Bugonia Isn't Likely to Be More Bizarre Than the Science Fiction Psychodrama It's Adapted From

Greek surrealist filmmaker Yorgos Lanthimos has built a reputation on highly unusual movies. His original stories veer into the bizarre, for instance The Lobster, in which unattached individuals must partner up or face being turned into animals. In adapting another creator's story, he often selects basis material that’s pretty odd too — odder, perhaps, than the version he creates. Such was the situation with 2023’s Poor Things, an adaptation of Alasdair Gray’s wonderfully twisted novel, a feminist, sex-positive reimagining of Frankenstein. The director's adaptation is effective, but in a way, his unique brand of weirdness and Gray’s cancel each other out.

His New Adaptation

His following selection to interpret also came from far out in left field. The original work for Bugonia, his latest collaboration with star Emma Stone, was 2004’s Save the Green Planet!, a perplexing Korean fusion of science fiction, black comedy, horror, irony, dark psychodrama, and cop drama. The movie is odd less because of its subject matter — even if that's decidedly unusual — rather because of the frenzied excess of its mood and storytelling style. It's an insane journey.

A New Wave of Filmmaking

There must have been a certain energy across Korea at the start of the millennium. Save the Green Planet!, the work of Jang Joon-hwan, was included in an explosion of stylistically bold, innovative movies by emerging talents of filmmakers such as Bong Joon Ho and Park Chan-wook. It came out the same year as the director's Memories of Murder and the filmmaker's Oldboy. Save the Green Planet! doesn't quite match up as those two crime masterpieces, but it shares many traits with them: extreme violence, morbid humor, pointed observations, and genre subversion.

The Story Develops

Save the Green Planet! revolves around a disturbed young man who kidnaps a business tycoon, believing he’s a being hailing from Andromeda, plotting an attack. Initially, the premise is played as slapstick humor, and the young man, Lee Byeong-gu (the actor Shin from Park’s Joint Security Area and Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance), comes across as a charmingly misguided figure. Together with his naive circus-performer girlfriend Su-ni (Hwang Jung-min) sport plastic capes and absurd helmets fitted with mental shields, and wield ointment as a weapon. However, they manage in abducting intoxicated executive Kang Man-shik (the performer) and taking him to a secluded location, a makeshift laboratory he’s built in a former excavation amid the hills, where he keeps bees.

Shifting Tones

Hereafter, the story shifts abruptly into increasingly disturbing. Lee fastens Kang into a makeshift device and inflicts pain while declaiming absurd conspiracy theories, ultimately forcing his kind girlfriend away. However, Kang isn't helpless; fueled entirely by the belief of his own superiority, he is prepared and capable to subject himself horrifying ordeals to attempt an exit and exert power over the clearly unwell younger man. Simultaneously, a notably inept investigation for the abductor commences. The officers' incompetence and incompetence is reminiscent of Memories of Murder, though it’s not so clearly intentional in a film with a narrative that seems slapdash and spontaneous.

Unrelenting Pace

Save the Green Planet! plunges forward relentlessly, driven by its wild momentum, breaking rules underfoot, well past it seems likely it to find stability or falter. Occasionally it feels like a serious story regarding psychological issues and overmedication; at other times it becomes a metaphorical narrative on the cruelty of corporate culture; alternately it serves as a grimy basement horror or a bumbling detective tale. Jang Joon-hwan brings the same level of feverish dedication in all scenes, and the lead actor shines, while the character of Byeong-gu continuously shifts between visionary, charming oddball, and terrifying psycho depending on the narrative's fluidity in tone, perspective, and plot. It seems this is intentional, not a flaw, but it can be rather bewildering.

Designed to Confuse

Jang probably consciously intended to confuse viewers, indeed. In line with various Korean films from that era, Save the Green Planet! is powered by an exuberant rejection for artistic rules partly, and a quite sincere anger about human cruelty in another respect. It stands as a loud proclamation of a society gaining worldwide recognition amid new economic and cultural freedoms. It will be fascinating to witness the director's interpretation of this narrative from contemporary America — arguably, a contrasting viewpoint.

Save the Green Planet! is available to stream for free.