Bugonia Isn't Likely to Be Weirder Than the Sci-Fi Psychodrama It's Adapted From

Aegean surrealist filmmaker Yorgos Lanthimos is known for highly unusual movies. The narratives he creates defy convention, like The Lobster, where single people are compelled to form relationships or face changed into beasts. In adapting existing material, he frequently picks original works that’s quite peculiar too — odder, maybe, than his adaptation of it. Such was the situation regarding the recent Poor Things, an adaptation of author Alasdair Gray's delightfully aberrant novel, a pro-female, open-minded take on Frankenstein. Lanthimos’ version is good, but to some extent, his specific style of oddity and the author's balance each other.

His New Adaptation

His following selection for adaptation also came from unexpected territory. The original work for Bugonia, his newest project alongside star Emma Stone, comes from 2004’s Save the Green Planet!, a bewildering Korean mix of styles of science fiction, dark humor, terror, satire, psychological thriller, and police procedural. It’s a strange film not so much for its subject matter — though that is highly unconventional — but for the chaotic extremity of its mood and directorial method. It's an insane journey.

A Korean Cinema Explosion

It seems there was a certain energy across Korea in the early 2000s. Save the Green Planet!, the work of Jang Joon-hwan, belonged to a boom of daringly creative, groundbreaking movies from a new generation of filmmakers including Bong Joon Ho and Park Chan-wook. It came out the same year as the director's Memories of Murder and Park’s Oldboy. Save the Green Planet! doesn't quite match up as those two crime masterpieces, but there are similarities with them: graphic brutality, dark comedy, sharp societal critique, and genre subversion.

Narrative Progression

Save the Green Planet! revolves around a disturbed young man who captures a corporate CEO, convinced he is an extraterrestrial hailing from Andromeda, intent on world domination. Early on, this concept unfolds as broad comedy, and the lead, Lee Byeong-gu (the actor Shin known for Park’s Joint Security Area and Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance), appears as a lovably deluded fool. Alongside his naive entertainer girlfriend Su-ni (Hwang Jung-min) sport slick rainwear and bizarre masks adorned with anti-mind-control devices, and employ ointment as a weapon. Yet they accomplish in seizing intoxicated executive Kang Man-shik (the performer) and taking him to Byeong-gu’s remote property, a makeshift laboratory assembled at a mining site amid the hills, which houses his beehives.

A Descent into Darkness

Moving forward, the story shifts abruptly into increasingly disturbing. The protagonist ties Kang into a makeshift device and subjects him to harm while spouting outlandish ideas, finally pushing his kind girlfriend away. However, Kang isn't helpless; powered only by the belief of his elevated status, he can and will to undergo horrifying ordeals just to try to escape and exert power over the mentally unstable kidnapper. Simultaneously, a notably inept investigation for the abductor commences. The cops’ witlessness and lack of skill echoes Memories of Murder, although it’s not so clearly intentional in a movie with a plot that comes off as rushed and spontaneous.

Constant Shifts

Save the Green Planet! plunges forward relentlessly, propelled by its own crazed energy, breaking rules without pause, long after you might expect it to either settle down or falter. At moments it appears to be a drama on instability and overmedication; at other times it becomes a metaphorical narrative about the callousness of corporate culture; sometimes it’s a claustrophobic thriller or an incompetent police story. Director Jang maintains a consistent degree of feverish dedication in all scenes, and the performer delivers a standout performance, even though the protagonist continuously shifts among visionary, lovable weirdo, and dangerous lunatic depending on the film's ever-changing tone across style, angle, and events. I think that’s a feature, not a flaw, but it might feel quite confusing.

Purposeful Chaos

The director likely meant to confuse viewers, indeed. Like so many Korean films from that era, Save the Green Planet! is powered by an exuberant rejection for stylistic boundaries on one side, and a quite sincere anger about human cruelty in another respect. It’s a roaring expression of a nation finding its global voice during emerging financial and social changes. It will be fascinating to see the director's interpretation of the same story through a modern Western lens — arguably, an opposite perspective.

Save the Green Planet! is available to stream at no cost.