individuals whom he suspected of being aliens.
Teddy goes to his mother’s hospital room and gives her the “cure,” only for it to actually be anti-freeze. Teddy has killed his mother, and he flees the hospital with the intention of killing Michelle. Yet Michelle is now standing firm, demanding to know how many of the people Teddy killed were Andromedan, to which Teddy reveals two. Michelle then details an elaborate backstory of the Andromedan species and technology, one that, on the surface, draws on a wide variety of other sci-fi sources, such as 2001: A Space Odyssey and Star Trek, which leaves the audience doubting whether this is actually true Andromedan accounts or all made up by Michelle on the fly. Is Michelle actually an alien or just convincingly playing the part to trick Teddy, who is easily manipulated when told what he wants to hear?
The Truth Is Revealed in ‘Bugonia’
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The next scene shows Teddy and Michelle going to her office, where she tells him they will “beam up” to the ship. At this point, it all seems like an elaborate hoax on Michelle’s part, made more absurd by the fact that her code communicator is a calculator (she says she had to disguise it to make it look human), entering in a 50-digit code that seems like stalling for time. The transporter is located in her office closet. When Teddy enters the closet and Michelle begins her “countdown,” the homemade explosive he brought detonates, killing him instantly and knocking Michelle unconscious with his severed head.
Michelle is put into an ambulance, but when the paramedics reveal Teddy is dead, Michelle gets up and jumps out of the vehicle, returning to the office, picking up her calculator, and walking into her closet before she is transported to her ship. Michelle is indeed revealed to be an alien, proving that Teddy’s conspiracy theories — even his claim about hair-based communication — were right. He even correctly guessed the design and layout of their Andromedan ship.
Sitting in her throne room, the Andromedans ask Michelle if the Earth is worth saving. Despite a brief hesitation, Michelle orders humanity to be destroyed. Her royal court leaves, and she walks over to the table containing a bubble over a flat-Earth surface. Michelle pops it, killing every human instantly.
The final twist of Bugonia, revealing that Michelle is indeed an alien, carries with it a lot of implications for the rest of the movie, some good and some bad that might call back to some of the problematic messaging of Marvel Studios’ Secret Invasion (yet don’t be discouraged, Bugonia is leaps and bounds better). It does seem to imply that Teddy, for all his ramblings, was correct… but that didn’t make his actions any less heinous. The ending of Bugonia is one that audiences will undoubtedly be talking about for years to come. Bugonia is now in theaters.
Release Date
October 31, 2025
Runtime
118 minutes
Director
Yorgos Lanthimos
Writers
Will Tracy, Jang Joon-hwan
Producers
Ed Guiney, Andrew Lowe, Emma Stone, Lars Knudsen, Miky Lee, Ari Aster, Jerry Kyoungboum Ko
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