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Posted in: Focus Features, Movies | Tagged: bugonia, Focus Features, Yorgos Lanthimos
Bugonia Writer Offers His Take on the Film's Ending
The writer of the 2025 Focus Features film Bugonia shares his thoughts on the ending of the film and its open-ended potential.
Article Summary
- Bugonia reimagines Save the Green Planet as a sci-fi thriller blending conspiracy, climate dread, and dark comedy.
- Jesse Plemons and Emma Stone lead as conspiracists targeting a pharma CEO they believe is an alien invader.
- Writer Will Tracy discusses Bugonia’s ambiguous ending and its thought-provoking themes on humanity’s place.
- The finale’s open-ended nature invites viewers to reflect on humanity’s impact on the planet and each other.
Bugonia is the latest dark, offbeat entry from director Yorgos Lanthimos, a blackly comic sci-fi thriller about conspiracy, climate dread, and the messiness of being human. Co-written by Will Tracy, it reimagines the well-received 2003 South Korean cult film Save the Green Planet, swapping in a modern American setting where two cousins kidnap a pharma CEO they are sure is an alien plotting humanity's extinction.
More specifically, the new version follows Teddy (Jesse Plemons), a bee-obsessed warehouse worker and conspiracy theorist, and his cousin Don (Aidan Delbis) as they abduct Michelle Fuller (Emma Stone), the powerful head of Auxolith. What starts as a seemingly delusional crusade spirals into something stranger and more pointed as torture, corporate explorations, and apocalyptic stakes collide. Upon release, reviews have also been largely strong, with repeat praise for Stone and Plemons, Lanthimos's surreal style, and its uniquely eccentric tone.
Though another big part of that conversation is the ending, which wipes out humanity in a rush of imagery and still somehow feels strangely reflective rather than purely nihilistic.
Credit: Atsushi Nishijima/Focus Features © 2025 All Rights Reserved. © Focus Features
Bugonia Writer Discusses His Thoughts on the Film's Ending
Speaking to Screen Rant about what he perceives as the open-ended nature of the final sequence, Tracy said, "What we see in the last few minutes of this movie has not happened, and it allows us to look at a world without us in it while also getting to see a little panoply of the human experience and everything that makes us weird and interesting and funny and occasionally awful and occasionally wonderful. We realize what would be missing without us for good and for ill. And there's something constructive about that. It's asking, 'What do we want? How do we want to relate to each other? How do we want to relate to the planet that we live on?'"
Alongside Stone and Plemons, the cast includes Delbis as Don, Stavros Halkias as local cop Casey Boyd, and Alicia Silverstone as Teddy's mother, Sandy, whose past connection to Auxolith helps fuel the story's anger and heartbreak. If you missed it on the big screen, it is now available to rent or buy digitally, and it recently arrived on Peacock for subscribers.
For those who have already seen the film, what is your opinion on the ending of Bugonia?
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