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Greek avant-garde filmmaker Yorgos Lanthimos has built a reputation on distinctly odd movies. His unique screenplays are weird, such as The Lobster, where unattached individuals need to find love or else be being turned into animals. When he adapts another creator's story, he frequently picks basis material that’s quite peculiar as well — stranger, maybe, than the version he creates. That was the case for last year's Poor Things, a film version of Alasdair Gray’s wonderfully twisted novel, an empowering, liberated spin on Frankenstein. The director's adaptation is effective, but partially, his specific style of weirdness and the novelist's neutralize one another.

Lanthimos’ Next Pick

The filmmaker's subsequent choice to bring to screen similarly emerged from far out in left field. The basis for Bugonia, his newest team-up with leading actress Emma Stone, comes from 2004’s Save the Green Planet!, a bewildering Korean mix of styles of science fiction, dark humor, horror, irony, dark psychodrama, and police procedural. It’s a strange film not so much for its subject matter — although that's decidedly unusual — but for the wild intensity of its atmosphere and directorial method. The film is a rollercoaster.

The Burst of Korean Film

It seems there was a creative spirit across Korea during that period. Save the Green Planet!, written and directed by Jang Joon-hwan, was included in an explosion of audacious in style, groundbreaking movies from fresh voices 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! isn’t on the same level as those celebrated works, but it shares many traits with them: graphic brutality, morbid humor, pointed observations, and defying expectations.

The Story Develops

Save the Green Planet! focuses on a disturbed young man who abducts a chemical-company executive, thinking he's a being originating in another galaxy, with plans to invade Earth. At first, that idea unfolds as farce, and the young man, Lee Byeong-gu (Shin Ha-kyun 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) sport slick rainwear and bizarre masks fitted with psyche-protection gear, and employ ointment for defense. Yet they accomplish in seizing drunken CEO Kang Man-shik (Baek Yun-shik) and taking him to the protagonist's isolated home, a dilapidated building he’s built on an old mine amid the hills, where he keeps bees.

A Descent into Darkness

Moving forward, the story shifts abruptly into ever more unsettling. Byeong-gu straps Kang into a makeshift device and physically abuses him while declaiming outlandish ideas, finally pushing the gentle Su-ni away. But Kang is no victim; driven solely by the conviction of his own superiority, he is willing and able to undergo awful experiences to attempt an exit and lord it over the clearly unwell younger man. Meanwhile, a comically inadequate police hunt for the abductor commences. The detectives' foolishness and lack of skill is reminiscent of Memories of Murder, though it’s not so clearly intentional in a film with a narrative that comes off as rushed and unrehearsed.

Unrelenting Pace

Save the Green Planet! just keeps barrelling onward, fueled by its manic force, defying conventions without pause, long after one would assume it to calm down or falter. At moments it appears like a serious story about mental health and overmedication; at other times it becomes a symbolic tale about the callousness of corporate culture; sometimes it’s a dirty, tense scare-fest or an incompetent police story. Director Jang applies equal measure of intense focus throughout, and the lead actor shines, although Lee Byeong-gu constantly changes from savant prophet, endearing eccentric, and frightening madman as required by the movie’s constant shifts across style, angle, and events. I think this is intentional, not a flaw, but it may prove rather bewildering.

Designed to Confuse

Jang probably consciously intended to unsettle spectators, indeed. Like so many Korean films of its time, Save the Green Planet! is driven by an exuberant rejection for artistic rules on one side, and a profound fury about man’s inhumanity to man on the other. It’s a roaring expression of a culture gaining worldwide recognition during emerging financial and cultural freedoms. It will be fascinating to see Lanthimos' perspective on the original plot from a current U.S. standpoint — possibly, an opposite perspective.

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Save the Green Planet! is available to stream without charge.