Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos has built a reputation on films that skew and unnerve: original works such as The Lobster invent rules that bend reality, while his adaptations often take already odd material and filter it through his unmistakable, eccentric lens. His take on Alasdair Gray’s novel in 2023, Poor Things, is a vivid, sex-positive reinvention of Frankenstein — an ambitious film that at times felt as if Gray’s singular voice and Lanthimos’ own idiosyncrasies were competing rather than harmonizing. More on Lanthimos’ methods. Read about the book-to-film differences in Poor Things.
His next adaptation, Bugonia, draws on a very different, wildly eccentric source: the 2004 Korean film Save the Green Planet! That original is a genre-bending cocktail — part sci‑fi, part black comedy, part horror, part satire, part psychodrama and part police procedural — with an often dizzying tonal range. Jang Joon‑hwan’s film is memorable not because it fits neatly into a category but because it hurtles between extremes with gleeful abandon.
The movie arrived amid a creative surge in South Korean cinema in the early 2000s, alongside filmmakers like Bong Joon‑ho and Park Chan‑wook who were redefining genre expectations. It premiered the same year as Bong’s Memories of Murder and Park’s Oldboy; while Save the Green Planet! doesn’t occupy quite the same canonical pedestal, it shares their appetite for vicious set-pieces, black humor and sharp social critique. More on Memories of Murder. More on Oldboy.
Image: Tartan VideoAt its core, Save the Green Planet! follows Lee Byeong‑gu (played by Shin Ha‑kyun), a deeply troubled man convinced a chemical company executive is actually an alien from Andromeda plotting an invasion. What begins as broad, almost slapstick comedy — Byeong‑gu and his girlfriend Su‑ni (Hwang Jung‑min) don homemade anti‑mind‑control helmets and wield menthol rub as a peculiar weapon — quickly darkens. They abduct a drunk CEO, Kang Man‑shik (Baek Yun‑shik), and haul him off to Byeong‑gu’s ramshackle mountain property: part home, part laboratory, part bee yard.
From there, the film slips into brutality and surreal horror. Byeong‑gu rigs a crude torture chair and subjects Kang to increasingly violent interrogations while delivering apocalyptic conspiracy manifestos; Su‑ni, fragile and overwhelmed, drifts away. Kang, for his part, is no passive quarry — his arrogance and survival instincts lead him to endure and manipulate in chilling ways. Meanwhile, an ineffectual police search stumbles along, more comedic than competent — a tonal echo of other Korean crime pictures but less deliberately measured, as if the plotting were occasionally improvised.
Image: Tartan VideoThe film never eases its foot off the accelerator; instead it barrels forward, repeatedly upending expectations. At different moments it reads as a portrait of untreated mental illness, a furious satire of corporate indifference, a grubby horror story or a slapdash police procedural. Jang’s direction is maximalist and committed to each tonal swing, and Shin Ha‑kyun delivers a performance that can be alternately poignant, comic and terrifying as Byeong‑gu oscillates between prophet, innocent eccentric and dangerous zealot. That elastic characterization feels intentional — part of the movie’s manic energy — though it can leave viewers unmoored.
It’s likely Jang wanted to disorient. Korean films from this period often combined stylistic daring with sharp social anger, and Save the Green Planet! channels both impulses: an unruly formal imagination married to genuine rancor about human cruelty and apathy. The result is a film that announces a distinct national voice finding its place on the global stage. It will be intriguing to see how Lanthimos interprets the same raw material from an American vantage point.
Save the Green Planet! is currently streaming for free on Kanopy.
Source: Polygon
