Bugonia Couldn't Be Stranger Than the Sci-Fi Psychological Drama It's Inspired By
Aegean avant-garde director Yorgos Lanthimos has built a reputation on extremely strange movies. His unique screenplays defy convention, such as The Lobster, in which singletons are compelled to form relationships or else be transformed into creatures. Whenever he interprets existing material, he tends to draw from source material that’s quite peculiar also — more bizarre, maybe, than his cinematic take. This proved true with 2023’s Poor Things, an adaptation of Alasdair Gray’s gloriously perverse novel, a feminist, sex-positive reimagining of Frankenstein. His film is good, but to some extent, his specific style of oddity and Gray’s balance each other.
His New Adaptation
His following selection for adaptation also came from far out in left field. The source text for Bugonia, his latest team-up with acclaimed performer Emma Stone, comes from 2004’s Save the Green Planet!, a confounding Korean mix of styles of science fiction, black comedy, terror, irony, psychological thriller, and police procedural. It's an unusual piece not primarily due to what it’s about — even if that's decidedly unusual — rather because of the frenzied excess of its atmosphere and storytelling style. The film is a rollercoaster.
A Korean Cinema Explosion
There must have been a creative spirit in South Korea during that period. Save the Green Planet!, helmed by Jang Joon-hwan, was included in an explosion of daringly creative, innovative movies from a new generation of filmmakers such as Bong Joon Ho and Park Chan-wook. It was released the same year as Bong’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, dark comedy, bitter social commentary, and genre subversion.
Narrative Progression
Save the Green Planet! focuses on an unhinged individual who kidnaps a chemical-company executive, convinced he is an alien from the planet Andromeda, plotting an attack. At first, this concept is presented as slapstick humor, and the young man, Lee Byeong-gu (the performer known for Park’s Joint Security Area and Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance), appears as a charmingly misguided figure. Alongside his innocent circus-performer girlfriend Su-ni (Hwang Jung-min) sport black PVC ponchos and ridiculous headgear fitted with psyche-protection gear, and use menthol rub in combat. Yet they accomplish in kidnapping drunken CEO Kang Man-shik (the performer) and bringing him to Byeong-gu’s remote property, a makeshift laboratory assembled on an old mine in a rural area, which houses his beehives.
Growing Tension
Hereafter, the story shifts abruptly into ever more unsettling. Byeong-gu straps Kang to a budget-Cronenberg torture chair and inflicts pain while declaiming absurd conspiracy theories, finally pushing the innocent partner away. Yet the captive is resilient; powered only by the conviction of his innate dominance, he is prepared and capable to subject himself awful experiences to attempt an exit and dominate the mentally unstable protagonist. At the same time, a comically inadequate police hunt to find the criminal gets underway. The officers' incompetence and incompetence recalls Memories of Murder, though the similarity might be accidental in a movie with a narrative that comes off as rushed and unrehearsed.
Unrelenting Pace
Save the Green Planet! plunges forward relentlessly, fueled by its manic force, trampling genre norms along the way, even when you might expect it to either settle down or falter. Sometimes it seems like a serious story on instability and overmedication; sometimes it’s a symbolic tale about the callousness of the economic system; alternately it serves as a claustrophobic thriller or a sloppy cop movie. Director Jang brings the same level of hysterical commitment throughout, and the lead actor delivers a standout performance, even though Lee Byeong-gu continuously shifts among visionary, lovable weirdo, and frightening madman in response to the film's ever-changing tone across style, angle, and events. One could argue it's by design, not a bug, but it can be pretty disorienting.
Designed to Confuse
Jang probably consciously intended to confuse viewers, mind. Like so many Korean films of its time, Save the Green Planet! is driven by an exuberant rejection for artistic rules in one aspect, and a quite sincere anger about societal brutality on the other. The film is a vibrant manifestation of a society finding its global voice amid new economic and cultural freedoms. It will be fascinating to witness Lanthimos' perspective on the original plot through a modern Western lens — arguably, a contrasting viewpoint.
Save the Green Planet! can be viewed online without charge.
