Bugonia Isn't Likely to Be Stranger Than the Sci-Fi Psychological Drama It's Adapted From
Aegean avant-garde director Yorgos Lanthimos is known for highly unusual movies. The narratives he creates veer into the bizarre, such as The Lobster, a film where single people are compelled to form relationships or risk changed into beasts. In adapting existing material, he often selects source material that’s pretty odd too — odder, perhaps, than his adaptation of it. Such was the situation regarding the recent Poor Things, an adaptation of Alasdair Gray’s gloriously perverse novel, an empowering, liberated reimagining of Frankenstein. Lanthimos’ version is good, but to some extent, his particular flavor of eccentricity and the novelist's neutralize one another.
The Director's Latest Choice
His following selection for adaptation was likewise drawn from far out in left field. The source text for Bugonia, his recent project alongside star Emma Stone, comes from 2004’s Save the Green Planet!, a perplexing Korean fusion of sci-fi, dark humor, horror, irony, dark psychodrama, and cop drama. The movie is odd not primarily due to what it’s about — though that is far from normal — rather because of the frenzied excess of its tone and narrative approach. It's an insane journey.
The Burst of Korean Film
There likely existed a creative spirit in South Korea during that period. Save the Green Planet!, written and directed by Jang Joon-hwan, was included in a surge of audacious in style, innovative movies from a new generation of filmmakers like Bong Joon Ho and Park Chan-wook. It debuted concurrently with the director's Memories of Murder and the filmmaker's Oldboy. Save the Green Planet! doesn't quite match up as those celebrated works, but it shares many traits with them: extreme violence, morbid humor, sharp societal critique, and bending rules.
Narrative Progression
Save the Green Planet! revolves around a troubled protagonist who captures a corporate CEO, believing he’s a being from the planet Andromeda, intent on world domination. Initially, 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 an endearing eccentric. Alongside his naive circus-performer girlfriend Su-ni (the star) don slick rainwear and ridiculous headgear encrusted with mental shields, and employ menthol rub for defense. Yet they accomplish in kidnapping inebriated businessman Kang Man-shik (the performer) and transporting him to the protagonist's isolated home, a ramshackle house/lab assembled at a mining site amid the hills, home to his apiary.
Growing Tension
Hereafter, the narrative turns into something more grotesque. Byeong-gu straps Kang to a budget-Cronenberg torture chair and inflicts pain while spouting outlandish ideas, eventually driving the gentle Su-ni away. But Kang is no victim; powered only by the certainty of his innate dominance, he is willing and able to subject himself horrifying ordeals just to try to escape and exert power over the disturbed protagonist. Simultaneously, a comically inadequate manhunt for the abductor commences. The officers' incompetence and incompetence echoes Memories of Murder, though the similarity might be accidental in a movie with a narrative that seems slapdash and unrehearsed.
A Frenetic Journey
Save the Green Planet! just keeps barrelling onward, driven by its manic force, breaking rules along the way, long after you might expect it to calm down or lose energy. At moments it appears like a serious story about mental health and overmedication; sometimes it’s a symbolic tale about the callousness of capitalism; alternately it serves as a grimy basement horror or a bumbling detective tale. The filmmaker maintains a consistent degree of intense focus to every bit, and Shin Ha-kyun shines, even though the character of Byeong-gu keeps morphing between visionary, lovable weirdo, and frightening madman as required by the narrative's fluidity in mood, viewpoint, and story. One could argue that’s a feature, not a mistake, but it might feel quite confusing.
Intentional Disorientation
The director likely meant to disorient his audience, mind. Like so many Korean films from that era, Save the Green Planet! draws energy from a joyful, extreme defiance for genre limits in one aspect, and a genuine outrage about human cruelty on the other. It stands as a loud proclamation of a society finding its global voice alongside fresh commercial and social changes. One can look forward to see Lanthimos' perspective on the same story through a modern Western lens — possibly, an opposite perspective.
Save the Green Planet! is available to stream without charge.
