Much is made in Bugonia about alienation — literally and figuratively — especially in the film’s book-ending statements. There are lots of ways to read this movie: as a satire of conspiratorial thinking, a portrait of how fragmented worldviews spiral into harmful self-delusions, or about echo chambers metastasizing into ideology. But what resonated with me most was its themes of class consciousness.

Contrary to the “cycles of violence” or “humans destroy themselves” reading, I don’t think the film’s ending is bleak in that self destructive way. Humanity’s annihilation by the Andromedans does not happen because humans are violent — it happens the very moment the mask slips, when someone directly confronts the underlying class relations governing their world. The Andromedans exterminate humanity not out of spite, but to prevent the emergence of genuine social understanding. Class consciousness is a dangerous thing for any ruling class, human or alien.

Lanthimos uses aliens, flat-earth motifs, and firmament-trutherisms to show this sudden break with the “ruling ideas” that structure the world. Marx wrote in The German Ideology that “The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas.” Breaking out of those ideas — ideas cemented into material reality at every level of life is a dangerous and extreme thing.

Revolution isn’t a dinner party, after all.