The Mind-Bending Conclusion of Bugonia: Unraveling the Wildest Ending of Any Film in 2025

Bugonia was always going to be a strange little oddity. It is directed by Yorgos Lanthimos, after all, the guy who ended his most commercial film yet with a goat brain transplant. The premise is pretty weird too, pitting Jesse Plemons’ conspiracist beekeeper against a CEO who may or may not be an alien from the planet Andromedan.

Even the name is quite unusual, drawn from the Greek word “bougonia”, which refers to an ancient Mediterranean belief that bees spontaneously generate from the carcasses of dead animals.

What’s perhaps weirdest of all about Bugonia though is how much its ending will take you by surprise, even if you’re already familiar with the South Korean film that it’s based on.

Lanthimos’ remake ends in a very similar way to Jang Joon-hwan’s feature debut, Save the Green Planet!, yet much of the film misdirects you in that fashion. As a longtime fan of the original who even owned a Tartan Asia Extreme branded DVD (remember those?) I still spent most of Bugonia’s runtime expecting Lanthimos to take us down a different route. And in part, he does, although the ending hews far closer to the original than I expected.

Major spoilers for Bugonia below.

Bugonia ending explained: Who is Emma Stone’s Michelle Fuller?

Jang Joon-hwan first got the idea for Save the Green Planet! when he considered how Stephen King’s Misery might look from the perspective of Annie Wilkes. Throw in inspiration from a joke conspiracy site that claimed Leonardo DiCaprio is an alien and you’ve got yourself the building blocks for both his original film and the remake that’s followed.

The difference in Bugonia is that the CEO (who may or may not be an alien) is played by a woman this time around. Michelle Fuller (Emma Stone) is captured early on by Teddy who’s convinced that aliens live on Earth, and his cousin Don (Aidan Delbis), who blindly follows everything Teddy demands of him, including chemical castration to purge any distracting thoughts. Poor guy.

After they shave Fuller’s hair, convinced that she can use it to contact her Andromedan clan, things inevitably go from bad to worse. Fuller has just three days to escape before the lunar eclipse begins, which Teddy believes is when her alien mothership will come to Earth. His goal is to convince the Andromedans to help save humanity, using Fuller as a means to establish initial contact.

At first, Fuller denies being an alien, because obviously she isn’t one. Teddy’s evidence to the contrary isn’t exactly compelling, after all. Narrow feet, thin cuticles, and high hair density aren’t so much evidence of her alien nature than they are of Teddy’s apparent insanity.

Eventually, Fuller does what anyone threatened by torture would do, which is to go along with their captor and agree that yes, she is indeed an alien. Teddy doesn’t believe that this admission is genuine though, not until she endures electroshock torture that no normal human can withstand. According to Teddy, at least. That means Fuller isn’t just an alien, no. She’s Andromedan royalty, a princess of the highest ranking.

From that point on, Teddy treats Fuller with more respect, aside from the occasional outbursts and threats to her life. But everything goes to shit when a surprise visit from law enforcement derails the plan, and Don kills himself in front of their captive. What’s worse is that when Fuller tricks Teddy into visiting his mother — a coma patient made sick by her company’s trials — and killing her with what he believes to be a cure.

Using the opportunity to free herself, Fuller discovers that Teddy is even more unhinged than we all thought when she stumbles across a hidden room full of dismembered corpses, people he’d previously tortured believing them to also be aliens. If the narrow shoe fits…

Upon Teddy’s return, Fuller doesn’t back down. Instead, she seems like a woman possessed, outraged by the atrocities she’s witnessed. It’s not the loss of human life that concerns her though. At least, not if her new claims are to be believed.

Doubling down on her assertions that she is in fact an alien, Fuller admonishes Teddy for his misdeeds, speaking of the Andromedan race with newfound gravitas. According to her, she and the rest of her kind are responsible for the existence of humans in the first place, and everything she’s done on Earth is in service to a grander experiment.

Promising Teddy a cure to his mother’s apparent death, Fuller guides him to her office at work where she claims a teleporter can beam them both up to the mothership and undo everything that’s transpired.

While it still seems that Fuller might be leading Teddy on, the way her voice changed earlier as she spoke of humanity’s hidden history hints that there might be something otherworldly going on, after all. Yet when they arrive at her office, talk of a special teleportation code unlocked by a calculator sure does sound like baloney, a desperate plea to stall Teddy while her colleagues call the authorities.

Eventually, Fuller convinces him to go first into the side room where her teleportation device is supposedly kept. This is the point where the authorities will obviously burst in and rescue Fuller, bringing Teddy into custody. Except, what happens next is far more explosive than that.

No, literally. Before you know it, the room suddenly explodes for real, sending Teddy’s now severed head flying through the air where it hits Fuller and knocks her out. Excuse me? It turns out that the bomb he was wearing was too sensitive and went off suddenly.