[COLUMN] Bugonia is a Paranoid Thriller About Aliens and Alienation | by Darren Mooney (Patreon)

NOTE: This piece contains spoilers for Yorgos Lanthimos’ movie Bugonia, which is on VOD now. It’s a movie that hinges on a big central question, and so knowing the answer to that question undermines a lot of the joy of a first watch. So there will be a second spoiler warning in here before we discuss the ending. Still, Bugonia is great. It’s a wonderfully weird contemporary movie that feels like a spiritual companion to Ari Aster’s Eddington, and is well worth watching for anybody with a tolerance for even mildly “off-kilter” cinema.

“We are not alone,” notes Casey (Stavros Halkias), a local police officer doing a routine check-up on Teddy Gatz (Jesse Plemons), who he used to babysit as a child. Casey is quoting from a newspaper clipping pinned to a picture frame inside the Gatz family homestead, which has fallen into a state of decline and disrepair to mirror Teddy’s own mental collapse. The windows are covered in tin foil. The curtains are drawn.

“We are not alone” feels like a central thematic statement for Yorgos Lanthimos’ Bugonia. In a narrative sense, it reflects the specifics of Teddy’s psychosis. Teddy has become convinced that human society has been infiltrated by an alien species from the Andromeda Galaxy. Teddy believes that Michelle Fuller (Emma Stone), the CEO of pharmaceutical conglomerate Auxolith, is one of these aliens, and so Teddy has kidnapped Michelle in the hopes of revealing her true Andromedan nature.

However, Bugonia is more broadly a movie about loneliness. In his spare time, Teddy is a beekeeper. The film opens with Teddy monologuing about colony collapse disorder, the mysterious affliction that has greatly diminished the worldwide bee population. This strange phenomenon causes the workers and drones to effectively abandon the communal hive, leaving the queen and her offspring to starve while they also inevitably die alone in the wilderness. It is the destruction of a society.

The metaphor is not especially subtle. Teddy lives in a small town in Georgia. Auxolith is, according to Michelle, “a key job creator and economic engine of the region.” Teddy even works for Auxolith, packing orders at one of their fulfilment facilities. However, there is a clear sense that – like so many gigantic multinational corporations – Auxolith has actually corrupted and corroded the sense of local community, turning the area into something of a ghost town.

Throughout Bugonia, there are repeated extended sequences of Teddy cycling from his house to his job or to the hospital where his mother (Alicia Silverstone) remains on life support. He travels down country roads, through suburban neighbourhoods, by strip malls. There are occasional glimpses of cars on the road in the distance, but there is no sense of a shared space. The only character who ever interacts with Teddy on his commute is Casey, who seems concerned about Teddy’s isolation.

When Casey stops by the house, casually inquiring about Michelle’s disappearance, he asks if the neighbours have seen anything unusual lately. “I don’t really know them,” Teddy admits. Casey acknowledges it must be hard for Teddy to deal with the loss of his mother without having his father around. Teddy shrugs it off. “I wouldn’t even recognize him,” Teddy concedes. The only company Teddy keeps is his neurodivergent cousin Don (Aidan Delbis), tending to speak at Don rather than with him.

Teddy is all alone. When Michelle tries to appease him by acknowledging his “movement”, Teddy is quick to correct her. “There is no movement,” he insists. “I figured this out all on my own.” As Teddy lays out his grand theory about how the Andromedans have arrived on Earth to destroy humanity, he is quick to credit his fellow conspiracy theorists, but he does so by their screen names. These are perhaps the people Teddy feels closest to, and he doesn’t even know their real names.

Early in the film, arguing that he needs to prevent Michelle from using her feminine wiles on them, Teddy chemically castrates both himself and Don. It is a very literal expression of the way that Teddy has cut himself off from even the idea of connection to another human being. “I just always thought I’d be with someone,” Don admits as Teddy pressures him to go along with the plan. Teddy fills that absence in his life with incessant conspiracy theorist podcasts, noise to drown out the silence.

Lanthimos leans into this sense of isolation in how he shoots the movie. As with his other films, the director employs an unconventional aspect ratio; Bugonia is framed in a narrow 1.5:1 aspect ratio, lending it a tight and claustrophobic feel. Characters are often placed alone in the shot, even when in close physical proximity to each other. Over dinner, Teddy, Don and Michelle rarely appear in the same frame. As Casey pulls Teddy tries to connect with him, the two may as well be worlds apart.

It makes sense that Lanthimos would lean heavily into this idea. Many of Lanthimos’ movies are about the difficulty that human beings have forming meaningful connections. Dogtooth is about a family that keeps their children isolated from the outside world well into adulthood. The Lobster imagines a dystopian reality where individuals must either pair off or be turned into animals. Kinds of Kindness is in large part about how horrifying and unsettling love can be.

The film also leans into Lanthimos’ fascination with language. No other movie characters speak like Yorgos Lanthimos characters, and there is perhaps an easy joke to be made that every character in a Yorgos Lanthimos movie sounds like an alien. However, while Teddy and Michelle are both ostensibly speaking English, they are seemingly speaking in such insane esoteric dialects that meaningful communication is next to impossible. Even if Michelle is not an alien, they are alien to each other.

Teddy speaks in the language of conspiracy theorists, with its own internal lore and logic that is impenetrable to any outsider. He cannot actually meaningfully prove any of his arguments, but he buries it under so much jargon and so many assertions that it’s impossible to engage with any individual insane factoid. Meanwhile, Michelle employs the rhetoric of corporate no-speak. Waking up chained up in Teddy’s basement, she proposes “a dialogue”, recognizing herself as “high-value.”

While Teddy believes that Michelle is extraterrestrial, she often sounds more like a robot. Preparing a corporate video on diversity, she complains that she sounds “like a metronome.” In an early sequence, she informs staff that they are free to leave at 5:30pm, but also that they really need to meet productivity targets, but crucially they should feel like they can leave at 5:30pm. The implication is clear, Michelle wants to say something but also communicate that it means nothing.

When her company’s drug trial sends a number of patients – including Teddy’s mother – into comas, she regurgitates a word salad that hits all the right notes, but contains no meaningful humanity. It is perhaps too much to expect Michelle to forge an actual emotional connection to a man who sees her as an alien parasite, but even her pragmatic attempts to generate an empathetic connection with her captor feel like empty corporate platitudes. Like Teddy, Michelle both talks a lot and says very little.

Even in the basement, Michelle runs through a variety of clichés and talking points in trying to deal with Teddy and Don, speaking of “echo chambers” and “bubbles.” Her conversations with Teddy feel less like an actual exchange of ideas and more like an attempt to manipulate or confuse – which makes sense given the situation, but also underscores the sense in which Bugonia is about the fear that any sense of a collective shared reality has completely fractured and people are completely disconnected.

Bugonia suggests that Teddy’s disconnect is rooted in his own personal trauma. His mother is in a coma, leaving Teddy to fend for himself. Late in the film, Casey acknowledges that he abused Teddy while babysitting him. However, the film also understands Teddy’s disconnect is a result of broader systemic forces. Over dinner, Michelle acknowledges Auxolith didn’t offer fair compensation to Teddy for his loss. There is no sense of a larger social fabric for Teddy to connect with.

After all, Teddy is not the only character to suffer from this disconnect. Cracking under the pressure of holding Michelle hostage and unable to properly articulate his own sense of despair, Don takes his own life in front of Michelle. In a last-ditch ploy to escape, Michelle convinces Teddy that the bottle of antifreeze in the back of her car is really a magical alien cure that will wake his mother from her coma. It doesn’t; it is just antifreeze. Michelle is hoping that somebody will see Teddy trying to inject antifreeze into a coma patient and arrest him. However, nobody notices what Teddy is doing as he does and nobody stops him as he leaves the crime scene. There is a sense of entropy at work.

Teddy admits that he has drifted through the entire “digestive tract” of contemporary political discourse in the hopes of finding some philosophy that will make sense of the larger world, experimenting with the political right and left. Teddy is looking for an explanation, for purpose, for meaning. It makes sense that Teddy would inevitably arrive at the possibility of an alien threat, because that would at least reassure him that he is not truly alone in the universe.

Although Bugonia is a remake of Save the Green Planet, a South Korean movie from 2003, there is something timely about the adaptation. The past few years have seen a substantial increase in political violence, often from disaffected men like Teddy. In recent years, the politics of these individuals has become increasingly incoherent, but this wave of violence still feels rooted in a broader sense of disconnect. Young men with no future, no path, no prospects.

NOTE: Here there be spoilers. Big ones.

Indeed, the bleakest punchline of Bugonia is that Teddy is ultimately correct. Michelle is an alien. More than that, she is an alien emperor. Against all odds, Teddy has recognized something broken in the system, in much the same way that Luigi Mangione’s assassination of Brian Thompson drew attention to the inequities of the larger health insurance system. However, Teddy’s actions do not actually fix anything, any more than Thompson’s death led to fairer health insurance pricing.

While Teddy is correct about the Andromedans, he has taken his paranoia to a dangerous and destructive place. Late in the movie, Michelle finds a secret room, documenting the past victims of Teddy’s torture and abuse - victims ultimately murdered and dissected as Teddy looks for proof of their alien heritage. Michelle confronts Teddy. “How many were Andromedans?” she demands. Teddy stutters and stammers, realizing that he has been caught out. “Two,” he eventually confesses. There is evidence of far more than two victims in that hidden room. Teddy has killed innocent people.

Teddy’s abduction of Michelle, which sets in motion a chain of events that leads to Don’s suicide, Casey’s murder, and the death of Teddy’s mother, seems to be enough to finally convince Michelle that humanity as a species is beyond saving – that the human race is inherently violent and self-destructive and cannot be steered from that course. In the closing minutes of Bugonia, set to Pete Seeger’s “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?”, ending on a verse repeating “where have all the young men gone?”, Michelle decides to kill humanity in order to save the planet.

While ultimately rooted in something closer to reality than one might expect, Teddy’s actions ultimately doom humanity. It is an incredibly bleak and fatalistic conclusion, and it pairs rather well with the ending of Kathryn Bigelow’s recent A House of Dynamite, which closed on a similarly depressing note about the inevitability of humanity’s destruction as a direct result of the species’ own worst impulses. In the end, Bugonia suggests, the threat is less aliens than it is alienation.