🔗 Share this article Bugonia Can't Possibly Be Weirder Than the Science Fiction Psychological Drama It's Inspired By Greek surrealist filmmaker Yorgos Lanthimos specializes in distinctly odd movies. His original stories veer into the bizarre, for instance The Lobster, a film where single people need to find love or else be being turned into animals. Whenever he interprets existing material, he tends to draw from basis material that’s quite peculiar too — odder, perhaps, than the version he creates. Such was the situation for last year's Poor Things, a screen interpretation of Alasdair Gray’s wonderfully twisted novel, a pro-female, open-minded reimagining of Frankenstein. Lanthimos’ version is effective, but in a way, his specific style of weirdness and Gray’s balance each other. His New Adaptation His following selection to interpret also came from the fringes. The basis for Bugonia, his latest collaboration with star Emma Stone, comes from 2004’s Save the Green Planet!, a perplexing Korean fusion of sci-fi, dark humor, horror, satire, dark psychodrama, and police procedural. The movie is odd not so much for its plot — even if that's far from normal — but for the wild intensity of its mood and narrative approach. The film is a rollercoaster. A New Wave of Filmmaking There must have been a creative spirit within the country at the start of the millennium. Save the Green Planet!, written and directed by Jang Joon-hwan, belonged to a surge of audacious in style, boundary-pushing movies from a new generation of filmmakers including Bong Joon Ho and Park Chan-wook. It debuted concurrently with 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 it’s got a lot in common with them: graphic brutality, dark comedy, sharp societal critique, and defying expectations. Image: Tartan Video Narrative Progression Save the Green Planet! is about a troubled protagonist who kidnaps a chemical-company executive, believing he’s an extraterrestrial hailing from Andromeda, intent on world domination. Initially, the premise unfolds as broad comedy, and the young man, Lee Byeong-gu (the performer from Park’s Joint Security Area and Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance), appears as a charmingly misguided figure. Together with his childlike entertainer girlfriend Su-ni (Hwang Jung-min) sport plastic capes and absurd helmets encrusted with anti-mind-control devices, and employ balm in combat. Yet they accomplish in seizing intoxicated executive Kang Man-shik (Baek Yun-shik) and bringing him to Byeong-gu’s remote property, a makeshift laboratory assembled in a former excavation in a rural area, home to his apiary. Growing Tension From this point, the story shifts abruptly into something more grotesque. Byeong-gu straps Kang onto a crude contraption and physically abuses him while declaiming outlandish ideas, eventually driving the innocent partner away. However, Kang isn't helpless; powered only by the certainty of his own superiority, he can and will to undergo horrifying ordeals just to try to escape and dominate the disturbed younger man. At the same time, a deeply unimpressive manhunt for the kidnapper begins. The cops’ witlessness and incompetence is reminiscent of Memories of Murder, although it’s not so clearly intentional in a film with a narrative that comes off as rushed and unrehearsed. Image: Tartan Video A Frenetic Journey Save the Green Planet! just keeps barrelling onward, driven by its wild momentum, breaking rules along the way, even when one would assume it to either settle down or run out of steam. At moments it appears as a character study regarding psychological issues and excessive drug use; at other times it becomes a metaphorical narrative regarding the indifference of the economic system; sometimes it’s a claustrophobic thriller or an incompetent police story. Director Jang brings the same level of hysterical commitment in all scenes, and the lead actor shines, although Lee Byeong-gu continuously shifts between visionary, charming oddball, and terrifying psycho as required by the narrative's fluidity in mood, viewpoint, and story. It seems this is intentional, not a bug, but it may prove rather bewildering. Purposeful Chaos Jang probably consciously intended to disorient his audience, mind. In line with various Korean films of its time, Save the Green Planet! draws energy from a joyful, extreme defiance for stylistic boundaries partly, and a quite sincere anger about man’s inhumanity to man in another respect. It’s a roaring expression of a nation gaining worldwide recognition during emerging financial and social changes. One can look forward to witness the director's interpretation of the original plot through a modern Western lens — possibly, a contrasting viewpoint. Save the Green Planet! is available to stream without charge.