Bugonia

Obviously a completely different experience if you've already seen Jang Joon-hwan's Save the Green Planet!, director Yorgos Lanthimos' Bugonia is then, under those circumstances, transformed into a feature-length query. Are these filmmakers prepared to go quite as far as Jang's film did? As before, Bugonia details the kidnapping and torture of a pharmaceutical executive by a mentally ill conspiracy theorist who harbours a grudge that is rooted in the experimental treatments that have placed his mother in an unending coma. Aside from the minutiae of this global subjugation, as espoused by Jesse Plemons' apiarist turned abductor Teddy Gatz, the biggest point of departure in this telling is the amount of time and space apportioned to the chained-up CEO, played here by the Academy Award winning Emma Stone. In this Lanthimos telling, written by Will Tracy, Stone's Michelle Fuller is a much more magnetic and conniving presence than her South Korean predecessor - Baek Yoon-sik's much more conspicuously reptilian Kang. Perhaps this decision to give over so much more of this film's focus to Fuller unbalances the overall piece? 

Certainly, the extra layer of context provided by the Bugonia's closing minutes are jealously guarded; a pointed refusal to allow the audience's perspective or expectation to truly align with Teddy's paranoid outlook. Stone, a gifted physical comedian, plays Fuller as irritating and disingenuous but never quite odious or even, really, gloating. Her attempts to reason with her kidnappers may be communicated in the patronising double-speak of American office culture but even this achingly neutral invective signals an attempt to reassume the upper hand she expects rather than outright offend. Stone's performance is such that Fuller could be an extraterrestrial, or a robot, or even just a sociopathic businesswoman attempting to navigate the violent moods of the unwashed chuckleheads who have locked her in their basement. Stone's innate ability to confer depth on her CEO, and the fact that she plays a certain kind of melancholy in the decision that closes Bugonia, actually ends up framing this remake in much more alien and nihilistic terms. As cinematographer Robbie Ryan's camera glides over beatific images of extinction, rather than the tiny fragments of happiness that closed Save the Green Planet!, it's Fuller's sadness and thwarted sense of ambition that we the audience (including any potential Oscar voters catching up with their screeners) are being asked to consider. 

Save the Green Planet!

Informed by a life filled with misery and brutal hardship, Shin Ha-kyun's Lee Byeong-gu has come to the inescapable conclusion that the Earth simply must have been covertly colonised by alien beings from the Andromeda Galaxy. So, how does Byeong-gu - an unhinged, one-man resistance - go about battling back against the oppressive forces orchestrating human tragedy? Kidnapping and torture, naturally. Writer-director Jang Joon-hwan's Save the Green Planet! begins with Byeong-gu stalking his latest victim, a stingy pharmaceutical executive who, Byeong-gu believes, is an extraterrestrial capable of contacting his planet's poised invasion forces. Whether or not these fanciful deductions have any actual purchase within the piece Byeong-gu has, unmistakable, hit on something regarding the ways in which sadistic aspects of the establishment - specifically those who crave and cultivate power - treat those they deem to be inferior. Towards the end of Jang's film this idea is repeatedly underlined by a series of disconnected montages that vividly detail the kind of cruel impassivity that informs these revelations. 

First, there's a secret history of planet Earth as told by Baek Yoon-sik's shaved and scorched executive that either reveals the meddling hand of Andromedan invaders or, in the style of The Usual Suspects, confidently draws from the dogeared, conspiracy flavoured ephemera scattered about Byeong-gu's sunken, sweaty lair. Here mankind is described as a rolling mistake, incapable of overcoming their innate thirst for self-destructive violence. We see a vision of the biblical Adam, this hirsute hominid tethered via an umbilical cord to one of Stanley Kubrick's monoliths, and the creation of Eve via some genetic splicing. This Adam's instant reaction to the helpless, naked woman presented to him is to attack her with a cudgel then rape her. A second, less esoteric compilation flicks through the defining events of Byeong-gu's life: seeing his father's arm blasted away from his trunk in a mining accident; the ridicule and beatings he endured, from teachers, for his diminished station in life; and the violent death, at the hands of policemen, of a young woman he was fixated upon. In all of these moments the stunted and childlike Byeong-gu was an impotent observer, able only to endure what was happening to and around him. Although their subject matter varies wildly, both sequences hum with the same depressing note: a great many people are destined to suffer terribly in their lives, for no other reason than it provides amusement for those who hold authority over them.