The Prophet and the Monster: Why ‘Bugonia’ Is a Structurally Perfect Film
Bugonia is a film about a man who kidnaps a CEO because he believes she's an alien. Teddy Gatz (Jesse Plemons) lives in the post-industrial ruins of an America that the biotech elite have left behind. He works in a fulfilment centre for the very corporation he's convinced is an extraterrestrial front. He's chemically castrated himself and his cousin Don to "maintain focus." He has a plan, a basement, and a shotgun. What he doesn't have is any capacity for the one thing that might save him: the ability to feel what has happened to him. The film earned its BAFTA and Oscar nominations not because of its premise but because of something rarer. It has a perfect structure — and that structure reveals something devastating about how stories work.
It’s a black comedy, which turns into a tragedy: Teddy is right. More right than even he knows. The corporation did run the clinical trial that left his mother in a permanent coma. The system is predatory. Will Tracy's screenplay understands something most conspiracy thrillers don't: it is not enough to see truly — you must also act truly, and the two require entirely different capacities. Teddy can identify the lion. He cannot tame it. His method — kidnapping, torture, ritual violence dressed up as heroic resistance — is the grief-stricken flailing of a man who has built his entire identity on a framework that makes unbearable suffering cosmically significant. Take away the aliens, and what's left? A traumatised man whose mother was destroyed by ordinary corporate negligence. The alien framework makes him a hero. The truth makes him nobody.
The structural centrepiece is the dinner scene. Teddy and Don (Aidan Delbis) have cleaned Michelle (Emma Stone) up, given her a cheap wig, and chained her to a nailed-down chair at a candlelit table. There is wine, candles, and beneath the grotesque staging, the shape of something sacred — a meal at which truth might be exchanged. And truth is what Michelle offers. Not performance but the actual history: a clinical trial gone wrong, a corporation that paid insufficient reparation and moved on. This gives Teddy everything he needs — a legitimate grievance, a real enemy, a path from delusional violence to meaningful action. The door opens. The audience watches as the protagonist is offered exactly what would save him. And he turns away, because the ordinary truth — your suffering is statistically common, you are one of millions — is more unbearable than any alien conspiracy. This is where tragedy lives: not in the catastrophe itself, but in the visible, offered, refused alternative.
Later, alone in Teddy's research room, Michelle has a moment of genuine understanding. She sees the whole arc — a mother whose behaviour everyone dismissed as delusional, the corporate exploitation, the grief channelled into conspiracy. For one breath, authentic compassion. Now, in every great story, there comes a point — usually around two-thirds of the way through — where the universe offers the protagonist something they haven't earned and don't deserve: a moment of unmerited understanding, an act of unexpected kindness, a door that opens from the outside when every door the character has tried to force has failed. Call it grace. In successful stories, this gift is received, and it transforms the protagonist from the inside out. In tragedy, it's refused — Macbeth ignores it, Hamlet can't act on it. What Bugonia does is something I'd never seen before: the grace is received — Michelle genuinely comprehends Teddy's suffering — and then immediately repurposed as a weapon. Her understanding becomes the raw material for a fabricated alien origin story, calibrated with surgical precision to everything she now knows about his psychology. "The pitch of her life. The Greatest Story Ever Sold." Grace arrives, is felt, and is converted into ammunition. It is a new thing in dramatic writing, and it's as chilling as anything I know.
Michelle Fuller (Emma Stone) deserves a paragraph of her own. She performs with such virtuosity — outraged CEO, calm negotiator, wounded woman, alien emperor — that the distinction between role and reality dissolves. And then the film reveals that the supreme performance was the truth all along. She is an alien. The story she fabricated to survive contains the essential facts of her actual identity, delivered as fiction, by a being who performed "human CEO" so well she partially forgot what she was. For any actor studying the relationship between role and identity, this is the most instructive character written for the screen in a decade.
The ending is the most structurally audacious in recent cinema. Michelle, revealed as the Andromedan Emperor, pronounces sentence: "We believe they have had time. And in their time, they have imperilled the life they share." Every human on Earth dies. The death montage — a British classroom, a Korean classroom, an airport, the Acropolis, a Russian wedding, teenagers in bed, the fulfilment centre where Teddy worked — is devastating because it is democratic. The final image: a meadow, a flower, a honeybee. "Earth has been saved." The title delivers its meaning at last — bugonia, the ancient belief that bees are generated from rotting carcasses. New life from death. But the carcass is us. This isn't nihilism. It's a consequence. The same refusal that destroyed Teddy — forcing rather than allowing, extracting rather than stewarding — is the refusal that destroyed the species.
So what does Bugonia teach? That character psychology is structured. Put a ‘paranoid’ who moves toward danger together with a ‘performer’ who becomes whatever the audience needs, add a ‘follower’ who has abandoned his own judgement, and you've built a dramatic structure that can only produce catastrophe. Change one character's psychology, and you change the genre. Tracy cast the perfect tragic ensemble — a paranoiac (Teddy), a performer (Michelle), a doormat (Don), an abuser (Casey, the cop who was once Teddy's babysitter, played by Stavros Halkias), and a ghost (Sandy, the comatose mother whose imprint drives everything, played by Alicia Silverstone) — and every role is filled by the exact type needed to guarantee that transformation is refused at every opportunity. The structure is complete. The bees survive. We don't.
Bugonia (2025). Directed by Yorgos Lanthimos. Written by Will Tracy. Produced by Element Pictures, Square Peg, CJ ENM, Pith Quest Films, and Fruit Tree. Presented by Focus Features and Fremantle. Distributed by Focus Features (US/Canada), Universal Pictures International (UK/Germany), and Universal Pictures (international). Based on Save the Green Planet! (2003) by Jang Joon-hwan.
This article constitutes fair use, critical commentary and analysis under applicable copyright law. All quotations from the screenplay are brief excerpts used for the purpose of criticism, review, and scholarly discussion. No portion of this article is intended to substitute for or diminish the value of the original work. The author encourages readers to see the film.
Andrew Higgs is getting his new book, The Alchemy of Screen Acting: Building a Sustainable Career in 21 Steps, ready for publication. Subscribers to Substack receive practical insights on screen acting and career development, and will be the first to know when the book becomes available. Subscribe for free using the link above.