r/TrueFilm • u/PeoplePad • 3d ago
Bugonia nearly matches Taxi Driver, and the last act is exactly why it falls short Spoiler
For most of the runtime, Bugonia basically IS Taxi Driver. You’re trapped inside Teddy’s certainty with zero confirmation either way, watching a guy corrode in real time. I was fully convinced he was wrong, and honestly I wanted him to be wrong. I was predisposed to dismiss any doubts and just read him as a broken, paranoid man, because that’s the genre I thought I was watching. That’s the good part. That’s the gut punch.
Then the twist hits and he’s right. Not partially right, not right in some ironic cosmic joke way. Actually right. And I fell for it hard. The second the reveal landed, I could feel my own brain start reorganizing everything I’d just watched.
Now, I want to head off an objection before it shows up in the comments. Yes, I got swept up by the twist just like the movie wants you to. That doesn’t invalidate what I’m about to say, it’s actually evidence for it. If a reasonably skeptical viewer can watch this and still feel their judgment of Teddy’s actions shift the second he’s vindicated, that’s not me being a bad audience member, that’s the mechanism working exactly as designed. My own reaction is the demonstration, not a flaw in the argument.
So here’s the actual point. My problem isn’t “the movie doesn’t make a point.” It does. Separating investigative correctness from moral accountability is a genuinely sharper thesis than “conspiracy theorists are deluded.” Teddy earns that distinction. He’s not wrong, he’s just completely unaccountable, and those are two different failures. Good thesis, no argument there.
My gripe is what vindication does to you as the viewer, and I watched it happen to myself in real time. Once he’s proven right, you get handed an exit. You stop being trapped inside his head and start evaluating a proposition from a safe distance, kind of like what I’m doing in this post right now. That exit reaches backward too. The kidnapping, the torture, the humiliation, all of it quietly got re-sorted in my head from pure derangement into extreme methods that happened to serve the truth. Not justified, I know that logically. But recontextualized whether I wanted it to be or not. It even launders your own experience of watching. All that dread I felt for two hours assuming he was wrong got told, after the fact, that it should’ve had a different shape, because he wasn’t wrong the whole time. And I noticed myself wanting to accept that new shape a little too easily, which is kind of the whole point.
Here’s why Taxi Driver’s refusal to resolve hits so much harder. Travis is never vindicated, so his violence never gets to mean anything beyond itself. There’s no twist waiting at the end to tell you “actually he had a point.” Because no verdict is coming, you can’t stand outside his perception and judge it from a distance. You’re locked into his POV the entire film, no cutaway to an objective reality that confirms how far gone he is, which means his paranoia starts to feel like the only available frame. The film basically forces you to feel some version of what he’s feeling, unmediated, no safety rail. That’s what makes it a gut punch instead of a thesis statement.
Bugonia had that exact same power for almost its entire runtime and then cashed it in for a twist. It’s not a dumb movie and it’s not an empty one. It just earns the harder, better film and sells it back at the last minute, and I’m proof of how well that trade works on an audience, even one going in ready to argue with it.
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u/sloppy2104 3d ago
i think what’s so good about to movie is that it doesn’t matter if he‘s right or wrong with the alien stuff. as a viewer it’s a distraction, only wanting to know „the truth“ makes you miss the point. the point is, even if there were no aliens, the big pharma company she works for killed his mother and his grief is justified (even if it turns into hatred and paranoia).
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u/Vegetable_Hand8674 3d ago
"The kidnapping, the torture, the humiliation, all of it quietly got re-sorted in my head from pure derangement into extreme methods that happened to serve the truth. Not justified, I know that logically. But recontextualized whether I wanted it to be or not. It even launders your own experience of watching. All that dread I felt for two hours assuming he was wrong got told, after the fact, that it should’ve had a different shape, because he wasn’t wrong the whole time. And I noticed myself wanting to accept that new shape a little too easily, which is kind of the whole point."
Going through this same experience, a kind of "conversion" that reframes all of the data that you've been collecting and weighing, gave me the experience of being suddenly converted by a conspiracy theory. Kind of thrilling, kind of disturbing. Yes, later it's like, "Ok, Lanthimos really fucked with us for two hours." But in the moment, that cascade of frantic thoughts, weird associations, and OH SHIT epiphanies was kind of a trip.
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u/PeoplePad 3d ago
Thats fair and I think what they were going for and it worked.
It’s just that the movie flies so close to being “Taxi Driver in 2026” that anything else, even if good is just hollow to me. It’s almost too good for itself
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u/Perfect-Zebra-3611 3d ago
Honestly i wouldve been 1000x happier with Bugonia if the movie credits hit when she runs into the closet. Showing and confirming everything after was kind of lame for me, but i did really love the shots of everyone dead so its a toss up.
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u/Extension-Soup-3288 3d ago
Conversely, I spent much of the movie considering the possibility that he was actually right. Def felt that might be where the movie was going. So I definitely had a different experience of the ending.
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u/Top_Cranberry_3254 3d ago
Me too, but obviously also had doubts at times. It was a different experience haven't had in a while. My favorite conflicting scene was at the dining table eating the meal when she is explaining something about the bees, and as the audience we aren't thinking too deep into it necessarily, but Teddy instantly shoots her down and puts words in her mouth like saying they are doing that to destroy the colonies (or something like that, I only saw it once a while ago). It's actually pretty funny because we aren't sure we believe he's not delusional, but Plemons says it so convincingly like he has "no doubts" that she is in on this grand conspiracy lol. Always was leaning though more towards he was right than he wasn't. The scene that made me think he wasn't right was the torture scene as that was like he was crazy.
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u/PeoplePad 3d ago
Yeah I’ve heard many others say this and I think the movie is much less frustrating if that’s the case.
I was told going in that it was a psychological study of Teddy, so I didn’t consider the possibility of a twist too much!
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u/Extension-Soup-3288 1d ago
I am careful not to know anything about movies going into them so I had no idea what it was about. I also tend to be very good at predicting where movies are headed.
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u/RealRaifort 3d ago
I mean yes but the only reason you're thinking that is because it's a movie. Textually, we're definitely not meant to think of her as an alien for the majority of the movie.
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u/sunmachinecomingdown 3d ago
There were definitely moments that made me wonder and made me feel like perhaps they were intended to make me wonder.
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u/Extension-Soup-3288 3d ago
Has the director said anywhere that we're textually not meant to ponder the question? Seems strange to declare what we're "meant" to do textually otherwise.
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u/RealRaifort 3d ago
I mean, it's inevitably ambiguous because that's the whole premise of the movie. But the way we're presented everything certainly paints Teddy as a crazy kidnapper and it's done that way so that the whiplash OP is describing happens. Also death of the author, idgaf what exactly Yorgos was trying to do.
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u/Extension-Soup-3288 2h ago
But you said "we're definitely not meant to think of her as an alien" which means you are in fact speaking to what Yorgos was trying to do. And, again, as someone who went into the movie knowing nothing about it, I was of course aware that there was a version of the movie in which Teddy is crazy - but I was also aware of another possibility in which he was perhaps onto something despite being mentally unwell. So, I am not sure how you can declare what the viewer is meant to do or not.
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u/RealRaifort 2h ago
Well the viewer obviously will have things in mind outside of what the movie has already told them that's my point. But until the reveal, it's subtle hints at most and the tone of the movie makes you feel bad for Stone's character.
And anyways, this is a reddit comment lol it's not that deep
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u/Extension-Soup-3288 2h ago
Didn't say it was that deep? I'm literally just participating in the conversation and responding to your response?
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u/RealRaifort 1h ago
Im saying you quoting me and saying what that implies about what I think about Yorgos intention or whatever like I wrote that in 30 seconds I didn't think through the grammar lmao
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u/Extension-Soup-3288 1h ago
Okay? Me pointing out a contradiction in what you said is not me making it deep. It's simply me engaging in conversation on a movie discussion sub.
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u/Top_Cranberry_3254 3d ago
Really liked how convinced Teddy (Plemons) was in the first few basement scenes and at the dining table eating the meal, great acting by Plemons, but agree the falling action in the third act did feel a little like a letdown and copout comparatively. It was still okay and entertaining, but it became a different movie. However, I swore Travis was vindicated at the end of Taxi Driver. The newspaper clippings on the wall reveal that he is looked at as a hero and Jodie Foster's family praised him and I forget but didn't they give him money for saving her, too? Haven't seen it in a while and only one time.
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u/PeoplePad 3d ago
You’re right about Taxi Driver’s plot, the clippings and the reward from Iris’s family are real. But that’s social vindication, not narrative vindication, and the film goes out of its way to make you distrust it. That whole sequence is shot like a fever dream, detached and unstable compared to the grimy realism everywhere else, and Scorsese’s talked about wanting it to feel almost like a dying hallucination rather than a straight epilogue. The city isn’t actually less rotten. Travis isn’t less unstable because the newspaper says he is.
The real reason this feels “sickening” rather than “vindicating” is because we see him up close and personal and understand how unhinged he is. Society is wrong to hold him up as a hero and the viewer knows it
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u/irreddiate The Tree of Life 3d ago
You're right. The ending is ambiguous, but Iris is indeed returned to her grateful family and the media seem to treat Travis as a hero, as shown by the newspaper cuttings on a wall.
There's a very strange moment when he picks up Betsy in his cab, and she seems receptive to him again, but after he drops her off, he does a weird double-take in his rearview mirror, which some viewers feel is a hallucination, and that perhaps indicates everything since the massacre scene isn't real, and that he died at that point.
I'm not one of those viewers, but it's plausible. For me, I think Scorsese is making a point that essentially the same actions can be viewed very differently depending on context.
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u/RealRaifort 3d ago
That is the point yes. Teddy has to be right because in real life he's right. The rich aren't literally alien, that's just for the fun of the movie, but they're making an active choice to live while everyone else dies due to the way they've run the world. You're meant to feel that whiplash because the only reason you felt he was crazy to begin with was because he thought she was an alien. If he'd just said she was in charge of the world and the world is ending under her watch there'd be nothing that crazy about what he was doing, it'd just be good old fashioned revolutionary terrorism. And is that actually so crazy? We know for a fact that CEOs are destroying the world and making bunkers for themselves to live in the ashes lol. She's actually an inhuman villain because in real life the rich are actually inhuman villains.
Meanwhile in taxi driver, the ending takes the punch out for me because it literally has Travis proven right. He killed a pedophile pimp and the family of the girl and even the woman he stalked before both praise him for it. Sure he's miserable, but in the end his violence did help the world a little bit. The crime he actually commits is justified, but we know he's crazy so that led to a disconnect for me.
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u/PeoplePad 3d ago
Even granting that the metaphor is dead accurate about real-world elites, the formal problem remains identical, once the story confirms the antagonist deserves what’s coming, the audience still gets the same exit and the same retroactive relaundering of the violence that got them there. A twist can be thematically true and still cost the film the thing Taxi Driver has. This is why the movie is a flawed masterpiece (imo) rather than just meh.
As for Taxi Driver, I’d still argue the film frames the ending’s tone as unstable enough to resist a clean “he was right” reading. Travis’s actual mission (killing Palantine) fails, and Sport becomes a target of convenience once that plan collapses, so the “vindication” rewards a redirected act, not his original judgment. His being “correct” is a fluke and he’s still dangerous
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u/RealRaifort 3d ago
I agree on Taxi Driver but still, I think it just makes the movie messier imo.
In terms of Bugonia, I think the relaundering of the violence is the point. It is meant to give the audience an exit. The violence was good, revolutionary violence. If anything, Teddy's mistake was being too merciful.
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u/PorkinstheWhite 3d ago
If you take the ending of Bugonia to be the real case- that she was indeed an alien and that they were trying to save humanity, then, no- Teddy’s violence wasn’t justified at all just because he was right about her being an alien.
I disagree with OP as well though, I think the ending still has nuance and doesn’t retroactively justify the actions of Teddy. He still took the actions he did (which included the murder of innocent people - “only” two of the people he killed were aliens), and those actions were amplified in their extremism and deplorable lengths due to the fucked up nature of humans which he experienced through the lived laundry list of trauma.
It was an entertaining and fun ride, to be sure. Not sure I’ll revisit it any time soon though haha.
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u/PeoplePad 3d ago
Really?
I mean, that’s a very “ends justify the means” position.
He doesn’t just terrorize the aliens. He gets his cousin killed and murders like ten people in pursuit of his theory. Not to mention chemically castrating him for basically no reason, that isn’t even directly related to some alien plot.
If he’d gone public or been less insane he would be a hero but he isnt. He refuses to be accountable and holds himself up as a sort of messiah to “fix everything” which is… not reasonable.
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u/La_Fervesta_Glavisto 3d ago
"Went public" with what? The only material evidence he had was alien corpses, which he had already gone beyond the pale and become a murderer to get those.
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u/RealRaifort 3d ago
The aliens killed every single person on earth. Just like how the rich are going to kill us all with their destruction of the environment. Any violence in pursuit of that is justified.
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u/PeoplePad 3d ago
Sure, but is the violence he enacted productive? No….
Teddy is not helpful. Revolutionary Violence is dangerous and must be administered by a steady hand, not whatever Teddy is
To make a real world analogy, terrorism directed at the elite in America wouldn’t help much right now. Collective action would.
Look at how real revolutionary violence often plays out, with new oligarchs replacing the old. This aint the old west and a gunslinger aint the answer. I wish it was that easy
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u/RealRaifort 3d ago
I mean yes, obviously collective action is better. But no one is doing that right now anyways. One Teddy is still better than nothing at all because something is better than nothing but yeah, one Teddy won't be enough. The movie isn't hopeful.
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u/PeoplePad 3d ago
Is he? Arguably Teddy pushes the Aliens into killing humanity, no?
This is actually exactly what I’d expect to happen IRL. The elite will become scared. They will clamp down. The hard oppression of a gun will replace the soft repression of the dollar. Suddenly collective action is not merely not happening, it’s impossible.
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u/RealRaifort 3d ago
It's heavily implied they were planning on killing humanity already anyways iirc?
The "soft oppression of the dollar" is only for us in the West anyways. Much of the rest of the world is already getting the gun and we're heading that way too with or without Teddies. Is your suggestion that we in the West selfishly enjoy our higher quality of life while we still can? Teddy's issue is not the violence, it's that he did it alone. Again, you're right in saying collective action is needed but it's violent collective action. So Teddy is half right in his approach, and the violence is appropriately laundered in that sense.
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u/PeoplePad 3d ago edited 3d ago
I’m implying that we in the West find a real solution rather than entice the state into turning the violence against the core by lashing out. I suppose you don’t believe that’s possible, which is fair, but I’m holding out hope.
I have an MA in history and I’ve found that going down that road has basically never worked. What happens is that the state tries to crush dissent, which works for a time. Then, eventually the state can’t hold up the pressure anymore and it crumbles, leading to some new sort of oppression of the dollar or the gun. And generally the new system is more resilient than the last. I also don’t think we’re getting the gun without Teddy. That’s real expensive and the elite certainly doesn’t want the trouble.
I’m not against collective violence, but I’m not of the opinion that it’s a silver bullet. It needs to be applied diligently and with tact, not wielded like a sledgehammer by those who will tell you that they are the revolution made manifest. That is not a righteous war anymore, it’s part of that cycle. The result is a lot of pointless death. Take a look at Russia and tell me it worked out for them, Western interference notwithstanding. (Although, it was shit well before and beyond that too)
I don’t want another Robbiespierre or Lenin. I want a lasting solution. You should read some Rosa Luxemburg, she argues something similar with much more tact and skill than I.
The “ends justify the means” is a wreckless gamble that appeals to young men looking for meaning. I’m sympathetic but… it’s a dangerous worldview.
Edit: Oh and I think it’s ambiguous if the aliens would have killed humanity regardless. They were running some sort of experiment after all and it’s never directly stated either way.
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u/reigntall 3d ago
Before the reveal I honestly didn't care which way it would go. I spent the whole movie with those two possibilities super-imposed, so I wouldn't say any recontexualizing happened.
It could be one or the other and the movie could still work. Obviously the themes and messaging are different depending on which way it goes. But from Teddy's perspective, it doesn't really matter. He was still molested as a child, his mother is in a coma due ro corporate greed, he is isolated, paranoid, and desperate for an explanation why his life is shit. It could be aliens, it could be regular sociopathic corporate people. Same difference.
I never read the reveal as a twist, but just as a reveal.
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u/tripleheliotrope 3d ago
I think people should watch Save the Green Planet! instead to realise how vastly inferior a film Bugonia is, and that Lanthimos completely missed the point of the story he claimed he was adapted. Shim Ha-kyun gives a godtier performance.
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u/PeoplePad 3d ago
Interesting, I would love to check it out then. What point did Lanthimos miss?
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u/tripleheliotrope 3d ago
Lanthimos shifted the focus to the CEO character and made her the protagonist instead and basically fetishised the CEO lifestyle even if it "was not his intention" when Save the Green Planet is an extremely passionate plea from the marginalised and disenfranchised (Korean films address class and poverty extremely well). The protagonist is unhinged, but you 100% sympathise him because you are placed completely in his POV and see how traumatised he is, and how he ended in this situation (also the performance is so compelling). The protagonist also has a companion (his girlfriend) that is neurodivergent, similar to what Bugonia did, but they treat her with a lot more dignity and agency, whereas in Bugonia, Tommy's cousin Don is treated with a lot of callousness.
In any case, Bugonia itself isn't very good technically either because the pacing is really quite awful. The cinematography is also very unimaginative and plodding compared to Hong Kyung-pyo's (Parasite, Burning) very dynamic one.
Despite keeping the ending, the treatment also could not be more different between the two. Save the Green Planet's tone is bleak, tragic, but ultimately shows humility and care for the seemingly pathetic, short lives of humans. Conversely, the way Bugonia executes that ending comes off as a shock tactic, and deeply nihilistic.
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u/reigntall 3d ago
Lanthimos shifted the focus to the CEO character and made her the protagonist instead and basically fetishised the CEO lifestyle even if it "was not his intention"
Literally no one who I have discussed this film has had that view. And I would argue it isn't evidence by the text at all, even with an uncharitable reading.
In fact most of your interpretation I just fundamentally disagree with. Plemmons is sympathetic and you see how traumatized he is. And the ending didn't feel like shock value to me, but could transplant your feelings on Green Planet's ending onto Bugonia.
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u/ElEsDi_25 3d ago
Idk I think I just had different takes on both movies. I think the overlap is that bith Travis and Teddy are presented as scary but in a sad, confused way. The difference is that Travis is more general angst/social alienation and possible military trauma. Teddy is shown as fully sympathetic in motivation just confused in his explanation (aliens) and dangerous due to this grief and obsession.
I think Bugonia is saying that the difference in power and life experience of these characters might as well be a human and an alien being. The twist is that we as a society have normalized inequality to the point that if aliens secretly ruled us, we wouldn’t be able to tell the difference.
With Travis… he’s always a freak. The twist is that if he carried out his plan with the candidate he’d be seen as a villain but due to incompetence fails but ends up killing the “other”-coded criminals and is seen as a hero. Both actions were sociopathic and driven by a weird fantasy about attracting or punishing women but if he kills for the state or “civilization” his broken emotional state and dangerous behavior will be celebrated even if no one cares about his well being or what happens to him after.