This review contains spoilers.

Released in theatres Oct. 31 from lauded director Yorgos Lanthimos, “Bugonia” is almost an electric assessment of class struggle but is undercut by its all-too-obvious ending.

Teddy (Jesse Plemons) is the son of a woman addicted to opiates. Michelle (Emma Stone) is a biomedical technocrat — and supposed alien — whose company sold Teddy a cure for his mother’s addiction, only for it to send her into a permanent coma. 

“Bugonia” takes place over the four days leading up to a lunar eclipse, during which Teddy and his cousin Donny hold Michelle captive and demand she put them in contact with her alien mothership.

Throughout the film, the theme of class conflict makes itself clear. As CEO of the pharmaceutical company Auxolith, Michelle is the embodiment of the modern “girlboss.” A photo of her posing with Michelle Obama is displayed in her office, she jams out to Chappell Roan’s “Good Luck, Babe!” in her black luxury sedan and her morning begins with a private self-defense class. 

Teddy is her direct opposite. He lives in a small, run-down house in Anywhere, America and works in a manufacturing and packing plant for Michelle’s company. His prized possessions are his beehives, which he says are afflicted with Colony Collapse Disorder caused by the actions of the alien race he believes Michelle to be part of. 

To Teddy, the source of Michelle’s wealth and status is the cause of the death of his world. His mother’s coma is something he perceives as her fault, even if it was presented as a clinical trial with associated risks. Teddy turned to the conspiracy that Michelle is an alien as a way to explain why someone else could have so much when everything he has is torn away from him. 

But as far as “Bugonia” goes to set up these themes, the ending undermines them in under 15 minutes. An English remake of the 2003 South Korean film “Save the Green Planet!,” Will Tracy’s screenplay sets up the idea that the top 1% are so removed from reality that they are, in essence, of another world. 

Though Teddy has the physical upper hand for almost the entire film, Michelle’s lack of belief that he could ever truly overpower her reflects how she regards him as a subpar species.

This theme echoes in the world today: The Sackler family, who all but engineered the real opioid crisis that Teddy’s fictional mother fell victim to, was worth $11 billion in 2021. 

Despite the destruction that their products wreaked in communities across America, they remain beneficiaries of an unimaginable wealth. To the great majority of people, they may as well be aliens, and they likely view the people impacted by their manufactured crisis with the same disregard that Michelle gives Teddy.  

Then, for Michelle’s character to not only actually be an alien, but also to truly be a benevolent overlord, rips the efficacy of that theme away. 

The failed “cure” that she sold Teddy for his mother’s addiction was apparently a trial to cure the human race of its evils, one that they tried on several other people around the globe. Michelle is not evil for what she did to the people being trialed — she was just trying to save the human race from marching itself to destruction. 

The film ends with a montage, over three minutes long, of bodies strewn across the world after Michelle presses the kill switch on the great Earth experiment. 

The montage is preceded by a close-up on her glistening eyes, mourning for her failure. It is framed as though she has tried to take on a great responsibility that ran away from her control, and for a fluffier science-fiction film, that’s fantastic — but for a film trying to evoke criticism of social class, the ending of “Bugonia” is unsatisfying and hollow. 

Michelle comes across as the gracious alien attempting to save the human race and Teddy as a human with an inability to comprehend the enormity of that. The clinical trials become the suffering of the few in an attempt to save the many, rather than a corporation preying on the desperation of the sick and their families. 

If “Bugonia” hadn’t put Michelle and Teddy at odds because of their class, the storyline would have worked — but because it did, it feels like an abandonment of what was built up over the previous two hours. 

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