November 11, 2025 - Bugonia (2025)

2.5/5

I did not like Bugonia. It was wonderfully acted and visually stunning, with an excellent score and sound design. It is objectively well crafted, but I did not like Bugonia. Hi, it's been a bit. I've been watching a lot of stuff but haven't had a lot of things I felt like putting to web-paper. However, the more I sat on this one, the more I had to say.

A contextual summary:

There is a conspiracy theorist named Teddy who convinces his cousin Don to help him kidnap a CEO. Her company is unclear in what it actually does, she is a chemist by trade, and her company did pharma research, but has an Amazon-style packing warehouse where Teddy is employed. They're also possibly involved in pesticides in agriculture use. Teddy kidnaps CEO Michelle because he believes she is an alien sent to destroy humanity through ecological destruction. He believes she killed and ruined his family, as his mother was part of a drug trial for treating opioid addiction that caused her to enter a coma.

Don is hesitant throughout the whole matter, Michelle tries several tactics to gain her freedom, denying being an alien, fake agreeing with Teddy, attempting to reason with Don, finally tricking Teddy to bring them back to the corporate building where she works. Throughout this process, Teddy has her head shaved by Don, keeps her restrained, physically intimidates her by throwing chairs when she denies his claims, tortures her via electrocution when he doesn't believe her first fake agreement, and then physically attacks her when she brings up his mother. When Michelle attempts to reason with Don, who has been increasingly distressed at Teddy's actions and worldviews, he commits suicide in front of her.

When Teddy investigates, she convinces him the antifreeze in her car is the cure to his mother's illness, and he rushes off. She uses this time to escape her restraints, and finds Teddy's murder/research room, with several other bodies hidden in it. When Teddy returns, she tells him that she is an alien, humans were based off her species and created to repopulate the planet after the dinosaurs went extinct. Humans then genetically altered themselves to be stronger, but this caused aggression and planet-scale wars. The drug trial Teddy's mother was a part of was to fix this gene that had been left in all the survivors. She has him take her to her office, where a "transport" exists to beam them up to her ship. Teddy, having strapped a homemade bomb to her torso, accidentally blows himself up before she activates the transport.

Michelle gets taken to an ambulance, but jumps out and runs back to her office to reveal that everything she told Teddy was true. The experiments had failed, humanity was a lost cause, and so her species ended the stasis on the planet, resulting in the death of all humans.

Bugonia is officially described as a black comedy, and many other reviews have called it satire. I didn't find it particularly amusing, nor did I find any of its critique of Michelle or Teddy particularly compelling. There's maybe 2 minutes showing how Michelle is a performatively lenient boss, and using corporate speak to act like she cares when she doesn't, and it doesn't lead to anything actually being said about her character besides being on Earth made her selfish "like humans". Teddy makes a point to say he had followed many different schools of thought, saying he was far right, leftist, marxist, "I tried it all," and none of it was right, so he turned to his alien theories. However, in our actual lives, many conspiracy theorists are part of right wing idealogy. The basis of several far right political talking points is ignorance and denial of scientific fact to support whatever their theory of the week is. "Flat Earth" is "funny", but what about when those same tactics of manipulation are used by climate change deniers. These ideas genuinely hurt people. The movie somewhat addresses this with Teddy's manipulation of Don via several strategies, but by writing Michelle to actually be an alien, a sense of legitimacy is given to Teddy. The movie is no longer a tragedy of a man who lost everything to this company and turned to extremist views to cope, it becomes a "Wow, he was actually right!"

Additionally, while many thrillers have actions of misogyny as the main tension points at their center, this one didn't sit right with me. It felt as if Teddy's bouts of violence were written as entirely related to the disagreements surrounding his worldview, without giving any regard to his actions as tools of misogyny. Michelle spends her entire time attempting to emotionally manage Teddy, and every moment of tension involves the threat of him committing violence against her. Not to discount the class power she held over him, but that was primarily stripped from her the moment she was kidnapped, besides the police taking her missing persons case somewhat seriously (which doesn't really even work because the cop they sent was an old babysitter of Teddy's who feels guilty about how he treated Teddy as a kid).

I also don't agree with the final conclusion the movie offers. I've seen time and time again in real discussions about "humanity is destroying the Earth" and thoughts that humans are inherently violent and not worth saving, as if we don't have our own symbyosis with our own ecosystems and the capacity to live sustainably, and that a lot of our current environmental issues are actually products of the greed driven by capitalism. I do not believe in the doomerism mindset of burning everything down to start over when it comes to humanity at large. So when Michelle, the CEO of a large company that has had multiple negative influences over the environment, calls humanity beyond saving, and that while yes she had a part in that, in humans it's part of an innate genetic makeup, I am going to disagree. Strongly.

Reading reviews from the people I follow, I was surprised to see how popular this movie was. Maybe there was something I missed, maybe there was something I overlooked. But I doubt one thing could recontextualize everything. To me, it's a well made movie with shit messaging.