Bugonia ending explained: Was Emma Stone's Michelle an alien all along?

There’s a strong potential that Yorgos Lanthimos’s fourth project with Emma Stone might be their best yet – and with Bugonia now available to watch in cinemas, it feels like only a matter of time until the awards start rolling in.

Based on the 2003 Korean film Save the Green Planet!, Bugonia follows two conspiracy-theorist cousins who become convinced that a powerful pharmaceutical CEO is actually a member of an alien race known as Andromeans.

The ending of the film is a rollercoaster of absurd twists and turns, all of which culminate in an intense, and potentially hopeless, climax.

So, if you want a recap of those final moments – or you haven’t actually seen the film and you just want to find out if Michelle was an alien or not, which is equally as valid – read on for your full breakdown.

Bugonia ending explained: Was Emma Stone's Michelle an alien all along?

So, after kidnapping a CEO, shaving her head, slapping her, bathing her in body lotion and accusing her of being an alien, it’s fair to say that Michelle Fuller (Emma Stone) is pretty much over the whole ordeal.

After giving her some sort of disturbing electroshock therapy (in a scene that is particularly difficult to watch, might I add), kidnapper Teddy (Jesse Plemons) decides that not only is Michelle an Andromedan, she’s also an Andromedan empress. And, not wanting to disrespect the ruler of this extra-terrestrial race any more than he already has, allows her to wash, dress and eat a spaghetti dinner with him and his cousin Don (Aidan Delbis).

During the meal, though, it becomes apparent that Michelle and her company were directly involved of the physical decline of Teddy’s mother Sandy (Alicia Silverstone), resulting in her falling into a coma. The dinner party soon unravels into chaos, culminating in a fight between Teddy and Michelle, during which Michelle stabs Teddy with a fork.

The confrontation is interrupted when Casey (Stavros Halkias), the creepy local Sheriff, knocks on the door, looking for any evidence that could help find out what has happened to Michelle. Don takes Michelle back down to the basement, while Teddy and Casey chat. Michelle offers to help Don and protect him from prison if he lets her go free, but instead, Don shoots himself in the head and dies.

Hearing the gunshot, Teddy kills Casey and rages at Michelle. Michelle tells Teddy that the bottle of anti-freeze she keeps in her car is actually a specific Andromedan medicine that will wake up his mother, and in a panic, a frantic Teddy rushes to the hospital and injects his comatose parent with the liquid which, obviously, turns out to just be anti-freeze. Meanwhile, back at the house, Michelle discovers that this isn't Teddy's first rodeo – in the past, he has kidnapped and killed multiple other people he deemed to be Andromedan.

Responding to the anti-freeze, Sandy dies, and a now-furious Teddy rides his bike back to the house to, once again, confront Michelle.

Wanting to save herself, Michelle seemingly confesses to being an Andromedan, and launches into a lengthy monologue about how the Andromedans came to Earth and created humanity, but soon became dejected with how humanity progressed. Michelle claims her goal is now to help humanity overcome their violent nature.

Michelle then agrees to take Teddy to the Andromedan headquarters.

She instructs Teddy to drive her to her office, where she claims that her walk-in wardrobe is actually a transporter that will beam them up to the Andromedan homeland after she types a lengthy code into a calculator.

Teddy, revealing himself to be wearing a homemade bomb, gets in the closet and, moments later, when the bomb detonates, is blown to pieces.

Michelle is taken into an ambulance, and all seems OK. She's escaped the conspiracy theorists, survived the explosion, and she’s a human.

Right?

Wrong, because in one final twist, Michelle drags herself out of the ambulance, crawls back to her office and into her closet, where she then gets transported up into the Andromedan mother ship. That's right folks – Michelle was an alien all along.

We are then shown a rather surreal sequence of Michelle discussing the fate of humanity with her fellow Andromedan senate. They eventually conclude that, unsurprisingly, humanity is not worth saving.

Michelle pops a bubble, and we are then treated to a brilliantly haunting scene of every human being on earth, dead.

The film ends where it began, with bees returning to a now human-less earth.

What is the message of Bugonia?

There are likely several moral threads one could draw from Bugonia – the critique of big corporate power, the question of whether humanity is worth saving, the blurring of lines between good and bad.

Perhaps the most obvious, though, how easily humans can dehumanise each other – and how far we’re willing to go to prove ourselves right, even at the cost of our own morality.

There is, perhaps, a complexity to this message, though. For if Michelle was an alien all along, does this revelation actually justify Teddy’s cruelty and violence towards her? Or does it instead highlight the idea that even if what we do is “correct”, our actions can still be evil?

What if Michelle wasn’t an alien, and Teddy had just kidnapped a regular, human woman? Yes, perhaps her big-evil corporate actions would still be still wrong, she’d still have been complicit in the harm of Teddy’s mother – but would that mean she deserved what she got? While watching those final 10 minutes of the film, I couldn’t help but wonder if this alternative ending would have been somewhat more effective.

Whichever way you take it, Bugonia’s ending is likely one that we’ll all be picking apart for a very long time – and is certainly a film that demands a second viewing once you know how it's all going to end.

Bugonia is now available to watch in UK cinemas.

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