Director – Jang Joon-Hwan – 2003 – South Korea – Cert. 18 – 118m
*****
NSFW
Convinced that a corporate boss is an alien who killed his mother, a man takes him prisoner and tortures him to find out his race’s plans for planet Earth – plays alongside Echoes In Time | Korean Films of the Golden Age and New Cinema which runs from Monday, October 28th until the end of 2024 at BFI Southbank
Lee Byong-gu (Shin Ha-kyun) is convinced that corporate CEO Kang Man-shik (Baek Yoon-shik) is not only responsible for the death of his mother but also is an alien spy set to communicate with his extra-terrestrial superiors at the next full moon in seven days time. So, aided by girlfriend Sooni (Hwang Jung-min), Lee kidnaps Kang and brings him back to his underground workshop beneath his hilltop home near which he keeps bees in hives. Lee wants to hear the truth from Kang’s own lips, and is prepared to torture him to get it.
CEO Kang is clearly not a nice guy – he is obviously raking in the money, yet we watch him driven home drunk by a valet who he shamelessly short changes on his fare. And as the narrative progresses, other allegations about him emerge which suggest that he’s a nasty, corrupt piece of work. But an alien? Byong-gu would appear to be deluded, while Sooni is merely trying to help and encourage her soulmate without regard to the right- or wrongness of his ideas.
Police Chief Lee (Gi Ju-bong) is well in with the rich and powerful, and wants anyone who threatens them caught. His best chance of that happening is seasoned, maverick detective Chu (Lee Jae-yong) whom he hates. His other hope is young, enthusiastic, detective Kim (Lee Joo-hyeon).
The film is messy with a thrown together on the day feel about it, yet it succeeds because of constant inventiveness and energy. Nasty though Kang is, what befalls him is so awful you can’t help but have some sympathy for him, however little he might deserve it. Byong-gu straps him into a chair, proceeds to administer levels of electric shock treatment that would kill humans but not a member of Kang’s supposed alien race whose bodies are constituted differently. Echoing Tetsuo: The Iron Man (Shinya Tsukamoto, 1989), he prepares a bodily intervention with what appears to be a heavily lubricated dildo on the end of a hose.
While Sooni decides she’s had enough and leaves to fulfil her passion for tightrope-walking in a circus, Detective Chu’s research leads him to believe Byong-gu is the kidnapper, so he turns up at his house on the pretext that he’s tracking poachers and needs somewhere to stay the night. Chu can’t find any evidence of the kidnap victim because Byong-gu cleverly moves the latter around to keep him hidden.
Later still, Detective Kim independently comes to the same conclusion and tells the chief, who by this time is arresting the culprit himself, only he can’t find Kang because the chief himself has arrested someone else altogether. Kim nevertheless follows his own hunch and sets off to catch Byong-gu… The narrative is more complex than that, with clever little tricks up its sleeve and ideas in the final reel which completely up the ante as the tale progresses.
Hovering somewhere between thriller, drama, crime movie, and possibly even science fiction, it’s hard to know exactly how anyone allowed maverick director Jang to make this because it’s so all over the place and clearly a highly individualised and personal vision. Yet, we should be thankful that somehow that happened, because the film is not really like anything else out there and keeps the viewer glued to the screen throughout. And serious themes peek out through cracks in the chaos: the rich and powerful are indeed destroying the planet, and it’s likely that only ordinary people will be able to stop them, even if Byong-gu’s desperate methods might not have much to recommend them.
Save the Green Planet! plays alongside Echoes in Time | Korean Films of the Golden Age and New Cinema which runs from Monday, October 28th until the end of 2024 at BFI Southbank.
Trailer:
Trailer (Echoes In Time | Korean Films of the Golden Age and New Cinema):
LKFF, The London Korean Film Festival 2024 ran from Friday, November 1st to Wednesday, November 13th at BFI Southbank and other venues.
Trailer (LKFF 2024):