Bugonia Couldn't Be Stranger Than the Science Fiction Psychodrama It's Based On
Aegean avant-garde filmmaker Yorgos Lanthimos specializes in extremely strange movies. His original stories defy convention, like The Lobster, a film where single people are compelled to form relationships or face transformed into creatures. In adapting someone else’s work, he frequently picks source material that’s pretty odd also — more bizarre, maybe, than his adaptation of it. This proved true regarding the recent Poor Things, a screen interpretation of Alasdair Gray’s delightfully aberrant novel, a pro-female, liberated take on Frankenstein. His film is effective, but partially, his unique brand of eccentricity and the novelist's cancel each other out.
His New Adaptation
His following selection to interpret was likewise drawn from the fringes. The basis for Bugonia, his latest team-up with star Emma Stone, comes from 2004’s Save the Green Planet!, a bewildering Korean mix of styles of science fiction, black comedy, horror, irony, dark psychodrama, and cop drama. The movie is odd less because of its plot — though that is decidedly unusual — but due to the wild intensity of its atmosphere and storytelling style. It’s a wild, wild ride.
A Korean Cinema Explosion
It seems there was a creative spirit across Korea at the start of the millennium. Save the Green Planet!, helmed by Jang Joon-hwan, was included in a boom of audacious in style, boundary-pushing movies from a new generation of filmmakers like Bong Joon Ho and Park Chan-wook. It came out alongside the director's Memories of Murder and Park’s Oldboy. Save the Green Planet! isn't as acclaimed as those iconic films, but it shares many traits with them: extreme violence, dark comedy, pointed observations, and defying expectations.
The Plot Unfolds
Save the Green Planet! is about a troubled protagonist who abducts a business tycoon, believing he’s an alien from the planet Andromeda, plotting an attack. Initially, the premise is played as broad comedy, and the protagonist, Lee Byeong-gu (the actor Shin known for Park’s Joint Security Area and Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance), seems like a charmingly misguided figure. Alongside his innocent entertainer girlfriend Su-ni (the star) wear black PVC ponchos and absurd helmets encrusted with anti-mind-control devices, and use balm as a weapon. Yet they accomplish in abducting intoxicated executive Kang Man-shik (Baek Yun-shik) and transporting him to the protagonist's isolated home, a ramshackle house/lab assembled at a mining site in a rural area, which houses his beehives.
Growing Tension
Hereafter, the film veers quickly into ever more unsettling. Byeong-gu straps Kang to a budget-Cronenberg torture chair and inflicts pain while spouting absurd conspiracy theories, ultimately forcing the gentle Su-ni away. But Kang is no victim; fueled entirely by the belief of his elevated status, he can and will to subject himself terrifying trials just to try to escape and dominate the clearly unwell protagonist. Meanwhile, a notably inept investigation for the abductor begins. The cops’ witlessness and clumsiness recalls Memories of Murder, though the similarity might be accidental in a film with plotting that seems slapdash and improvised.
Constant Shifts
Save the Green Planet! plunges forward relentlessly, fueled by its own crazed energy, breaking rules along the way, long after it seems likely it to either settle down or run out of steam. At moments it appears like a serious story regarding psychological issues and pharmaceutical abuse; in parts it transforms into a fantasy allegory on the cruelty of corporate culture; alternately it serves as a dirty, tense scare-fest or a sloppy cop movie. Director Jang brings the same level of feverish dedication to every bit, and the performer delivers a standout performance, although the character of Byeong-gu keeps morphing between wise seer, lovable weirdo, and frightening madman depending on the movie’s constant shifts in tone, perspective, and plot. I think it's by design, not a mistake, but it can be pretty disorienting.
Intentional Disorientation
Jang probably consciously intended to confuse viewers, of course. Like so many Korean films from that era, Save the Green Planet! is driven by a gleeful, maximalist disrespect for genre limits partly, and a quite sincere anger about societal brutality on the other. It’s a roaring expression of a culture finding its global voice alongside fresh commercial and social changes. It promises to be intriguing to witness how Lanthimos views this narrative from contemporary America — possibly, a contrasting viewpoint.
Save the Green Planet! can be viewed online at no cost.
