The ending of Yorgos Lanthimos‘s latest provocation, Bugonia, doesn’t work, and the reason it doesn’t work tells us something about the cowardice that’s crept into contemporary filmmaking. For ninety minutes, we’ve been watching a meticulous, nasty little chamber piece about corporate sociopathy and male grievance—Emma Stone‘s pharmaceutical executive is all polished surfaces and reflexive charm, while Jesse Plemons gives us a man whose isolation has curdled into violence. It’s unpleasant and precise, and then Lanthimos throws it all away with a sci-fi finale that feels like it wandered in from another movie entirely.
The aliens look cheap—deliberately so, one suspects—after the care and attention lavished on every detail of the corporate world and the protagonist’s paranoid basement lair. This sudden dive into bargain-basement alien mythology feels like a joke at the audience’s expense. And maybe that’s the point, but it’s a point that undermines everything the film has been building. We’re asked to believe that Stone’s character really was an extraterrestrial, that Plemons’s conspiracy theorist got it all exactly right despite being portrayed throughout as a pathetic figure spiraling into violence after being failed by every system meant to protect him.
The problem isn’t that the twist is unearned—though it is—but that it lets everyone off the hook. Stone’s character spends the film as a recognizable type: the educated, liberal CEO who mouths platitudes about diversity while running a company that poisons people for profit. She’s given just enough intelligence and wounded dignity to make us forget that she represents everything rotting in American capitalism. The film seems to understand this. We watch her calculate, dissemble, and deploy her considerable cognitive resources toward the singular goal of survival. When she discovers Plemons’s kill room, her terror feels utterly human. When she hesitates while spinning out an elaborate mythology about her alien origins, we’re watching someone buying time, not reciting her people’s history.
But then the film asks us to accept that this was all real, that her improvisations about calculator-phones and closet-teleporters were genuine alien technology, that her carefully rehearsed corporate training somehow prepared her for this specific crisis. It’s preposterous. What we’re actually watching is a clever woman talking a delusional man into a closet where she can trap him. She’s seen his renderings, read his notes during her captivity—she knows exactly what story he needs to hear. That she’s pulling from a Biblical flood narrative twisted with evolutionary theory only makes sense; she’s an executive who sat through diversity training memorizing lines. Creating a mythology on the fly is well within her skill set.
The head collision during the explosion is where the film actually ends—everything after plays out in the dying consciousness of one or both characters. Suddenly security protocols vanish, the building that required badges and guards becomes freely accessible, and Stone runs through empty spaces that should be swarming with police. It’s dream logic, and anyone who’s seen how Lanthimos handles the protagonist’s memories—his mother floating in mid-air, those absurdly oversized needles—knows the film is perfectly capable of distinguishing between its realistic present and its surreal interludes. The alien sequence is another surreal interlude, only this time Lanthimos wants to pretend it’s real.
Why? Because making it real allows him to avoid the movie he’s actually made—a movie about how conspiracy thinking and corporate malfeasance feed off each other, how an unjust system produces both the Plemonseses and the Stones of the world, and how neither can see past their own bubble long enough to achieve genuine communication. The tragedy of the film is that Plemons is right about the pharmaceutical company destroying his mother and wrong about the aliens, while Stone is right that he’s delusional and wrong that her company isn’t monstrously culpable. They’re both partially correct and both unreachable, and that’s a harder ending to sit with than “surprise, aliens are real and humanity is doomed.”
Lanthimos and his screenwriter want credit for their audacity while ducking responsibility for their implications. By insisting the ending is literal, they get to make a big, absurdist statement about environmental collapse and human failure without doing the difficult work of showing how we actually fail each other. The bee imagery throughout the film points toward something more interesting—the contrast between collective purpose and human alienation, between the hive’s efficiency and our fractured, individualistic misery. But rather than follow that through, we get a cosmic council condemning humanity in what amounts to a shrug. It’s easier to blow everything up and call it a day than to sit with the specific, mundane ways we’ve poisoned ourselves.
The great trick of the film—accidental or not—is that it works better if you don’t believe what you’re being told. Take the ending as Michelle’s trauma-induced fantasy, and you have a movie with something to say about power, delusion, and the impossibility of bridging our separate realities. Take it literally, and you have an elaborate shaggy-dog story that mistakes audacity for insight. Lanthimos has made that mistake before, but never quite so flagrantly.
