Bugonia is a brilliant film.
At its core, it tells the story of the American — or rather, universal — beaten-down believer: beaten by fate and consumed by conspiracy theories. According to the old saying that even a broken clock is right twice a day, the redneck in this film turns out to be right once in his lifetime. The real question is not if he is right, but at what cost.
Abused as a child, he grows up alone, carrying with him the pity of a police officer who once served as his babysitter. His devotion to the plan becomes absolute: in order not to be distracted, he castrates himself. His only accomplice, Donny, commits suicide when he finally understands what he has helped create. He poisons his mother with antifreeze. And in the end, he dies like a fool, attempting to teleport himself while wearing a bomb vest.
The supreme irony is that even when the idiot grasps the truth, he only ever reaches half of it. The aliens he discovers — and wants to eliminate in order to “save” the planet — are not invaders at all. They are the planet’s original inhabitants, returning in an almost tragic attempt to save humanity from idiots like Teddy.
Idiots believe they are saving the world.
In the end, they destroy it.
“No one can fuck with us. Not even ourselves.”
In an almost poetic twist, idiots chemically castrate themselves. If this mechanism truly worked in reality, humanity would disappear as a species without being hit by an asteroid and without being wiped out by a hostile alien race.
An Oscar-worthy film — a reminder that humanity’s darkest day won’t be brought by too few bees, but by far too many idiots.
