Conspiracy and Annihilation as Reparative Practices: On Yorgos Lanthimos’s Bugonia

Editorial note: The following review contains plot spoilers.

1.

“Inhuman” is a word we often use to describe powerful leaders and corporate CEOs who seem so far removed from ordinary life that their motives and behavior appear almost alien. They are “inhuman” not only in their cruelty or indifference but in the etymological sense of the word alienus—foreign, hostile others.

Yorgos Lanthimos’s Bugonia (2025) takes this metaphor literally, or rather lets its protagonist, Teddy Gatz (Jesse Plemons), do so. Teddy is a downtrodden warehouse worker and amateur beekeeper who becomes convinced that the world’s evils stem from the fact that aliens have secretly taken over the planet. His main target is his boss, corporate CEO Michelle Fuller (Emma Stone), whom he believes to be an extraterrestrial in human disguise, orchestrating humanity’s slow destruction.

Michelle Fuller is not just any executive: she heads Auxolith, a sprawling conglomerate whose reach extends from pharmaceuticals to agribusiness and logistics. In the film’s opening, her daily routine—choreographed with Lanthimos’s trademark detachment—is so cold and mechanical that she does seem otherworldly. Michelle embodies the institutions of late capitalism and the triple devastation they inflict: ecological, bodily, and social. Teddy’s mother has fallen into a coma after volunteering for an Auxolith drug trial; his beehives are dying from Colony Collapse Disorder linked to the company’s pesticides; and his colleagues endure dangerous working conditions but dare not complain for fear of losing their jobs.

Michelle embodies the institutions of late capitalism and the triple devastation they inflict: ecological, bodily, and social.

Auxolith pays for Teddy’s mother’s ongoing treatment, but this financial gesture—this “reparation”—is hollow. Money cannot compensate for the loss of her living presence. Bugonia thus opens with the failure of conventional reparation, revealing a world in which injustice and injury persist despite token compensations. Corporate accountability, Lanthimos suggests, has become purely performative.

When official mechanisms of justice fail, where can one turn? Teddy, the film tells us, has tried everything—from white-supremacist circles to Marxist study groups—without relief. Powerless and angry, he turns to the internet, assembling pseudoscientific fragments into a grand narrative in which aliens are responsible for everything from his mother’s coma to the dying bees. His true solace thus comes from a grand phantasmatic conspiracy theory, which repairs something that the real world has broken: his sense of coherence, agency, and meaning. In this worldview, his suffering finally makes sense, and his life gains purpose. 

Bugonia shows how conspiracy can operate as a kind of emotional or existential reparation for those abandoned by the social order: it is the people’s counterfeit of justice, a distorted attempt to reintroduce moral causality into an unjust and opaque world. Teddy and his cousin Don (Aidan Delbis) eventually abduct Michelle, imprisoning her in their basement in the hope of forcing her to confess her alien origins. Lanthimos treats conspiracy not with ridicule but with mournful lucidity. Through Jesse Plemons’s deeply sympathetic performance, we see how desperately Teddy wants his story to be true. When Michelle tells him that the antifreeze liquid in her car could cure his mother, he races to the hospital and injects it—only for it to kill her instantly.

Teddy is no mere villain. He is a working-class man from rural Georgia, caring for a comatose mother and his coworkers, haunted by past abuse, and clinging to precarious employment. Smart and well-read, he simply orients his intelligence in the wrong direction, channeling genuine analytical curiosity into delusional synthesis. His grand narrative offers him compensatory empowerment: a sense of mission, a way to see himself as savior and hero. By believing he is fighting cosmic evil, he becomes someone acting meaningfully to redeem a world that has rendered him invisible. But the tragic irony is that this self-authored mythology turns catastrophic. His fantasies culminate in psychopathic torture, murder, and finally suicide.

2.

In an important essay on conspiracy theory that deserves to be translated into English, Italian writer Wu Ming 1 (Roberto Bui) warns against the naïveté of dismissing all conspiracies as fiction. “The most common mistake,” he writes, “is to deny the very existence of conspiracies, thereby discrediting all denunciation and calling ‘conspiracy theory’ any disturbing inquiry or manifestation of critical thought. Yet conspiracies have existed, still exist, and will always exist” (La Q di Qomplotto, 2021, our translation). His point is not to validate paranoia but to restore discernment. He urges us to distinguish between real and imaginary conspiracies: the latter are vast, totalizing, and endlessly self-confirming; the former are concrete, fragile, and historically situated—susceptible to exposure and defeat.

Conspiracy, first absurd and delusional, then real, has paradoxically saved the planet. A kind of planetary reparation.

In Bugonia, this distinction collapses in an absurdist and terrifying twist. The film’s ending—perhaps a dream, perhaps not—reveals that Michelle Fuller, the corporate executive abducted by Teddy and Don, truly is an alien empress. Yet when the paranoid fantasy turns out to be true, revelation brings no redemption. After convening her alien council, Michelle decides to annihilate human life on Earth. How are we to understand this ending? On one level, Teddy’s desperate search for meaning literally ends the world; on another, it saves every other form of life. In the film’s final image, after the apocalypse, bees return to their hives. Conspiracy, first absurd and delusional, then real, has paradoxically saved the planet. A kind of planetary reparation.

Lanthimos has insisted in interviews that his film is not nihilistic. And indeed, the sudden extinction is rendered with disarming serenity: no flames or fear, no blood or rolling heads—only a soothing stillness, an almost tender, even blissful quiet surrounding the dead bodies. Yet if the disappearance of humankind appears not as a terrifying apocalypse but as the restoration of a cosmic balance, what kind of hope remains? Perhaps Bugonia’s most unsettling suggestion is that repair, in an age ravaged by social and ecological collapse, can only begin after us—that the world might heal precisely by relinquishing the human. What emerges, then, is a truly posthuman myth: an ecological messianism, secularized through the figure of the extraterrestrial. Hope remains, but not for us.

Saarbrücken, Germany / Liège, Belgium