If you walked out of Yorgos Lanthimos' Bugonia wondering whether Emma Stone's ultra-composed CEO is actually an alien and what that final gut-punch was about, here is the clean version without the hand-wavy mystique. Yes, she is. And no, humanity does not come out of this one looking great.
Quick setup
Bugonia is a black-comedy sci-fi story about two conspiratorial true believers, Teddy and Don, who kidnap Michelle (Emma Stone), the head of a big, very public-facing company. They think she might be an alien. She insists she is not, mostly to keep an increasingly volatile Teddy from doing something stupid. She tries to outmaneuver them, plays with what they believe, and keeps her secrets close. It sounds ridiculous until it isn't.
So... is Michelle an alien?
Yes. The movie very explicitly confirms it late in the game. After Teddy accidentally dies, Michelle drops the human act and reveals her true nature: she is not just from the Andromeda galaxy, she considers herself its empress. She has been living on Earth under the corporate mask to develop a drug meant to blunt humanity's worst impulses. That mission was her way of keeping the species in check without wiping it out.
Problem: she decides the experiment failed. And it's Teddy, ironically, who pushes her over the edge. His choices convince her that trying to medicate humanity's aggression is a losing battle.
The ending, clearly
Michelle lays out her worldview straight to Teddy before things go all the way south: in her mind, human evolution is wired for aggression, and past alien meddling only accelerated the rot. She has likes and dislikes about people, sure, but the headline is simple — she has lost faith in the species.
So she triggers her endgame. Michelle destroys an artificial, controlled recreation of Earth's atmosphere — a system that, once collapsed, erases humans while sparing animals. It's clinical, brutal, and very much in line with her 'contain or end' logic. The movie doesn't present it as easy for her; she cries as it happens. But the result is the result: the final images are people blinking out of existence across the globe while the natural world remains.
How we get from kidnapping to extinction (in order)
- Teddy and Don abduct Michelle because they think she's an alien running a secret agenda.
- Michelle denies it for most of the story, partly to keep Teddy calm, partly to keep control.
- She manipulates and misdirects them, but also plants just enough to make her alien origins sound plausible.
- Teddy dies by accident, and Michelle finally reveals her true form and status: an alien ruler from the Andromeda galaxy.
- We learn her Earth mission was to make a drug to dampen humanity's violent streak — a last-ditch containment plan.
- Convinced by Teddy's behavior that the plan won't work, she sets Plan B in motion.
- She destroys a fabricated version of Earth's atmosphere she controls, which wipes out humans but leaves animals alive.
- She cries, then the film closes on humans being erased worldwide. No ambiguity, no take-backs.
The point, without the noise
Michelle isn't a misunderstood savior; she's a judge with a failed pilot program. The more she sees, the more she believes aggression is the core engine of the species — a feature, not a bug. The drug was her attempt to sand that down. Teddy's spiral convinces her it won't take. So she flips the big switch. It's a bleak punchline, but also exactly the kind of sharp, nasty joke Lanthimos likes: the alien conspiracy theorists were right, just not in any way that helps them.