Bugonia

Teddy Gatz is a withdrawn, anti-corporate beekeeper in rural Ohio who has spent years compiling evidence that humanity is being slow-walked into extinction by extraterrestrials hiding in plain sight. His mother lies in a coma after a years-long mystery illness he blames on industrial pollution from Auxolith, a major biotech firm. He has identified Auxolith's CEO Michelle Fuller as a senior agent of an Andromedan colonisation effort. He has been planning her abduction for years and shares the basement of his late uncle's house with his cousin Don, a sweet, easily-led young man who is the only person in the world who will help him do it.

Late one night they snatch Michelle from her driveway and drag her down into the basement. They shave her head — Teddy believes Andromedans transmit and receive via hair — strap her into a homemade restraint chair, and bathe her in vinegar, which Teddy is sure is fatal to her species. Michelle insists, with steel nerves, that she is a human being and is going to destroy them legally for this.

For days Teddy delivers an unhinged interrogation: he wants her to summon the Andromedan emperor for negotiation. He shows her his rooms full of research, the maps of Auxolith's environmental crimes, the timeline of the colonisation. Don oscillates between belief and concern. Michelle works on Don. She offers him a future on the other side of this — money, freedom, a normal life — and slowly drives a wedge between the cousins.

A local sheriff arrives on a wellness call after Michelle's office reports her missing. Teddy kills him in the kitchen in a panicked, brutal struggle. He and Don bury the body in the yard. Michelle nearly escapes once when Don is left alone with her, but Teddy catches her and the violence between captor and captive sharpens.

Michelle, finally cornered, drops the act. She admits she is exactly what Teddy thinks she is — a senior officer of an Andromedan expedition. She offers him a deal: she will summon her people if he gives her the freedom to do so. Teddy lets her use his own ritual to send the signal. The signal goes out.

The ship comes. A pulse sweeps the planet. Teddy and Don and Michelle and the basement and the bees and the Ohio fields and every human who has ever stood on this Earth are gone. The film closes on what is left — bees in a quiet field, pollinating an inheritance that no longer has anyone in it to inherit. Teddy's conviction was correct. His understanding of what acting on it would cost, less so.