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Posted in: Focus Features, Movies | Tagged: bugonia, Focus Features, Yorgos Lanthimos
Bugonia Director Shares His Thoughts on the Film's Suprise Ending
The director of the new Focus Features film Bugonia shares his thoughts on the film's ending, and if he thinks it's bleak.
Article Summary
- Bugonia’s twist ending reveals Emma Stone’s character is truly an alien, upending expectations and genre norms
- Director Yorgos Lanthimos weighs in on the film’s controversial finale, calling it both bleak and hopeful
- Viewers are split, interpret Bugonia’s conclusion as either a dark apocalypse or a chance for renewal on Earth
- The film blurs sci-fi, conspiracy thriller, and social satire, challenging audiences’ own perspectives and feelings
Yorgos Lanthimos's Bugonia starts as a unique kidnapping thriller and ends as something much stranger. Conceptually, the film's story follows Teddy, a conspiracy-obsessed beekeeper played by Jesse Plemons, who becomes convinced that powerful pharma CEO Michelle Fuller, played by Emma Stone, is actually an alien embedded on Earth. Together with his cousin Don, he abducts her and drags her to a basement bunker, hoping to force a confession and save the planet from what he sees as an Andromedan invasion.
Over the course of days, Teddy shaves Michelle's head, interrogates her, and spins elaborate theories about dying bees, corporate greed, and a human race on life support. Michelle resists, bargains, and eventually leans into his delusion. Though by the final act (spoilers ahead), she basically reveals that she really is an alien empress from Andromeda. And shortly after the reveal, Teddy straps a homemade bomb to his chest after she promises to teleport him to her ship. However, when he steps into a closet he believes is a portal, the device detonates and kills him. Michelle later returns to her alien council (via the same closet-portal), and together they decide that the human experiment has failed. In the final images, a wave silently wipes out humanity while other life, especially bees, thrives in the aftermath.
Credit: Atsushi Nishijima/Focus Features © 2025 All Rights Reserved. © Focus Features
Bugonia Director Discusses the Film's Conclusion
Unsurprisingly, the specific unraveling of the film's ending has split viewers, and on that topic, Lanthimos tells Entertainment Weekly, "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. It's a film, and nature survives, and it kind of allows the hope of a second chance at everything restarting. So 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.'"
Bugonia's cast carries that tightrope tone. Stone gives Michelle a mix of icy detachment and unnerving vulnerability. Plemons plays Teddy as both desperate and oddly sympathetic. Elsewhere, Aidan Delbis is Don, Teddy's manipulated cousin, while Alicia Silverstone appears as Teddy's mother. The film also marks another collaboration between Stone and Lanthimos after The Favourite, Poor Things, and Kinds of Kindness, and again leans into heightened, uncomfortable satire wrapped in genre clothing.
Whether you walk out feeling gutted or oddly soothed may say as much about your own outlook as it does about the film's vision of the future. But if you somehow ended up here without seeing the film, make sure to find out for yourself while Bugonia is in theaters courtesy of Focus Features.
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