Aegean avant-garde director Yorgos Lanthimos has built a reputation on extremely strange movies. His original stories defy convention, such as The Lobster, in which single people are compelled to form relationships or risk being turned into animals. Whenever he interprets existing material, he often selects basis material that’s quite peculiar as well — stranger, perhaps, than the version he creates. This proved true regarding the recent Poor Things, a screen interpretation of author Alasdair Gray's gloriously perverse novel, a pro-female, sex-positive take on Frankenstein. His film stands strong, but in a way, his unique brand of oddity and the novelist's cancel each other out.
His following selection for adaptation similarly emerged from the fringes. The original work for Bugonia, his newest team-up with leading actress Emma Stone, comes from 2004’s Save the Green Planet!, a perplexing Korean mix of styles of science fiction, dark humor, horror, satire, dark psychodrama, and police procedural. It's an unusual piece 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.
There must have been something in the air in South Korea during that period. Save the Green Planet!, the work of Jang Joon-hwan, was included in a surge of stylistically bold, boundary-pushing movies from a new generation of filmmakers such as Bong Joon Ho and Park Chan-wook. It came out concurrently with Bong’s Memories of Murder and the filmmaker's Oldboy. Save the Green Planet! isn’t on the same level as those iconic films, but it’s got a lot in common with them: extreme violence, morbid humor, bitter social commentary, and genre subversion.
Save the Green Planet! is about an unhinged individual who captures a chemical-company executive, convinced he is an alien hailing from Andromeda, plotting an attack. Initially, this concept unfolds as broad comedy, and the young man, Lee Byeong-gu (the performer known for Park’s Joint Security Area and Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance), seems like an endearing eccentric. He and his naive entertainer girlfriend Su-ni (the star) don black PVC ponchos and bizarre masks encrusted with anti-mind-control devices, and employ balm as a weapon. But they do succeed in seizing inebriated businessman Kang Man-shik (actor Baek) and taking him to the protagonist's isolated home, a dilapidated building he’s built at a mining site amid the hills, where he keeps bees.
Hereafter, the narrative turns into something more grotesque. Lee fastens Kang to a budget-Cronenberg torture chair and inflicts pain while ranting absurd conspiracy theories, eventually driving his kind girlfriend away. Yet the captive is resilient; driven solely by the conviction of his innate dominance, he can and will to subject himself horrifying ordeals in hopes of breaking free and dominate the clearly unwell kidnapper. At the same time, a notably inept police hunt to find the criminal commences. The cops’ witlessness and incompetence is reminiscent of Memories of Murder, although it’s not so clearly intentional within a story with a narrative that comes off as rushed and improvised.
Save the Green Planet! plunges forward relentlessly, driven by its wild momentum, defying conventions without pause, even when it seems likely it to either settle down or falter. Occasionally it feels as a character study on instability and overmedication; in parts it transforms into a fantasy allegory about the callousness of the economic system; alternately it serves as a dirty, tense scare-fest or an incompetent police story. Director Jang maintains a consistent degree of feverish dedication throughout, and Shin Ha-kyun delivers a standout performance, even though the character of Byeong-gu continuously shifts from visionary, charming oddball, and terrifying psycho depending on the film's ever-changing tone in mood, viewpoint, and story. I think that’s a feature, not a flaw, but it may prove quite confusing.
It's plausible Jang aimed to unsettle spectators, mind. Similar to numerous Korean films from that era, Save the Green Planet! is driven by an exuberant rejection for artistic rules on one side, and a quite sincere anger about societal brutality in another respect. The film is a vibrant manifestation of a nation finding its global voice during emerging financial and cultural freedoms. It promises to be intriguing to see the director's interpretation of the same story through a modern Western lens — possibly, an opposite perspective.
Save the Green Planet! is available to stream without charge.
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