Bugonia. Don't get put down, grabbing onto insanity for your life.

These "online people" seem crazier than ever.

This essay about the themes of the movie "Bugonia" Its not a review or does it contain spoilers.

Bugonia is the same old story, but for our times. Tales of class division, its consequences, and those most inspiring stories about kings learning to be the little people. Those are not new issues. They are older than capitalism and as old as human nature, the need to partition and focus on what’s in front of you. Once we hear a fact a third time, the thousandth doesn’t make a difference. It gets quieter, like a defense mechanism from hearing the same alarm for centuries. We already know our nature and that it’s an unimaginable amount of work to think about it. To listen to the person in front of us and challenge the views that made us. What else are we going to grab onto, spinning on this fragile planet of ours?

Set photo from the Bugonia movie.

One side is seemingly out of his mind. Years of pain and denial grew into his tangled trauma. But he isn’t without hope, not from the beginning. His every step further is a conscious decision. You can see his face change. Will he think and judge? Or go further in the direction that he was launched into a long time ago? He’s got his echo bubble, he is agreeing with himself already. He was certainly once wronged by this woman and is justified, even if he comes out wrong. And he won’t, because he decided to lose himself already.
    She, on the other side, is in the right. A victim of losers who grabbed onto her highness out of jealousy. Because she earned her place and is too big to lose. She is certainly smarter and more educated, doesn’t forget to mention that, but she wouldn’t use it on him because that would require some kindness. She is able to do it, as she spoke personally with every victim of her company’s actions with a curated smile. Now she would need to get out of her skin for a much longer time.
    But she is bound to a chair and isn’t speaking to somebody in need that is at the other side of a boot. You can see how she tries, because it’s a matter of survival for her. Once the violence starts, she is brought down to her wits and out of her ego.
    Both sides of this divide are forced to listen to one another. They try to get as little from each other as possible. To win, they need to quit their own realities, which are as similar to each other as they are hostile. She had theoretical degrees and he has his YouTube degree. In a cloud of confusion in the information age, the truth will come out of necessity. 

Back to square one. 

You can see him losing his mind and her regaining it. It’s shown by the way the Earth becomes more flat than round with every act break, and how little things begin to make too much convenient sense for the man that is losing his grip on reality. With every regrettable decision, he gets easier to manipulate. He doesn’t want to think about so many things that he will grab onto anything now set in front of him, and she is the one setting the stage.
    By the force of nature, she is more resilient and conniving. It doesn’t matter that we don’t recognize her anymore and that she might not be so fun at parties at home. She is not a hero, and he set up his failure by not acknowledging reality — the same thing that she just began to do. To survive, she needed to escape, and he shouldn’t have done what he did: kidnapping her. Then everybody would be at square one, on the same Earth again. 

In Bugonia, as nobody is able to acknowledge any truth, the woman does resemble an alien, and the humans are shown to be like bees that, once they become hard to manage, are put down with their owner’s choice.

At the end, the movie itself is going crazy. Every rule is sacrificed for the message. Every little person or king on Earth is now reduced and being put down. It’s by a god-like power that some might have been aware of, but it still wouldn’t have mattered. There is no plan or spaceship that would save the humans in this reality. No laser beam to wither your existential fears away. We are members of the same bee colony, and all that seems to matter is what’s good for the hive.