Bugonia on the United Healthcare CEO Shooting

The first quarter of Bugonia, a black comedy film directed by Yorgos Lanthimos, deliberately keeps its viewers in the dark. The film follows Teddy Gatz (Jesse Plemons) and his cousin Don (Aidan Delbis) as they physically and mentally prepare to face off against a very dangerous but unnamed threat. They start by doing push-ups and yoga, but quickly escalate to buying paper masks of Jennifer Aniston’s face and chemically castrating themselves, making it very difficult to guess the nature of the threat. Just when the suspense starts to tip over from intriguing to frustrating, Teddy and Don initiate their plan: they kidnap Michelle Fuller (Emma Stone), CEO of pharmaceutical company Auxolith and demand that she confess to being an Andromedan alien. 

If that plot seems completely random to you, it’s because Bugonia is an American remake of director Jang Joon-hwan’s Korean movie Save the Green Planet! (2003)—which was, in turn, partly inspired by a blog post claiming that Leonardo DiCaprio was an alien attempting to conquer Earth by seducing all of its women. Though Jang was set to direct the American remake of his own movie, he had to step down due to health issues—it was soon after that Lanthimos, his replacement, and producer Ari Aster (who directed and wrote both Midsommar and Hereditary) decided to reverse the gender of the male CEO in Save the Green Planet! and cast Emma Stone as the head of Auxolith. Compared to Save the Green Planet!, Bugonia’s modern American context and female protagonist allow it to explore the question of whether or not the recent rise in hostility towards healthcare CEOs would be as justifiable if conflated with misogynistic incel ideology that has also been gaining popularity as of late.

The most pressing issue in Bugonia (despite the kidnapping, of course) is how the healthcare system—specifically, pharmaceutical CEOs—can fail patients. Throughout the film, the connection between Michelle and Teddy is hinted at (minor spoilers ahead) until Michelle finally recognizes Teddy as the son of a patient who had been part of her company’s failed medication trial. When she points this out, it triggers a fictionalized flashback in which Teddy is holding his comatose mother’s floating body by her IV tube, as a child holds a balloon, while Michelle offers him a performative apology for his mother’s failed treatment and promises him monetary compensation. This realization pushes the audience to feel empathy for Teddy despite his apparent craziness—perhaps the kidnapping is an attempt to avenge his mother? Is his alien theory a manifestation of his grief? Though neither would justify his actions, we can at least understand what prompted his actions. With these possible motivations in mind, Teddy’s actions bear uncanny resemblances to the murder of the UnitedHealthcare CEO that occurred in December 2024, where 26-year-old Luigi Mangione fatally shot Brian Thompson after “expressing anger with what he called ‘parasitic’ health insurance companies and a disdain for corporate greed and power”—a case that was notable in its outpouring of public support for Mangione as opposed to the shooting victim. Even those who did not support Mangione at least acknowledged the importance of addressing rising healthcare costs and the predatory nature of healthcare companies; Bugonia appears to explore this same phenomenon through Teddy’s backstory.

However, a key difference from both the UnitedHealthcare CEO case and the original movie Save the Green Planet! is that Bugonia features a female CEO. The kidnapping of a female CEO as opposed to a male one introduces a gender divide that was not present in Save the Green Planet!. As mentioned above, chemical castration is one of the ways in which Teddy and Don prepare to confront Michelle; Teddy insists that it is a necessary step to clear their mind of distractions and prevent “it” (later revealed to be Michelle) from mentally manipulating them. It is clear that the men in this movie—Teddy and, to an extent, Don—view Michelle’s womanhood as a threat. In this way, Bugonia’s gender flip adds a layer of nuance to the current widespread hatred of healthcare CEOs: Is such an extreme level of disdain and violence still justifiable when it seems, in part, to be motivated by her identity and not her profession? The fact that Michelle is not set up to be a likeable CEO further complicates this question: she criticizes her company’s diversity training script for using the word “diverse” too many times and tells her employees that they are free to leave at 5:30…unless, of course, they still have work to do. Still, these faults are hardly sufficient to justify Teddy’s cruel treatment of her.  

Teddy’s dehumanization of Michelle, combined with the fact that the film takes an absurdly long time to reveal the reason why he kidnapped her (in fact, it takes almost 14 times longer than the original to explicitly mention the alien conspiracy), has misogynistic implications. Teddy’s dialogue strongly reminded me of incel ideology that has unfortunately been gaining popularity in recent years, stemming from toxic online forums but substantiated in recent femicide cases and general misogyny. Teddy intentionally dehumanizes Michelle by referring to her as “it” immediately after Don asks if “she’ll try to hurt us”, subtly correcting Don’s conception of Michelle not only as a human, but also as a woman. He also paints her as a monstrous threat that will cage them into “pain traps” of “procreation and seed spread and monogamy” and take away their freedom without presenting any concrete evidence to prove his claims. On top of that, Teddy and Don both touch her without consent, shaving off her hair and rubbing antihistamine cream over her body after rendering her unconscious. Based on these violations of Michelle, it would not be unreasonable for both her and the audience to assume that her kidnapping was motivated by her gender; at this point in the movie, misogynistic or sexual motives would be more probable explanations for the kidnapping than an alien conspiracy. Michelle herself acknowledges this fact when she tells Teddy, “I'm also a high-profile female corporate executive. Does that add a certain…politicized optics to this? I would say absolutely; the role that her gender plays in the nature of the kidnapping, and its perception by society, is directly addressed by the film. Even after they reveal their true motives, they use her alienness to justify the violence they enact against her—and the justification of violence against women is the culmination of incel ideology, as best exemplified by a hit show released earlier this year, Adolescence (2025). 

Overall, Bugonia is an ambiguous film that forces the audience to both hate and empathize with every one of its characters. Michelle is a greedy, out-of-touch boss, and it was her company’s medication that left Teddy’s mom comatose; however, that in no way warrants her brutal kidnapping and torture. Teddy is a psychopathic kidnapper, but he does it to avenge his mom and, in his mind, save the planet. Though instinctively, you’re more likely to be on Michelle’s side than Teddy’s, his unwavering conviction throughout the entire movie that she is an alien will have you doubting your own beliefs until the very end.

Sadie Cho is a Junior at Columbia College, majoring in English and Psychology. 

@sadie.y.cho