‘Bugonia’ stars Emma Stone, Jesse Plemons on twist ending

This article contains spoilers for Bugonia.

Bugonia features one of the most bloody, wild, go-for-broke endings in recent memory, so it’s only fitting that it’s eliciting vastly different reactions from audiences — and no one welcomes this more than director Yorgos Lanthimos.

The film follows a conspiracy theorist named Teddy (Jesse Plemons), who kidnaps and tortures powerful CEO Michelle Fuller (Emma Stone), convinced she is an alien sent to destroy humankind. As bizarre as his beliefs sound at first, by the end of the film, after days chained up in his basement, Michelle concedes that she is an alien empress from the Andromeda Galaxy.

She confirms many of his outlandish theories (like that her hair is a secret communication device), but she insists he was wrong about her people’s intentions. Far from wanting to destroy humanity, she says her Adromedan ancestors actually created humans, and they’ve been trying to save us from ourselves ever since.

While Teddy believes her, it remains unclear until the film’s final moments whether she is telling the truth or bluffing in a last-ditch effort to escape her tormentor.

“The thing that I grew to appreciate more and more was the fact that throughout the film, Teddy says some things that, from an objective standpoint, you can look at and think that’s true, and then he’ll follow that up with something that is objectively bananas and insane,” Plemons tells Entertainment Weekly alongside his costar.

“And the same thing goes for Michelle,” he adds. “It felt very, very close to the very myopic ways in which a lot of us can go through life, where there is very little room for multiple ways of thinking or for multiple things to be true at once. We get this tunnel vision.”

Thrilled that Michelle is finally coming clean, Teddy asks to be taken to her mothership. So, Michelle leads him to her office at her pharmaceutical company and punches some numbers on a seemingly innocuous calculator, which she tells him is really a teleportation device. After typing in the code, she tells Teddy to stand in her closet, where she insists he will be beamed up to her ship.

But when he closes the closet door, the homemade bomb he’d strapped to his chest explodes, which sends his decapitated head hurtling into Michelle, knocking her unconscious. When she awakes in an ambulance on the way to the hospital, she jumps out the back door and runs back to her office. Back inside, she goes into the closet (still filled with bits of Teddy) and is beamed aboard her ship, proving that she is, indeed, an alien.

At a council meeting aboard the mothership, she and her fellow Andromedans decide once and for all that the human experiment has failed. With tears in her eyes, she goes to a model of Earth and pops a bubble around it, wiping out all human life on the planet.

As the film ends, a montage of collapsed bodies around the world is shown, while other species, notably bees (whose impending extinction was a preoccupation of Teddy’s), appear to be flourishing.

While the eradication of our species might sound like a bleak ending note, Lanthimos tells EW that audiences are divided on whether the film presents a hopeful or pessimistic view of the future.

“I’ve noticed that some people say, ‘Oh, it’s really dark and bleak, the ending,’ and then some other people find it very hopeful, because in a sense you don’t take it literally,” the director says. “It’s a film, and nature survives, and it kind of allows the hope of a second chance at everything restarting.”

He continues, “So some people see it this way instead of it all ended. So I think it says things about the viewer themselves, how they feel in the end. And I think sometimes it might change. If it sticks in their head, maybe they think about it [later] and go like, ‘Yeah, maybe it is hopeful. It’s not that bleak, actually.'”

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As the director intended, the film is filled with moments that audiences are sure to interpret differently. Teddy’s death, for example, is never fully explained. While police guess that friction or his body heat triggered the homemade bomb, could Michelle have used her alien teleporter to set it somehow off?

“Yeah, I mean, I always assumed it was Teddy, really. There was a friction situation, and he got stuck, and that thing was a homemade [bomb],” Stone tells EW before taking a moment to praise the film’s prosthetic designers.

“I’m going to be honest with you. I think [Teddy’s decapitated] head was one of the most incredible pieces of prosthetic work I’ve ever seen,” she says to Plemons, who sits alongside her for the interview. “I’m being really serious. It was unbelievable. But stepping into that closet was really disgusting.”

“But,” her costar adds with a mischievous glint in his eye, “I like the [kill switch] beaming thing. That’s the one thing he didn’t think about.”

Bugonia is now playing in theaters.