Bugonia Beat Sheet Analysis
Why We Chose to Do a Save a Cat! Beat Sheet Analysis of Bugonia
Four Oscar® nominations, including Best Picture and Best Adapted Screenplay. BAFTA: 5 nominations, including Best Screenplay (Adapted) and Best Director. WGA: nominated for ” – Bilge Ebiri, New York and Vulture
Screenplay by: Will Tracy, based on the 2003 South Korean film Save the Green Planet! written by Jang Joon-hwan
Directed by: Jorgos Lanthimos
Genre: Institutionalized
These stories are about how a hero who is entrenched inside a certain group, institution, or establishment fits into that system—or doesn’t. The hero must decide if being part of the group is worth it, and must choose to join, leave, or destroy it. Ultimately, all the stories in this category come down to this question: Who’s crazier… me or them?
The 3 elements of an INSTITUTIONALIZED story are:
1) Every story in this category is about a group—a family, an organization, or a business that is unique.
2) The story is a choice, the ongoing conflict pitting a “Brando” or “Naif” vs. the system’s “Company Man.”
3) Finally, a sacrifice must be made and you get three endings: join, burn it down… or commit “suicide.”
Save the Cat! Beat Sheet Analysis for Bugonia
Opening Image
A vibrant, color-drenched close-up of a purple verbena and a honeybee could lull us into thinking that the tone of Bugonia will be peaceful, except for two factors: 1. This is a Yorgos Lanthimos film, and 2. Teddy Gatz’s (Jesse Plemons) VO states that pollination is “… like sex, but cleaner. And nobody gets hurt.”
So, we can safely assume that the story we’re about to see will be extremely messy and a lot of people will get hurt.
Theme Stated
Teddy schools Don (Aidan Delbis) on the aliens’ method of destruction: “That’s the way they planned it, to make us the same as the bees. A dead colony, atomized in a trillion directions, with no way home again.”
At the heart of this excessively dark comedy is a poignant tale about being emotionally homeless, disconnected, trying to orient oneself in the chaos by finding someone or something to blame. Perhaps that way, suffering can have meaning and Teddy can reimagine himself as a savior rather than an utterly lost soul.
Set-Up
In his lonely and isolated thesis world, conspiracy theorist Teddy Gatz is distraught over the death of bees in the apiary on his run-down farm where he lives with his autistic cousin Don. Teddy doesn’t believe the usual explanations of this CCD (Colony Collapse Disorder) like pesticides or climate change; he’s certain that aliens are the cause.
So, he and Don have been in training— ya know, the usual, yoga, abstaining from screen time, chemical castration—to save the planet. There are too many things that need fixing to name with Teddy, including madness, but the deep emotional pain in Plemons’ moving performance and his affection for Don in numerous Save the Cat! moments keep us tied to him as a (not completely anti-)hero.
In contrast to the troubled Teddy and anxious Don, we meet the CEO of the pharmaceutical company, Auxolith, Michelle Fuller (Emma Stone), a woman as bright and sharp as a diamond. Just how much Lanthimos is deliberately tipping his hand by making Fuller almost superhuman is up for debate, but her attempts to be a “relatable” boss are pretty hilarious, setting up a question in the viewer’s mind as to whether Teddy is really off base in his E.T. assessment.
Catalyst
Teddy and Don drug and abduct Michelle (and her very expensive SUV) from her home.
Debate
It’s a Keystone Cops-meets-Pulp-Fiction sequence as the kidnappers fumble and bumble their way through getting Michelle into captivity, seemingly almost stunned by their success while pushing the envelope of brutality. They shave off her hair down to the scalp, cover her entire body in a thick layer of antihistamine cream, and chain her to a cot in the basement.
Break into Two
Once Michelle has regained consciousness, Teddy marshals us into Act Two with a speech welcoming her to the headquarters of the human resistance and promising they will try to adhere to the guidelines of the Geneva Convention in dealing with her.
B Story
In flashback, we meet Teddy’s B Story relationship, his mother, Sandy (Alicia Silverstone), as she agrees to participate in a clinical trial for opioid addiction. Sandy has been a largely terrible and absent mother, but she’s all Teddy’s got and his attempts to rescue her are the only way to orient himself and find his way home.
Fun and Games
As Michelle has always been absolutely accustomed to calling the shots and Teddy has absolutely not, it’s quite the power struggle in this antithesis world. Michelle assumes that this is a standard kidnapping that can be taken care of by the right amount of money and is understandably taken aback by Teddy’s assertion that since she is a high-ranking official of the Andromedan alien race, the only way out of her predicament is by arranging a meeting with her Emperor before the upcoming lunar eclipse.
As much as Michelle would like to laugh, cry, or break out the tinfoil hats, Teddy’s rage in accusing the Andromedans of killing his entire family is so palpable, it’s clear she’s in genuine danger. She tries to gently analyze Teddy, help him to see that he’s been radicalized by his internet feedback loop, but he’s having none of it. If she doesn’t confess, she’ll end up like “the others,” which is a pretty ominous comment that scares Michelle into a new tactic: admitting that she is, indeed, an alien. Does that make Teddy happy?
It does not. Teddy hooks Michelle up to a homemade electroshock chair and hits her with 400 volts of electricity while Don cries and begs him to stop.
Midpoint
In a flashback False Defeat, A and B Stories cross as we discover the reason for Teddy’s fury: the Auxolith drug that was supposed to help Sandy overcome her addiction put her in a vegetative coma from which she has not awakened in many years. The stakes are raised as it becomes clear that it was Michelle Fuller herself who broke the news to a young Teddy and we’re now certain that he will eventually kill her for revenge.
Bad Guys Close In
Michelle doesn’t die from the electrocution and Teddy’s inner bad guys start to take control; unable to make sense of her survival and feeling like he’s failing his mother, Teddy gets more and more dysregulated. When Michelle tries to apologize to Teddy for Sandy’s condition and offer him reparation money, he attacks and tries to strangle her.
They are interrupted by the appearance of a cop, but this is not “the good guy with a gun”; it’s Casey Boyd (Stavros Halkias), a feckless deputy sheriff who used to be Teddy’s babysitter and yet another in the long line of adults who failed Teddy by molesting him. Casey munches on cake and apologizes for the past as Teddy sits there, sweaty and barely keeping himself together, somehow forced into saying he forgives Casey over and over.
Meanwhile, Michelle gets into Don’s head, trying to reason with him, promising to fix everything. Don simply can’t process all the emotions that are overwhelming him, his loyalty to Teddy vying with his despair. He begs Michelle to take him away from Earth, there is nothing for him here anymore. Once she makes that promise, Don shocks her by shooting himself. Casey hears the shot, so Teddy attacks and murders him, then picks up his shotgun and runs to the basement to kill Michelle.
But Michelle stops Teddy cold by telling him she has a cure for his mother. All he has to do is take the bottle labeled “Antifreeze” in the back of her car, because, of course, it’s not really antifreeze but Auxolith’s new medication, and inject it into Sandy.
Teddy may be crazy and obsessive, but he’s also whip-smart and good at sniffing out a lie, which is what makes his confusion and capitulation even more heartbreaking. Reeling from Don’s death and desperate to save his mother, he bikes to the hospital and injects the “cure” into Sandy.
All Is Lost
Who dies. Of course. The whiff of death we sniffed from a mile away.
Dark Night of the Soul
Wild with grief, Teddy races home to kill Michelle for real this time, but falls further down the rabbit hole of anguish and disorientation as she proclaims his, and indeed, all mankind’s complicity in death and destruction.
Break into Three
Because—wait for it—she is an Andromedan and never fear, Teddy can still save his planet! Smash cut to “The Night of the Lunar Eclipse”!
Finale
We are living in anticipation of what this synthesis will reveal and Bugonia does not disappoint.
Teddy executes the plan by taking Michelle to the Auxolith headquarters at gunpoint, eager to meet the Andromedan Emperor in the confines of her office clothes closet.
In a small high tower surprise (there are more, trust us), Teddy reveals to Michelle that he has strapped explosives to his body just in case she double-crosses him—and promptly blows himself up, with a chef’s-kiss touch of black humor as a severed Jesse Plemons head flies across the room and knocks Michelle on her ass.
Since Teddy is unable to execute the new plan due to his untimely demise, Michelle takes over. She escapes an ambulance, limps back to Auxolith, and in either the most, or least, surprising high tower surprise ever, depending on the viewer’s trust in Yorgos Lanthimos’ level of insanity, dashes into the closet and beams herself up to her home planet.
The Andromedans meet to lament the state of their experiments to make humans more humane and since Michelle is their Empress (of course she is), she is given the task of ending humanity. With deep sadness in her eyes, she pops the protective bubble over Earth and kills off every single man, woman, and child; as our Theme proposed, there is no way home again.
Final Image
The good news is that the doggies and kitties have survived, as we see them mewing and licking the faces of their deceased owners, but even better, the bees made it, too. Our Final Image of the queen bee in Teddy’s apiary matches the tone of the Opening Image: peaceful, clean, and possibly for the first time in the history of mankind… nobody gets hurt.
Check out the Beat Sheet Analyses for these other Oscar®-nominated films:
