WARNING: SPOILERS 

Yeah, I wasn’t a fan of the ending, either.

A corporate CEO, Michelle Fuller (Emma Stone), is kidnapped by two exurb nutjobs and chained to a basement cot because the leader of the two, Teddy (Jesse Plemons), thinks she’s an alien intent on destroying Earth. Her head is shaved so she can’t communicate with the mother ship, her body covered with antihistamine cream for same, and at one point she’s given electro-shock treatments. You wonder how far Teddy will go to prove she’s an alien before he realizes he's wrong.

Turns out he’s not wrong.

We get those vibes throughout but I assumed it was just cultural commentary. I.e., These CEOs with their airless offices and airless terminology (“unpack,” “let’s dialogue”) are like aliens, and certainly of a different species than workaday Teddy, who bikes to his job at a “Fulfillment Center”—another awful corporate term—of Auxolith, Fuller’s corporation, where he slaps addresses on boxes. Plus it’s Emma Stone, with her thin body and big E.T. eyes. Oh, and near the end, after Teddy kneecaps her, she uses her one good leg to crawl, like an injured crab, alien-like, to lift the keys from the now-dead No. 2 man Don (Aidan Delbis). So we get the alien vibe throughout. 

But I assumed she wasn’t an alien because “Bugonia” is directed by Yorgos Lanthimos, and it was a serious film tackling the serious issues of the day—like the near-kidnapping of Gov. Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan in 2020 by right-wing nutjobs. Overall, too many CEOs are making too much money by creating way too many awful jobs like Teddy’s; and too many people like Teddy are alone with their thoughts and the internet. That’s a lot of life these days. It’s relevant.

And then it becomes absurd. Teddy is right—right down to using hair to communicate with the mother ship. Even Earth in those final shots is flat. I guess we should’ve listened to those guys, too.

I felt oddly rooked. I spent 90 minutes worrying over a person I didn’t need to worry over. I expended emotional capital, a precious commodity these days, on nothing.

Yorgos’ larf
I should mention that my nephew Ryan doesn’t quite align with this interpretation. He thinks the ending is ambiguous. I guess you could interpret it as less sci-fi than fantasy—as in Teddy’s fantasy. As in maybe it’s Teddy’s final thoughts before he blows himself up? Which is why he’s right about everything.

Wish I could see more of a reason to believe that. Right now it just feels like a larf, Yorgos’ larf, a giggle thrown at those sad serious people like me trying to think things through.

The early stuff is haves/have-nots. Michelle Fuller has. She rises early in her modern glass mansion, does her exercise/kickboxing, drives to work and breezes into her glass office and does whatever work she does. Her one human moment is driving and singing along to Chappell Roan’s “Good Luck, Babe.”

Compared to most of the world, Teddy and Don are haves, too; just not compared with Michelle Fuller. Plus what they have they squander. It’s a nice house but falling apart around them. Teddy isn’t lazy—he bikes everywhere, he works, he raises bees, he raises Don—he’s just unfocused, or focused on the wrong things. There’s too much buzzing in his brain.

How crazy is Teddy? That’s our question throughout. Jesse Plemons has made a career out of playing people who seem quietly reasonable about their own horrifically unreasonable viewpoints—all the while seeming slightly off. You just don’t know how off until the reveal. Here there are several—moments when his temper flares and he resorts to violence, or worse, in the electro-shock scene, when everyone is begging him to stop, Michelle, Don, us, and you see him concentrating to ignore that noise and focus on the signal, his signal, the great work he’s doing for humanity.

But Teddy’s true reveal is at the 11th hour. By this point, things have gotten messy. The electro-shock data shows that Michelle is not just an alien but alien royalty, a queen bee, as it were, and entitled to some respect, or something, involving dinner. That ends badly, too. She provokes violence from Teddy, and might’ve been choked to death but for the timely arrival of the cops. Well, one cop, Casey (Stavros Halkias), whom we’d seen stopping and talking with Teddy earlier. He’s actually working the case of the missing CEO, just not well. Mostly he seems intent on trying to reconnect with Teddy and to apologize for molesting him when he was his babysitter years earlier. Yeah. Not sure why Yorgos has to throw that in, too. Worse, Casey's apology doesn't feel deep or thought-through; it just sits there. Is the point that everyone’s distracted? The cop by the past, Teddy by the present? Everyone has shit in their basement.

As Teddy is showing Casey the bee colonies, Michelle, hidden in the basement, is convincing Don she’ll take him to the other planet, Andromeda, and as he acquiesces he shoots himself in the head. That finally alerts the cop that something's amiss, but Teddy bashes his head in with a shovel, then confronts Michelle in the basement.

The oddity here and the rest of the way out is how amenable Teddy suddenly becomes. He was a stubborn shit for most of the film but suddenly every suggestion Michelle makes he follows. Owning up to her alienness, she tells him the antifreeze in the back of her car isn’t antifreeze but a cure for his mother lying in a coma because of an Auxolith product. He believes her. Still blood-splattered, he takes the jug to the assisted living facility, encounters no one, subs it out for her IV drip, and kills her. Now he’s pedaling back with tears in his eyes and rage in his heart.

In the interim, Michelle did the crab thing, got the keys, set herself free. At first she’s crawling up the stairs, but then returns to the basement. Was the upper door locked? That’s what I assumed. I assumed she returned to look for a new exit. But maybe that was never the point. Maybe the point was to find what she finds: Teddy’s secret room, with his computer, his newspaper clippings tacked to the wall, and mason jars full of the body parts of other people he’s killed. She wasn’t his first abductee. There were many, many others. That’s the true reveal. He’s Ed Gein for the sci-fi set.

And somehow, despite killing his own mother on Michelle’s false intel, he remains suggestible. When he returns, she has the upper hand. She demands to know how many of his experiments were Andromedans, he says two, then she peppers him with the true sad history of humanity. How we’re just an alien experiment, a mea culpa for killing off the dinosaurs; but we’re forever haunted, forever problematic, forever in trouble. But she can cure us. She has to return to her corporate office to teleport to the mothership, but then she can cure us. And he can join her.

And he believes her.

Ryan’s theory
Question: in the teleportation closet in her office, wearing that suicide vest, does he blow himself up on purpose, by accident, or is it the Andromedans somehow? Or doesn’t it matter?

The hokiness of that teleportation closet, along with the hokiness of the Andromedan race—reminding me of 1970s-era “Dr. Who”—gives further credence to Ryan’s theory. Maybe Teddy watched those shows growing up. That’s why he imagines the Andromedans that way. Besides, if you take it all at face value, that it all happened the way we’re seeing it, why would the Alien Queen kill off the human race now? We, through Teddy, have finally evolved enough to figure it all out! We’re worthy. Nope. Pop. Gone.

I liked the final images of all the dead around the world as Marlene Dietrich’s version of “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?” plays on the soundtrack. But it would’ve felt more poignant if I hadn’t already soured on the film.

Would love to hear other thoughts. I feel like I'm looking for an interpretation of the ending that makes the movie more meaningful, and I'm not finding it at all.

I did walk away wishing to see a movie, or maybe an “Office”-like TV series, called “Fulfillment Center,” about the unfulfilled people working there filling orders for other unfulfilled people trying to fill the holes in their own souls with its various products. A comedy, I imagine.