- There's a huge twist at the ending of Emma Stone's new movie Bugonia, and it needs to be discussed.
- After being kidnapped and trapped in a basement for most of the film, things finally come to a head between Jesse Plemons' Teddy and Emma Stone's Michelle.
- Read on to learn what happens in the final moments, and whether Teddy was right about all along.
In Bugonia, the latest from Yorgos Lanthimos, Emma Stone is a Forbes list big pharma girlboss and Jesse Plemons is a beekeeping conspiracy theorist, low on the totem of her employ. Plemons’ Teddy Gatz recruits his too-soft-for-the-world cousin Donny to kidnap Stone’s Michelle Fuller, who he believes to be an alien from the Andromedan species, covertly controlling humanity and killing the bees.
The pair prepare their minds and bodies (chemical castration and all) and abduct her, shaving her head to prevent communications with her intergalactic peers. They lock her in a basement and insist she arrange a meeting with her Andromedans before a lunar eclipse enables invasion of earth.
At this point, it’s clear to everyone in the room (us and Emma Stone’s Oscar winning scalp) that Teddy is in the throes of mental illness. Flashbacks reveal that Auxolith—Michelle’s pharmaceutical company—recruited Teddy’s mother as a test subject for one of their drugs, which left her in a coma.
Don’t stop reading: this movie isn’t really about revenge and exploitation. That’d be far too predictable. Bugonia will prove to be one of the most surprising movies of the year, and so that leaves us no other choice but to ask, “what was that ending?”
Let's break into it.
Held captive in Teddy’s basement, Michelle tries everything from psychological manipulation to boardroom-level reason to desperate appeasement. Teddy’s erratic interrogation and the bizarre logic of the kidnapping holds and he moves onto the next phase of the plan.
Teddy tortures Michelle with electric shock and is left stunned by her capacity for pain – the level of electricity he was stunning into her skull should’ve killed her, but it didn’t. He discerns that Michelle is not just any alien but part of the Andromedan royal line.
In an attempt at royal etiquette, he stages a dinner upstairs for the three of them, in the hopes of beginning negotiations for the Andromedans retreat from earth. Michelle breaks free, the two violently fight, Donny knocks Michelle out with the butt of a rifle, and a cop (curiously played by comedian Stavros Halkias) drops in unannounced.
A shaky and fearful Donny brings Michelle back to the basement, while Teddy humors the cop. Donny’s resolve is not quite as steadfast as Teddy’s, and through some C-suite negotiation, Michelle nearly cracks him. Suddenly, Donny turns the rifle on himself and shoots. Hearing the shot ring out, Teddy panics and beats the cop to death with a shovel.
Teddy and Michelle are once again at odds; and to save herself some time, she convinces Teddy that the cure for his mother’s condition is inside a bottle of antifreeze in her trunk. He believes her and races to his mother’s hospital, injecting her with antifreeze, which (obviously) kills her.
Meanwhile, Michelle is looking for a way to escape and instead finds a hidden space full of dismembered bodies and evidence of previous alien investigations that have taken place in this basement. Heads in jars and whatnot.
Teddy returns to find Michelle still in the basement, but there’s been a power shift. She assumes the role of Andromedan royalty and explains how her kind has been around since the dinosaur days, and that humans are the world destroyers in the room. At this point, we’re all wondering if this is real or part of her larger plan to escape her abductor.
Michelle convinces Teddy she’ll arrange his meeting with the Andromedans at Auxolith HQ. In the shadow of a multi-day national manhunt, Michelle arrives back at the office with this terrifying man and heads straight to her office. Teddy shows up with a suicide vest, desperation and conviction entwined.
About those final moments...
Using an office closet as a fake “teleporter,” Michelle tricks Teddy into entering it. The vest detonates, Teddy dies, Michelle is knocked unconscious. She wakes up in an ambulance during the lunar eclipse, escapes, and returns to the closet—this time the teleporter actually works.
As it turns out, Teddy was right and Michelle was in fact an extraterrestrial plant all along. She beams aboard the mothership and reveals her true identity: the Andromedan empress.
On the mothership, she studies a model of Earth, determines the human experiment has failed, “pops” the protective bubble around the planet model, and wipes out humanity in an instant. The final images are of unconscious humans all over the world, as if the plug on humanity was pulled in an instant. Michelle looks down at a silent, human-less (dare we say, hopeful?) Earth while Teddy’s bees return to their work.
