This post contains spoilers for the ending of Bugonia. 

One of the things I often struggle with is finding the right place to end a story, especially if it’s a longer one. When I wrote the GWWA book, for example, I wasn’t sure if I liked the ending, and as I edit that book (eventually) I may change the ending a little, move it forward or backward in time. 

An important thing to consider, though, is just how much ending there needs to be. The ending of Return of the King (which, I admit, I only saw once, in theaters, when it came out) seemed to take forever. I swear that movie ended about six times before it finally went to the credits. I’m sure LOTR purists will say all of that was necessary; I’m not sitting through the movie again to find out. 

When you’re writing sci-fi or horror, though, sometimes it can be better to end a story without showing what happens next. Letting the reader (or viewer) figure it out keeps them thinking about the story long after it’s over. I’m reminded of a sci-fi story I wrote some years ago about aliens coming to Earth; at the end, the protagonist enters the alien ship, and the story ends. We don’t need to know or see what happened to him; it would have unnecessarily extended the story. Instead, I left it up to the reader to decide what happened next. 

The reason I’m writing about this is because of the movie Bugonia. I watched it recently, and I knew the general shape of it before I started: a couple of guys kidnap the CEO of a major corporation because they think she’s an alien. (Here’s where the spoilers start.) As it turns out, she is one, and the guys (who you’re supposed to think just sit in a right-wing echo chamber) were right all along. At the end of the movie, the CEO brings one of the guys to her office and says her closet is a teleporter. She finds out that the guy has a bomb strapped to him, but is willing to “beam him up” to her ship. Unfortunately, when he goes into the closet his bomb detonates. At that point, we’re supposed to think this was all a ruse, that the CEO isn’t an alien after all. 

Once she is rescued by the paramedics, though, she escapes from the ambulance and returns to her office, going into the closet. There’s a flash of light, and–

And the story doesn’t end. 

I think that flash of light, plus the cops opening the closet to find no one there, would have been enough for a good, strong ending to the movie. Even if we’d seen the CEO come out of the teleportation goop on her ship, that would’ve been enough. But instead the movie goes on for another ten minutes — the CEO, who it turns out is the alien emperor, decides that humanity has lived out its time and does something to Earth’s atmosphere that causes all humans to die. 

Then the movie ends. 

I mean, I get it. It’s a Yorgos Lanthimos movie, and those are supposed to be weird. But I don’t think it was necessary to tack on those final ten minutes. We as an audience could have decided for ourselves, based on the things the CEO said while in captivity, what the next steps for the aliens would be. It would have kept us talking about the movie. We wouldn’t have a definitive answer. 

Sometimes in sci-fi and horror the lack of a definitive answer makes a story stronger. Bugonia is one case where it definitely would have. I still enjoyed the movie (for certain values of “enjoyed”), but I wish it had ended sooner.