Bugonia ending explained: The truth behind Michelle being an alien

Bugonia is the official remake of Save the Green Planet!, which is a 2003 South Korean film. Yorgos Lanthimos directed the absurdist black comedy, while Will Tracy wrote it. It premiered at the 82nd Venice International Film Festival and was released theatrically on October 24, 2025, by Focus Features. The film's official synopsis, as mentioned on Letterboxd, is as follows:

Two conspiracy obsessed young men kidnap the high-powered CEO of a major company, convinced that she is an alien intent on destroying planet Earth.

Its ending is something we will be getting into in this article. Let's explore that and find out if Michelle is actually an alien.

What is the plot of Bugonia?

Bugonia starts with a beekeeper named Teddy Gatz (played by Jesse Plemons), who is into conspiracy theories. He has a cousin named Don (Aidan Delbis) who shares the same love and passion for conspiracies. The two believe that Michelle Fuller (Emma Stone), who is the CEO of a pharmaceutical company, is an alien who plans to destroy their planet. They kidnap her in an attempt to stop her from her mission.

How does Bugonia end?

Towards the end of Bugonia, we learn that Michelle is actually an alien from the Andromeda galaxy. Almost the entire film, the audience is tricked into believing that Teddy and Don are illogical people who see a conspiracy in everything. In one scene, Michelle goes on a rant, admitting that she plans to take over Earth and is the queen of the Andromeda world.

At one point, Teddy passes away, and we realize that Michelle is trying to build a drug to suppress all the dark thoughts of human beings. The two had shaved her head, and it was labelled as a silly move. But eventually, the plot reveals that Michelle communicated with her species through her hair.

Later, she states that humanity is on the brink of collapse and wants to wipe out the population. There is an obvious distance between Michelle and Teddy. While she is an alien and he is a human, there is also a class divide between their two worlds. The climax also reveals that Teddy has more reasons to kidnap Michelle beyond his beliefs about her.

Several years ago, Michelle's company hired people for a medical trial. The trial eventually failed as the drug had reactions on many of them, including deaths and comas. Teddy's mother was one of those to suffer. While the company paid them some amount, this did not deter Teddy from growing a sense of resentment for everyone. This revelation gives Bugonia a political twist, turning it into a story about the ill practices of the pharma industry.

Michelle decides to end humanity as people start dropping in their regular lives. She does this by destroying a recreated version of Earth. The film ends on a sad note as the alien manages to eliminate life from the planet.