Bugonia (2025) movie review

 *SPOILERS*

Hello, 

I just finished watching the movie Bugonia. If you haven't watched it, and you're interested, I suggest stop reading. However, I wanted to do a movie review for it.

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 *SPOILERS*

I messaged ChatGPT, so I will post that reply as well: 

Here’s one way to think about why the ending might feel “wrong,” thematically:

For most of the film, Bugonia seems to be circling themes like:

Paranoia vs. meaning – the tension between hidden truth and personal delusion

Control and power – who believes they’re in charge, and who actually is

Absurdity of systems – corporations, society, even reality itself as bug-like, mechanical, or hive-minded

Human connection vs. alienation – especially in the main relationships

The tone is strange, analytical, almost meditative in its weirdness. You’re trained to look for metaphor, social commentary, or existential meaning in the surrealism.

Then, in the final five minutes, (without spoiling for anyone else reading), the movie seems to either:

1. Go very literal when it had been operating metaphorically

2. Or go very “cosmic / absurd” when it had been psychologically grounded

3. Or flip the power dynamic in a way that undercuts rather than deepens the earlier tension

Instead of feeling like the inevitable outcome of the themes, it can feel like:

• A twist for twist’s sake
• A detached joke after an intimate, unsettling ride
• Or an ironic shrug where you were expecting a thesis

Thematically, it’s like the movie asks you for a certain kind of intellectual and emotional buy-in, then cashes the check in a different currency.

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The whole movie set up so that the one main character is clearly mentally ill and delusional. And when Emma Stone's character does escape, the final scene does a disservice to her character. I think it would make more sense that if she does return to her work and enter the closet, that she has a mental breakdown or a psychotic episode. This would make more sense, because she had to "play the part" of the alien ambassador, and she experienced seeing death up close, in very traumatic ways. (There is a scene where Emma's character is reading the mentally ill person's journal, so this would make sense with this alternate ending). 

Personally, I thought it was a pretty good movie, up until the last 5 minutes. The way it ends really detracts from the whole theme of the movie, and it really doesn't make any logical sense.