Brian Gallagher has spent the past two decades writing about movies and TV for MovieWeb, IGN and Daily Mail, covering Star Wars, Marvel and more.
WARNING: There will be SPOILERS for Bugonia below so read on at your own risk.After a successful limited release with one of the top platform per-screen averages, Bugonia opens in wide release this weekend.
The latest collaboration between actress Emma Stone and writer-director Yorgos Lanthimos could very well earn Oscar nominations for both. Stone and Jesse Plemons’ performances are certainly Oscar-worthy, as is Lanthimos’ direction, though the ending left much to be desired. The film follows pharma tech CEO Michelle Fuller , who is kidnapped by an incel conspiracy theorist beekeeper named Teddy Gatz and his dim-witted cousin Don . Teddy kidnaps her because he’s convinced she’s actually an alien trying to kill the planet, due to copious amounts of “research” he’s done. The well-reviewed film centers around whether Michelle is or is not an alien, though the ultimate answer is surprisingly obvious, in essence, as inevitable as Thanos. Sadly, it may have been far more interesting had Lanthimos gone the less obvious route. Yes, Michelle Fuller Is Really An Alien. Duh. The Bugonia trailer was playing in front of practically every movie I saw over the past few months, and the more I saw it, the more obvious it became that Michelle had to be an alien. Of course, Teddy and Don appear to be unhinged or medically unwell and all that through the carefully curated shots in the trailer. However, in the end, the way those characters are constructed — seemingly uneducated, blue-collar schlubs — makes the reveal that they somehow know a CEO is really an alien, actually all too obvious, especially given who is writing and directing. If it were anyone but Yorgos Lanthimos making this film, it might not have been as obvious. But when the main conceit of a film centers on whether a character is an alien — from a filmmaker who has made films about people being turned into animals if they don’t find a romantic partner and a Victorian-era woman brought back to life via brain transplant — it should be obvious the route he’s going. In a very weird way, it reminded me a bit of the 2000 Farrelly Brothers comedy Me, Myself and Irene. Jim Carrey plays a man named Charlie, who suffers a psychotic break and forms a second, more snide, personality, named Hank. During all this, he’s protecting a woman named Irene from her mob boss boyfriend. The one particular scene it reminds me of is when the cocky Hank makes a number of wild assumptions about Irene and why she moved to New York from her small town in Texas. She says that his assumptions were wrong, but towards the end of the movie, she tells Charlie that basically everything Hank guessed about her was right.Why It Would Have Been More Effective If Michelle Fuller Was NOT An Alien It’s quite clear throughout the film that Teddy and Don have not had such a great life. Their mother was a test subject for a drug made by Fuller’s company, which left her in a coma. Michelle told Teddy that her company, Auxolith, would pay for all her treatment, but they covered it up from going public. This dynamic between Teddy and Michelle — and how they actually knew each other before the abduction — is glossed over in the film, perhaps to serve as a red herring of sorts, when actually it could have been the strongest aspect of the film. She could have accused him of having a mental break with all the stress from his mother. Conversely, his hatred for her, coupled with his conspiratorial beliefs about the Andromedan alien race, could have manifested in much more shocking ways if he had just snapped and killed her, thus realizing she was not an alien, and now he was just a crazy person who had killed a CEO. It could have said volumes more about our society. I spoke with a friend of mine who had seen the film before I had, and he mentioned that he thought it would have been brilliant had the film ended ambiguously, right at the office closet explosion. The more I think about it, the more I agree, because everything after that point is just weird for weird’s sake, I think. The Big Boring Twist The climax involves Michelle and Teddy going to her office so they could both be teleported up to the mothership via her office closet. Teddy straps a bomb to his chest in case she has any funny business up her sleeve, and when she activates the teleportation device via an ordinary calculator, Teddy explodes. Michelle is rushed to a hospital but gets out of the ambulance and goes back to her closet to teleport herself to the mothership, where she reports to the Andromedan leaders and tells them Earth has basically failed. So she basically pops a bubble over Earth as humanity dies, as Lanthimos egregiously shows us with a multitude of corpses.Damon Lindelof said something in a 2013 interview that always stuck with me. “Any summer movie that comes out with a budget of $100 million-plus has to have the world at stake. The hero has to save the world.” Bugonia is estimated to have a $55 million budget, and it feels “on brand” for Lanthimos to end the world in a film when the most common trope in the industry is saving it. But when one’s brand is being weird, and one’s film is set with such blatant duality, the weirdest choice quickly becomes the most predictable one.
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